Reamde: Difference between revisions

* [[Crazy Survivalist]]: Jake, his family and the other inhabitants of Prohibition Crick.

* [[Deadpan Snarker]]: Most characters. Richard notes that Jones likes to be the only one making the snarks.

* [[Doorstopper]]: It's by Neal Stephenson so not a surprise.

* [[Draft Dodging]]: Richard did this to avoid being drafted for [[The Vietnam War]] , only to come back to the U.S. during Jimmy Carter's blanket amnesty. This earned him [[The So-Called Coward|the scorn of many of his family members]] although not the ones who really know him.

** Sokolov starts out as a [[Punch Clock Villain]] for Ivanov, but eventually decides that he'll try to protect Zula and later becomes an avenging angel for her.

* [[Heroic Neutral]]: Richard Forthrast was perfectly happy running his computer game empire. Then the bad guys went and stole his niece.

* [[Hollywood Encryption]]: Safely averted. The encrypted file on Wallace's hard drive has a ".gpg" file extension. GPG is a real-world program, the GNU Privacy Guard, that implements an encryption alogrithm (OpenPGP) that would work exactly as described. That said, there's nothing about GPG that requires a three-letter ".gpg" file extension as it instead embeds GPG/PGP header information in the file itself. GPG'd files can have any extension the user wants and GPG will still be able to identify and decrypt them by checking for the PGP header block in the file. Stephenson likely used a .gpg file extension because it was quicker and less awkward than explaining the details of GPG's functionality, and worked just as well as a shout-out for cryptogeek readers and wouldn't have made much difference anyway for those who didn't know what he was talking about in the first place.

* [[Hollywood Hacking]]: An in-universe example:

** At one point, the opening sequence of T'Rain is described as being ripped off from the opening sequence of [[Google Earth]], which is in turn (accurately) described as being ripped off from some old science fiction novel. The novel in question is one of Stephenson's earlier books, ''[[Snow Crash]]''.

** The book mentions ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' a few times as ''T'Rain'''s chief competition.

* [[Simultaneous Arcs]]: Once things start picking up, the book has a habit of splitting off the characters and following one around until one character affects another, and then start explaining how ''that'' character got there.

* [[Stylistic Suck]]: Skeletor is described as a hack writer several times before we see a sample of his writing. It's ridiculously [[Purple Prose]].

** Ivanov completely snaps in the end. Sokolov realizes that Ivanov might be losing his sanity well beforehand.

** Abdallah Jones is another example. Right in the middle of a gunfight with Richard, he starts ignoring Richard and shooting frantically at a mountain lion. Even when Richard pops out of hiding to shoot him, Jones is babbling about the cat.

* [[Word Salad Title]]: Like several of Stephenson's previous novels, the title is a made-up word found within the story. It's apparently supposed to be "README" with the letters transposed, either as a result of a typo or a lack of writing proficiency.

* [[Xanatos Speed Chess]]: This whole novel reads as a big game of this.