We never realized, until just this moment, how much respected science fiction author Neal Stephenson looks like formerly respected actor Stanley Tucci (look, he did a movie with Helen Hunt, that alone immediately downgrades your career several points: just ask Greg Kinnear) with a beard glued to his face. Seriously. Look at these two guys. OK, they’re not doppelgangers; Tucci is a little bigger and he’s got darker skin, but we know exactly who we’re casting when it comes time for a Kitty Kelly style epic about ’90s and ’00s science fiction. And we’ll probably go with Taye Diggs for Charles Stross.
Anyway, let’s actually talk about Stephenson’s novel, which really is about gold farmers.
Goddamn, Tucci just needs to lose a little weight and…OK, sorry. The novel, titled “REAMDE”, involves, as you may have guessed, the Jimmy Hart version of World of Warcraft. A weed-smuggling hippie from the ’60s with a lot of money due to being, well, a weed-smuggling hippie, and discovers online gaming. He launders his money by gold farming, builds his own massive start up because we can’t have a novel set in the modern day in a science fiction novel that DOESN’T feature a start-up, and then apparently some young gamer ticks off the Chinese and an “online war for dominance” begins.
Let’s just hope Stephenson paid attention to the reviews of “Anathem” that we don’t really care about his endless dissertations about whatever happens to be bothering him this week, and saves that for either his blog or the sequel to “In the Beginning Was the Command Line.” It’s left behind the author tract and is starting to approach the level of cruft.
Also I loved him in “Julie and Julia.”
[ via the doorstop fans at The Mary Sue ]