Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Very clever and engaging premise, but very broad and sloppy execution. I'm a huge Stephenson fan, he's on my short list of best writers on the planet, so Reamde was huge disappointment to me.

The premise (and I don't think this is a spoiler) is the intrusion of a MMORPG (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game) on real life in unexpected (and potentially disastrous) ways -- not in a Tron-like player-gets-absorbed-into-the-game sense, but in a way that strikes me as so realistic (although I can't really judge, not being a MMORPG player myself) that, for all I know, it may be a riff on a real-life incident.

I thoroughly enjoyed the setup, watching the various characters get drawn in to the game (remember, not in a Tron-kind-of-way), only to realize that playing the game might not be as much fun as they thought it would be. But then the story devolves into an action novel, everybody fighting with (and shooting at) everybody else, which is something at which Stephenson's never been very good. The book stops being clever or even entertaining, after a while it's just a lot of stuff happening to a lot of people with whom you almost identify, but not quite, because Stephenson never takes the time to adequately develop most of his characters.

After I wrote the above, I looked up Reamde's rating on Amazon, which shows it as a little more then three stars at this point. I won't argue with that, I may have been a little harsh because I was expecting too much. But still, after being completely awed by a few of Stephenson's five-star-plus novels (Snow Crash, Cryptonomycon, The Diamond Age), Reamde was a real let-down.