Zula has taken a job at a company responsible for a globally popular video game, founded by her billionaire uncle. Her boyfriend Peter has entered into an illegal transaction with someone he doesn’t realize is connected to the Russian Mafia. Everything goes south, and Zula and Peter are abducted. What follows is a book with a giant scope. It’s an international suspense thriller that takes a multitude of interesting main characters to the limits of their capabilities. Stephenson manages to linger on lots of small technical details in a way that’s interesting, and while still making a real page-turner with characters we care about for over 1000 pages.
Termination Shock is probably the Stephenson that is most like Reamde in the sense of feeling like a limited scope thriller while still touching on insane big picture stuff. Unfortunately, it does indulge in Neal’s ethos of “megaengineering projects will be a net positive if we just get out of the visionaries’ way”.
Also,
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They did my boy Laks dirty.
I haven’t read that one. Understandably, there’s quite a lot of climate fiction being written. Much of it feels important, but the underlying existential dread isn’t very enjoyable. KSR’s Ministry for the Future was really good though.
Ministry was indeed excellent (I listened to the audiobook)