Graham Wilkinson A fast moving novel covering MMOG, virtual currency, cyber attacks, drug smuggling and international terrorism.
This recommendation came from another book I’ve recently read, Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, by George Gilder. Gilder uses Reamde as a warning about the possibilities of Sutoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies being hacked.
The story is centred around Richard Forthrast and his adopted niece Zula. Forthrast is a reformed drug smuggler who has invested his ill-gotten gains in the most popular massively multiplayer online game in the world, T’Rain. A Fortune 500 company, T’Rain comes under attack from Chinese hackers who’s livelihood has been built upon mining virtual gold, the MMOG’s simulated precious metal. These hackers infect users’ computers with a virus called REAMDE, which takes their personal files hostage and demands a ransom delivered to a specific location in the T’Rain world.
The narrative really gets going when Zula’s boyfriend Peter, borrows a thumb drive infected with REAMDE from Richard. This drive finds its way into the hands of Russian mobsters who’s computers are subsequently infected. The Russians proceed to fly illegally to Xiamen, China with Zula and Peter (against their will) to hunt down the hacker at the centre of REAMDE and kill him. In Xiamen the group’s path crosses a jihadist terror cell led by Abdullah Jones, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Jones ends up kidnapping Zula and flying her to British Columbia. The last part of the book follows a gunfight across the Canadian–American border with Jones leaving a trail of destruction in his wake.
I’m not usually a fan of fiction and in addition this is a 1,000-page book but the detail that Stephenson puts behind T’Rain and the pace of the story is genuinely compelling and kept my attention until the very end. The concept behind this book’s MMOG, T’Rain is particularly interesting. The game makers employ a geologist to write an algorithm which replicates the topography and underlying strata of the earth. This algorithm accounts for the existence of gold in the virtual world which is equally as difficult to mine as in the real world. Serious players of the game utilise teams of miners, using mining & surveying equipment and protected by paid security, all powered by souped-up computers.
The ability to acquire virtual wealth and the level of difficulty in doing so makes the T’Rain virtual gold more stable than real world currencies. These gamers also figure out ways of transporting this virtual wealth out of the game into the real world using underground exchanges. The richness of detail around the underlying technology and the ecosystem that it has spawned is what gives Stephenson the licence to take this narrative on an epic journey across continents with a band of terrorists, hackers, mobsters and secret agents without the reader thinking twice.
Considering that this book was published in 2011, Stephenson is quite prophetic in the fictional world he creates in Reamde, providing eery echos to the world we live in today. Certainly when you think about real stories of hackers infiltrating MMOGs like Fortnite and stealing user profiles, the implications of quantum computing on the integrity of a blockchain and even the test proposed by Russia to turn the internet off to combat cyberattacks.
I would highly recommend this book to budding futurists, those interested in blockchain, cryptocurrency and MMOGs, and equally those who just love a fast-paced thriller. I’m not quite ready for another mammoth story like this quite yet but I will be aiming to read another of Stephenson’s many best-sellers at some point this year as I try to hone my own ability to imagine the future.
