Fall; or, Dodge in Hell A Novel

**Massive spoilers ahead!** Edit: rating explanation - 1 star to follow Goodreads' mouse-over (which is rather biased towards positive ratings anyway) as I did not like this book. I'd have given it 2 stars for the decent half of the book and some interesting thought experiments. As a huge fan of Neal Stephenson’s books, I find it hard to describe this book as partially dull: even his early novels, while rough around the edges, have always had fascinating ideas in them. Some were crazy, some eerily predictive. I can criticise some of his storytelling as well: some of the endings left me unfulfilled, but the journey to that end was always fascinating enough that I could easily recommend most of his books. It should be noted that one half of this books isn’t really dull (just not as brilliant as some of his other novels), the story about events and characters on Earth is decent, with some likeable characters and enough interesting ideas about technology, religion, politics and the results of being able to create a digital afterlife. The half of the story that takes place post-life is the problem: it’s frequently dull, I found myself missing the flesh and blood characters of the real world, and not very original. The afterlife read like a mixture of the most boring parts of The Silmarillion (too many characters and no emotional connection to any of them) and the genealogy part of Genesis. Each time a character in the real world died, I regretted their death as I knew I’d have to encounter a less interesting reincarnation of them in the digital world. Finally, the book also left me unfulfilled: Stephenson creates a digital afterlife, and I still have no idea what it must be like, in his imagination, to be dead-yet-alive. None of the now digitized characters deal with this issue, and their loved ones who remain on earth are only occasionally described as missing them. Instead, most of the living humans left on Earth seem fascinated with watching events in the afterlife unfold, while seemingly ignoring their own lives in what looks like a post-scarcity society, with nature recovering from our near-CO2 apocalypse: if I had been one of them, I would have turned off the afterlife, set out on a trek around the world and most definitely opted out of digitizing my brain.

** spoiler alert ** This massive novel took a while for me to get into. As a sequel, I had not expected the returning characters to be so much older and deader. (More spoilers ahead!) There was a scene early on when Richard was brushing his teeth or shaving and he noticed the light as it came into his bathroom. The way it fractured and reflected. (I’d go find it again for you, but that’s not so easy on a Kindle.) My point is that the author spent many pages on this one observation and I remember thinking at the time that it was going to take me FOREVER to finish this book and that NS’ editor should have insisted that this be cut down. Now that I’ve finished the book, it is clear why that scene was important (although it could still have been trimmed, IMHO). But wtf? This is about post-humans whose minds have been uploaded “to the cloud” and they start with nothingness. The whole thing’s Biblical aspects were quite surprising. The last thing I’d want to do, post-uploading, is to have to exist almost prehistorically: weaving one’s own clothes, milling one’s own flour, casting metals to make cooking pots and spears. I’d much prefer to be uploaded to Iain M Banks’ Culture world with its endless parties, exotic lifeforms, gender-switching, and implanted, mood-altering drugs! But back to Dodge. Richard gets uploaded first and becomes Egdod, the all-powerful, separating light from dark and bringing forth order from chaos, one red leaf at a time. The rest of the world (in Meatspace) can’t communicate with him but, over the decades, find ways to make sense of the cyber world he constructs. More souls are uploaded and politics and infighting follows. Egdod becomes a vengeful, Old Testament God for a spell. One of the best bits is how Spring, a former programmer and one of the uploaded souls who joins Egdod’s Pantheon of gods, re-creates plants and animals that can self-replicate and eventually, with Egdod’s help, creates little “sub-routines” that bring forth “children” in our image that had never existed in Meatspace. You wouldn’t want to be at that Bris... Another is his prescience in considering that the Internet and social media as we know it today is both dangerous and unsustainable. It’s broken and NS shows us how easily we can be victimized by it (Remember Moab!). One chilling section follows Sophia and friends through parts of Iowa where they encounter cults with gas-lit flaming crosses that read the Bible as forbidding the mixture of different materials in one’s clothing. Cotton-poly blends and anything knit with elastic, for example, are prohibited, so they must remove their underwear before meeting with the local church folk. I particularly enjoyed the Meatspace sections as a thought exercise around the “what if” of post-human digital existence from the “back on Earth” perspective. The Egdod story, with its angels and firestorms, became a fairly straightforward adventure story. Not bad, but long and with too much Biblical symbolism for my taste. My favorite Neal Stephenson novels remain: Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Anathem and the System of the World trilogy. What about you?

