REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson

It’s becoming increasingly clear that throwing all expectations overboard whenever Neal Stephenson releases a new novel is a good idea.

Um… no. Expectations are why we have celebrity rock-star writers. Neal and Neil are two of my all-time favorite science fiction writers for a reason, and I read them because I want to read a Neal or a Neil story. I don’t want a Grisham novel or a Steele book. I want more of what I love. In this, Reamde failed spectacularly to deliver, despite starting out with a concept that was almost tailor-made to set alight all my dopamine receptors: gold-farming and MMORPGs. (I don’t intend to rename the blog sindorei.info anytime soon, but it would probably be more apt).

I find reviews of that sort to be empty of any real value. In contrast, Mark writes an honest review in praise of Reamde which makes a far better case for any fan of Neal to pick it up at some point – I don’t have such serious qualms or complaints that I can’t agree with most of Mark’s assessment. But oh my god, Anathem was such a monumental masterpiece! And the Baroque Cycle literally expanded my horizons, historically speaking. (Yes, I’m aware it was fiction. And in an alternate universe, where gold has a stable isotope.)

I guess I expected something similarly mind-blowing with respect to MMORPGs, and i was certainly happy to see what Neal had to teach me about gun lore, liberal biases aside. But (and this is where I nitpick in spoilery fashion) I found the MMORPG part curiously shallow… for example:

Neal certainly got some of the tropes of MMORPGs right, especially the naming conventions for items. But the big Idea for T’Rain, his fictionalized competitor to World of Warcraft, was to make the game gold-farming-friendly, by actually encouraging people to exchange gold in-game for real money. Before I start picking nits though let me bask in a moment of true awesome, where Neal gets a little self-referential:

The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.

Look, this pretty much proves that Neal Stephenson is still Neal Stephenson. I mean, if you’re a Fan of Neal, you’ll need a few minutes to just sit and appreciate the sheer rapture the above paragraph is causing you. (If not, never mind).

Anyway – here’s how T’Rain operates:

* Warrior mages and other interesting characters were expensive to maintain. Corporation 9592 charged the owners of such characters more money. Miners, hunter-gatherers, farmers, horse archers, and the like cost virtually nothing; teenagers in China could easily afford to maintain scores or hundreds of such characters.

* Miners, farmers, and the like didn’t require a lot of intervention by their owners. A miner character would reliably generate gold with no human intervention at all, provided that its player had the good sense to plonk it down in a part of the world that had actual gold mines and to protect it from raids by bandits, invaders, and so forth.

* The social structure was feudal. Any character could have between zero and twelve vassals, and either zero or one lord. A character with no lord and no vassals was called a ronin, bugt except among rank newcomers, there were few of these; more typical was to set up a moderately-sized network of vassals who spent their lives doing things like mining and farming. A character who had some vassals but no lord was called a Liege Lord and, obviously enough, sat at the top of a hierarchy; most Liege Lords were small-timers running one-or two-layered networks or miners or farmers, but some ran deeper trees comprising thousands of vassals distributed among many layers of the hierarchy.

By making such provisions and tweaking them over the first couple of years of T’Rain’s existence, Richard and Nolan had managed to pull off the not-so-easy feat of making a massively multiplayer game that was as accessible to the all-important Chinese teenager market as it was to the podgy middle-aged Westerners who were dependent upon those Chinese teenagers for virtual gold. From one point of view, the Westerners got to have more fun, since they could purchase gold pieces and use that virtual cash to fund spectacular building projects and wars that were simply out of reach to the kids in China. But on the other hand, those kids in China were actually making money; playing the game, to them, was a source of income rather than an expense.

Now, this sounds brilliant on the surface, and there’s an even longer excerpt later on in the book describing how money is actually transferred out of T’Rain – virtual in-game gold is “sacrificed” (destroyed) and becomes a deposit to the player’s bank account. But economically, this makes no sense – fundamentally, if gold is generated in-game according to some rate N gp/min, and the exchange rate is X dollars per gp, then the game could theoretically have to pay out NX dollars per minute. Since the system is setup to actively encourage gold farming of this sort, it’s a guarantee that the efficiency of the gp->$ conversion efficiency is going to approach 100%. Even if it’s 1% though, it’s not like Corporation 9592 can print money In real Life. So the payouts have to come from game revenue. In other words, the amount of money paid out to Chinese kids is fundamentally constrained by the amount being paid in by Western podgies.

In Warcraft, we Western podgies pay in, straight to Blizzard’s coffers. AND some Western podgies pay an additional amount directly to Chinese kids for some gp to use in-game. That is, it goes $->gp, not the other way around. And, Blizzard gets a cut too, because those Chinese kids are paying Blizz for accounts just like the Westerners are. In T’Rain, the economics are inverted, and it seems impossible that Corporation 9592 would have any profit at all.

