In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T’Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world.
But T’Rain’s success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player’s electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game’s virtual universe—and Richard is at ground zero.
Today I finished “REAMDE” by Neal Stephenson. I didn’t know anything about it before starting (other than it was written by Stephenson and I read all of his stuff) and given the capsule description above (and the title, a play on a mistyped filename) you might think it was another techno-thriller like “Snow Crash” with a MMORPG twist, but it’s actually closer to “Cryptonomicon” where the technology plays a lesser role in the story. So where “Cryptonomicon” was about World War II and code-breaking, “REAMDE” is about guns, international terrorists, guns, Chinese hackers, and more guns.