Another ambitious Stephenson project. It has some of the adventure and futurism we've grown to love, but definitely gets stuck in some laborious character building in the middle that doesn't seem to matter all that much in the end. This aspect made the book more tedious for me, and in a way that was more boring than the esoteric technical and bureaucratic details of Cryptonomicon, for example. I’d really love to see more adventures in the Stephenson worlds already built—Seveneves, please!—than more attempts to build new ones whole cloth. This one, like some others in the past, feels unfinished and frayed with innumerable loose ends. I also can’t avoid a heavy eye roll at the final (and, one could argue, over-arching) concept landed in the book. Stephenson doesn’t spend any time convincing his audience, but instead gives a cheap wink to the people who already agree with the concept. No spoilers, but suffice to say that this has become the techno-religious totem of our time, and I find Stephenson’s entry into that debate—if we can call it that—thoroughly uninspired.

Just not good I really wanted to like this book, but really the second half is slow garbage. Lots of great premise up front, but then with every chapter it gets worse.

Fall or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson is about life after death, except with computers! This is the second book with Richard 'Dodge' from  Reamde , which is about phishing scams.  You don't need to have read that in order to enjoy this one, you just need to know that Richard is rich and does unconventional things.   Richard dies very early on in this book, but he has left instructions on what he wants done with his body, which is to store his body cryogenically, so that in the future he can be revived.  There are a lot of ethical implications with all of this, and Neal Stephenson explores these. Neal Stephenson does not write small, simple books, but I find the journey he takes me on interesting and entertaining, so I'm happy to see where it goes!   Fall or, Dodge in Hell  was published on 11th June 2019, and is available from  Amazon ,  Waterstones  and  Bookshop.org . You can follow Neal Stephenson on  Twitter  and his  website . I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, and so my thanks to NetGalley and to  HarperCollins UK .

A sweeping epic as usual. Part of the book is high-concept sci-fi combined with and exploration of what it means to be alive, and what parts our bodies play in that idea. It then turns into a rollicking adventure tale. Longer than it needed to be, but that lets Stephenson five deep, and is part of the appeal.

Fall is really two books. Both are engaging and offer that Stephenson mix of brilliance and infodump. (I tried to embed a photo but can't get it to work. Click here to see the author and I.) Let me explain, then comment a bit more behind spoiler shields. In one we start with the present day, with a bunch of geeks and the development of a mind-uploading technique. This progresses further into the 21st century. It's science fiction. Call it FallA. In another book we follow the adventures of various humans and other creatures in a fantasy world. This is the uploaded realm, and there are many struggles building to an epic conclusion. It's fantasy, generically: FallB. Fall begins with FallA, then alternates between A and B as the uploading process picks up steam. FallA gives out around 1/2way through the tome, and the rest is FallB, gleefully tracking the uploaded realm. Honestly, I preferred FallA. I enjoyed Stephenson's fond yet skeptical portrait of the geek world, but really got interested when he advanced things. We see a spectacular fake news story and the invention of a new form of digital identity. There's a big detour into a red state America made dystopian through information filters and cultural separation (179ff). There's the fascinating prospect of uploading becoming an industry, a cultural object, and increasingly central to humanity. I really wanted to see more of this. In contrast FallB is fun, like a few D&D campaigns in a row, but not so interesting - at least to me. There is much geekery on display. Characters sometimes have obsessive habits they dive deeply into. A crucifixion gets waylaid when the tormentors fall out over compression levels in a nailgun. I appreciated the use of "Zeroth Age" (540) (my musings on this). Stephenson offers some interesting historical views. For example, one of his long-running characters reflects:I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible... ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up in a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it - before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts - we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially... Now we're back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe. (251) Now, for spoilers.(view spoiler)[It was nice to see Enoch Root again, although it looks like he's killed off. I really did enjoy the finale, because Stephenson's novels tend to have weak endings. Here he really set up a series of events and had them collide together well. I am not sure about Sophia's fate. Does Dodge keep her in child-state forever? (hide spoiler)] Overall, this is an interesting book, or pair of books. It's a fun ride for Stephenson veterans; I'm not sure it'll grab newbies. I wish there was more of FallA.

The first 300 pages were fantastic. Then the story delved further into bitworld and became less interesting to me. Many reviews said that the last part of the book was almost entirely a fantasy novel within bitworld, so I gave up at around page 500 and will not be finishing the book. This is disappointing, because the first 3rd was so very good.