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the daily review, wed., oct. 26

Neal Stephenson

Even imaginary worlds have crime. In real life, it might be drug trafficking, but online they call it gold farming. Virtual worlds, like World of Warcraft, are massive realms where millions of gamers from around the world meet 24/7. Players relax, socialize, date, have affairs and raid dungeons, while others defy diabolically complex end-user service agreements and instead make a living off them.

Inevitably, someone would make an online role-playing game a key plot element in a thriller. Thankfully, it's done well in REAMDE, Neal Stephenson's latest work.

Regarding the title. It's an anagram and – if ever spotted on your hard drive – a sure sign a resident virus is likely monkeying with the works, screeching silently and flinging malware at the walls. Spotting a readme.txt with a displaced letter signals a cuckoo in the nest.

REAMDE's plot kicks in right away, shortly after hooking readers with Stephenson's uniquely flavoured characters. For those new to his novels, they're populated with casts of people who are typically familiar in some faintly archetypal but stereotype-fracturing way. The fictional game of T'Rain is their common connection, the sometimes lawless zone just outside traditional and understood norms. It's the island city-state attractive to adventurers, people of loose morals and pirates, while still sporting safe suburbs that kids, seniors or the jaw-droppingly naive can visit.

Thus it is possible for the story to begin in Iowa at the Forthrast family reunion, seen through the eyes of uncle Richard – former cross-border marijuana smuggler turned founder and CEO of the massively successful T'Rain – then play out simultaneously across the South China Sea and the Pacific Northwest.

Richard's niece Zula, a smart young woman orphaned by war in Eritrea and subsequently raised with Midwestern sensibilities, falls afoul of her black-hat hacker boyfriend Peter's side business. He's selling illegal data, but the deal is ruined by a virus that is itself part of a massive and co-ordinated virtual gold heist of unprecedented proportions. Zula is swept up in the deadly consequences.

Some readers might have reservations about tackling a new Stephenson novel. Half of those setting out to read his books – often after heartfelt recommendations from friends – slam into a wall of complex and dense, but very cool, ideas.

However capable Stephenson is at rendering game theory or quantum cognition down to more manageable and often hilariously colloquial terms, some readers find it to be too much. Not so with REAMDE, which has more in common with Zodiak, his first book, than Anathem, his last one.

Stephenson still plays with familiar themes from his Baroque cycle novels and Cryptonomicon, but with a gripping narrative tension that moves at a breakneck pace. The 1,042 pages will fly by.

He doesn't sacrifice depth while moving the story along. REAMDE is an insightful look at the virtual gold economy. It's real. Vast sums of wealth don't just flow from the PayPal accounts of gamers into the bottomless coffers of gaming companies. Another, background economy has piggy-backed these virtual worlds to redistribute wealth, funnelling money away from rich, lazy, first-world gamers and suckers into the pockets of gold farmers in developing countries.

Industrious, dedicated, sometimes supporting a family, sometimes simply amoral, they're privateers and pirates working the back allies, shady bars and lawless international waters of the Internet.

They're the real story behind REAMDE.

Shane Holladay is the digital news product manager at The Globe and Mail.

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