Maybe I just don’t understand economics but I don’t see how this works at all. It’s not metaphysics or alternate realities, it’s basic game mechanics that I think should be fairly obvious to anyone who has played Warcraft for a length of time (as opposed to dabbling on a free account, perhaps to do research on a book).

Here’s my complaint. The true richness of the MMORPG world isn’t evident in Reamde – it’s more like a backdrop for a gimmick, What if Gold Farming Were Real Business? All the reasons we play MMORPGs are absent here – the difference between raids and pvp, why some people solo and others do 5-mans, the eternal treadmill for gear, the social tribalism of a guild. Neal does sort of reference the Alliance vs Horde faction division, but only as a sort of commentary on how arbitrary it is, in T’Rain one side was explicitly Evil and the other explicitly Good, and the users found a way to circumvent that artificial and arbitrary classification (but did so in a frankly stupid way, based on clothing palette. Really? sigh…). In Azeroth, Horde and Alliance are both tremendously varied and there was never any Good/Evil dichotomy, so if that was intended as criticism on Neal’s part, it fell short of the mark.

In fact there is a very brilliant aspect of T’Rain – something truly unique an innovative. It’s called APPIS and I am not going to summarize it here because I think it’s the single thing that makes the book worth reading in the same thought-provoking way that Anathem and Snowcrash and all the rest of his great works are. But to my immense and incredible frustration, Neal introduces APPIS and then never actually uses it in the plot. The actual term APPIS itself only appears on six separate pages in the book! We are given this amazing concept and then it vanishes, never surfacing again in any relevant way, booted aside for guns and jihadists and a discussion about Great Circle routes. This is astonishing. It’s as if the finale to Snowcrash happened in a shopping mall instead of the Metaverse. How can such an incredible concept be left unused? My consolation prize is the essentially useless knowledge that a 1911 is a really awesome handgun. Noted.

At any rate, there’s not much point in complaining further. Maybe we can revisit the Reamde universe at some point where APPIS can play some actual relevant role to the plot. Or maybe not, and maybe some aspiring writer will be inspired by Reamde to invent something similar and actually use it.

Or maybe not and maybe Neal’s next project is the one that will blow my mind the way I expect it to be blown, Stephenson-style. My complaints aside, I don’t regret getting the book and I know I’ll be pre-ordering the next one.

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BoingBoing has an early review of Reamde up and it has seriously whet my appetite. Gold farming is the hook but apparently Stephenson is also a bit of a gun nut. Who knew? Exciting!

REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson

I’ve pre-ordered my copy from Amazon in save-a-tree format. I actually don’t even own a Kindle but it’s still the best way to read a book, especially one by the Neal. This thing is a thousand pages long.

It’s out on September 20. So basically next Tuesday is a wash for me.

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Here’s the list – I’ve read 51 of these. And the #1 and #2 slots are exactly what I’d have picked.

I am glad to see Neil and Neal on the list (though NPR spelled Neal’s name wrongly in one entry). Especially love the fact that The Princess Bride made it on the list!

Inexplicably, A.C. Doyle is missing, which boggles my mind. Not as surprising is the absence of any of the Big B’s (Bear, Baxter, Benford, and Brin) of which the omission of Greg Bear is the most egregious.

I think a top 100 list is less than useful though, what would be better would be a top 20 author list. So, let’s make one! In (first-name) alphabetical order, because a ranking will take more thought:

1. Arthur C. Clarke
2. C.S. Lewis
3. David Brin
4. Douglas Adams
5. Frederick Pohl
6. Fritz Leiber
7. Greg Bear
8. Greg Egan
9. H.G. Wells
10. Isaac Asimov
11. J.R.R. Tolkien
12. Jules Verne
13. Kurt Vonnegut
14. Larry Niven
15. Neal Stephenson
16. Neil Gaiman
17. Ray Bradbury
18. Rene Daumal
19. Robert Heinlein
20. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Well, ok that’s only 19. Some of these are for an entire series, others for a single book, but all of them wrote something that really grabbed me, more so than usual.

I’m sure others’ lists would differ – and certainly would be helpful, so leave yours in comments!

And a special mention for writers who I think are odious people personally, though they certainly write well: Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card.

And I really need to add The Stand to my reading to-do list.

It occurs to me a much harder list would be of short-story authors. A good start woudl be compiling everyone who has ever appeared in the Asimov’s Best Science Fiction series. That’s something for another day…

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Overheard on the Internet:

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

(original source)

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How the heck did I miss this?

Following a successful one-off special that made its debut on BBC Four last year, the Beeb has confirmed that Dirk Gently, the world’s only holistic detective, will be returning for more adventures next year.

Stephen Mangan starred as the titular detective who may or may not be an utter charlatan, and while the adaptation didn’t please all fans of Douglas Adams’ original novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, the special was widely seen as a decent jumping off point for further stories in the future.

Raking in a more than respectable 1.1 million viewers when it screened last December, the show’s success has led the BBC to commission three 60-minute episodes, which will be again written by Howard Overman.

