Neal Stephenson - Reamde

George Dyson helped with fishing boat lore, Keith Rosema with flight plans, and George Jewsbury did a bit of Russian translation. John Eaton and Hugh Matheson helped fill out the picture of British Columbia by cheerfully supplying background information about cat-skiing resorts and mining operations, respectively.

Having put the reputations of the above people in play, I must reiterate that there are places in the book where I may have misinterpreted their advice, or simply chosen to ignore it for storytelling reasons, and so none of them should be blamed for any defects.

Somewhat in the same vein, a word about geography: the advent of Google Earth makes it easy to call up high-resolution maps of any place on the planet and compare them against the descriptions in a work of fiction. Anyone who attempts this with Reamde open on their lap is wasting his or her time. There is an Abandon Mountain in northern Idaho, and something that goes by the local and informal name of American Falls, but I have taken vast liberties with their descriptions here. There is no Prohibition Crick, as far as I know. In short, none of the geographical description in Reamde can be expected to tally with the real world or its high-quality digital representations, and so readers are encouraged to enjoy it as what it is—a work of fiction—and leave it at that.

Neal Stephensonis the author of Anathem; the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle ( Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World ); Cryptonomicon; The Diamond Age; Snow Crash, which was named one of Time magazine’s top one hundred all-time best English-language novels; and Zodiac . He lives in Seattle, Washington.

www.nealstephenson.com

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“Stephenson has a once-in-a-generation gift: he makes complex ideas clear, and he makes them funny, heartbreaking and thrilling.”

“The rarest of geniuses.”

“[The] Homer of geek mythology.”

“Neal Stephenson has made a name for himself as a writer whose imagination knows no limits.”

“The Seattle writer is hard-wired to tell stories, explore technology and riff on anything that catches his fancy.”

“The cult legend.”

“The view from Stephenson’s world is a marvel.”

“For all of his achievements, Neal Stephenson’s most impressive may be his ability to attract a following equal parts hacker and literati… It’s not just that his prose is smooth and often witty or that his intelligence is wide-ranging and speculative, but that he wrestles with concepts … in ways that would shame most ‘literary’ novelists.”

Anathem

The System of the World

The Confusion

Quicksilver

Cryptonomicon

The Diamond Age

Snow Crash

Zodiac

Cover design by James Iacobelli

An Imprint of Harper­Collins Publishers

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

REAMDE. Copyright © 2011 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stephenson, Neal.

Reamde / Neal Stephenson.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-197796-1

1. Computer games—Fiction. 2. Virtual reality—Fiction. 3. Money laundering—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569. T3868R43 2011

813′.54—dc22

2011020573

ISBN 978-0-06-210642-1 (international edition)

EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011

ISBN: 9780062101341

11 12 13 14 15 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1