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Reamde was the book if any are interested.

A cool part was one of the engineers complaining when a powerful user cast a spell that deformed the landscape. The whole world was a huge finite element simulation so that one spell cause CPU usage to spike as whole world had to be updated.

The book was fun, sort of a thriller, but I felt Stephenson could have done more exploring the world of the MMO game. A rare complaint for him.

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Cast in another light, it was standard Stephenson fare -- the first half of the book explores a topic deeply and interestingly, then the second half basically sets it aside to trail off into some weird no-man's land. Seveneves was particularly obvious version of this issue.

I thought Seveneves was more like two "first half of Stephenson novels" smushed together; I found myself wishing there was more exploration of the "second" world. I thought the cultural evolution stuff was super interesting.

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