There was a Dirk Gently one-off on BBC 4 last year???? TORRENT TIME

If it’s half as good as Sherlock it will be brilliant. If it’s twice as good as the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, it will be wretched.

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My former AP English teacher from high school has retired and moved to China to teach English.

This is an amazing world.

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I am racking my brain and memory to no avail – I need to recall the autor and name of the short story set in an alternate history where the Nazis win World War II. The Germans roll over Europe, conquer Britain, win in Russia. The Japanese expand into China and Asia, and the two axis powers swallow the entire globe. Then they turn on each other, and fight World War III, and the Nazis are ultimately (barely) victorious. At this point the Nazis break out the old Holocaust Instruction Manual and turn the resources of the planet towards genetic purification and the glory of the Aryan race. And they succeed. And centuries after World War II, the true Third Reich becomes a pure race indeed on white-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired people. As the centuries pass, the Reich liberalizes, moderates, and eventually becomes a Republic. True learning and democracy again flourish as the homogeneity of the Aryan race – now the entirety of the human race – ensures peace and prosperity and minimal conflict. The horror of the past centuries is increasingly edited out and ultimately forgotten entirely, lost in myth. A new history emerges, one scrubbed clean of any messy reference to wars or races, and after a few generations this new narrative has become set in the collectve stone of human memory.

And one day, a full millenium after the dark prehistory that gave rise to what has now become a human utopia, two students at the University of Tokyo, Hans and Franz (names may be different from my recollection) are eating lunch. Hans turns to Franz and asks him., “do you ever get the feeling we were lied to?”

if you thought that was a cool summary, the original was 10^6 times better. Help me figure out who wrote it! I think I might have read it on one of these, but I’m not sure.

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Good grief, Amazon just dropped the price of the Kindle 2.0 by another 40 bucks! New price: $259. And they are introducing a GSM-enabled version for only $20 more so you can download books worldwide, not just in the US. This is unbelievably aggressive, and probably partly motivated by Sony’s recent refresh of its own ebook line.

I still think that the Kindle DX is the one I want, though – the better PDF support is critical for me. But with the price drop on the mainstream Kindle, I am even less likely to buy a DX now; the price on the DX has to come down sooner or later. The only reason I need PDF support is because I will use the Kindle heavily for my academic journal reading; if not for that I’d probably have bought the Kindle the last time it dropped in price.. and be cursing about it now.

Of course, I’ve also been doing some actual reading of late, and am now a few hundred pages into Quicksilver. I can easily see how owning a Kindle would accelerate this habit. I am genuinely conflicted at night between WoW and these analog pursuits!

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Now that Ramadan has ended, I’m taking up my geeky pursuits again. I’ve got a copy of Anathem from the library and added some game time back to my Warcraft account. I have to confess that it’s a hard choice

Just saw the movie 17 Again starring teen heartthrob Zac Ephron and former teen hearthrob Matthew Perry. I was delighted to note the supporting “best friend” character was a geek otaku of the highest caliber, who also managed to score an otaku dreamgirl. You can always tell when writers are genuine geeks – it shows, unlike gross and absurd representations like Revenge of the Nerds and Urkel and whatnot.

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I’ve swooned over the Kindle before, but still haven’t found myself willing to take the plunge. Sony has been going after Amazon’s Kindle with sexy new versions of its own e-book reader, but the main problem with the ebook market in general is that the readers are still just too expensive, not to mention stuck in a technology slow-lane with black and white text, no color support, and the non-intuitive physical form factor of a single slab.

Enter ASUS with the first real innovation we have seen in this market – a dual-pane reader with color screens, genuine computing/web surfing abilities, and most importantly a low price:

ASUS eeebook

The world of ebooks is about to start a new chapter with the arrival of the cheapest digital reader on the market. Asus, one of the world’s biggest consumer electronics businesses, confirmed last week that it is planning to shake up the market in the same way it did when it launched the first netbook — the low-cost alternative to the laptop.

(…) Unlike current ebook readers, which take the form of a single flat screen, the Asus device has a hinged spine, like a printed book. This, in theory, enables its owner to read an ebook much like a normal book, using the touchscreen to “turn” the pages from one screen to the next. It also gives the user the option of seeing the text on one screen while browsing a web page on the other. One of the screens could also act as a virtual keypad for the device to be used like a laptop. Whereas current ebook readers have monochrome screens, the Asus would be full colour. The maker says it may also feature “speakers, a webcam and a mic for Skype”, allowing cheap phone calls over the internet.

The ability to read on one page and surf on the other is a big deal – imagine having Wikipedia, Google and Evernote handy while reading a book! You could really enhance your comprehension and note-taking that way, all on the same self-contained device. The key to success here is the connectivity, with both WiFi and 3G essential. ASUS is poised to transform the ebook reader market the same way they did the notebook market with the introduction of the EEE PC. It’s about time.

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