Recently, with the release of Fall, or Dodge in Hell, we had a discussion on the iFanboy Patreon Facebook page about the various pros and cons of Neal Stephenson’s oeuvre.

“What we are left with is two-thirds of a book that is a complete and full story – but that reads more like a think-tank’s novelization of their doomsday preparations – and one-third of a book that is so cramped, condensed, and rushed – while representing a think-tank’s novelization of their preparations for rebuilding human life – that it either should have been its own book, or removed entirely.”Īs it turns out, however, Neal Stephenson’s excursive tendencies is specifically why some people love Neal Stephenson so much.Īs a long-time listener of the iFanboy podcast (and a financial supporter through their Patreon) I have had the privilege of listening to Josh Flanagan, Conor Kilpatrick, and (though less recently) Ron Richards rave about their love for Neal Stephenson. In my review for Seveneves, I said that the book was “the result of a brilliant writer surrounded by editors unwilling or unable to tell him to stop, rewrite, condense, or anything else an editor is supposed to do with a book.” Further, and in summarising my feelings about the book, I wrote: I genuinely love Neal Stephenson books, but as he has gotten older, his books have gotten progressively longer, and my ability to stick with his particular Neal Stephenson-specific style of writing has gotten tricky.

In that time I have read and reviewed dozens of other books – including another Neal Stephenson book, his 2015-published Seveneves, reviewed here. So, eight years after I first started reading Reamde, I have finally finished it. Unfortunately, within minutes of picking Reamde back up off the shelf, I realised that I had no memory of the first half of the book – only impressions of mayhem in a small Chinese city. In fact, a bookmark had been sitting close to halfway through the mammoth 1,000-page behemoth for nearly a decade.

I was 30 pages into Neal Stephenson’s Fall, or Dodge in Hell when I came across the word “T’rain” and I remembered that a) this book was a sequel from Stephenson’s 2011 Reamde and b) I had never finished reading Reamde.

Reamde book review