Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

Really boring, almost didn't finish (and I love his older books).

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.

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.

What a strange book. Not since [b:The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer|827|The Diamond Age Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer|Neal Stephenson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388180931l/827.SY75.jpg|2181158] has a Stephenson novel felt so mythic. It is the type of book I like, character driven legendary. The viewpoint and characters kept shifting though. I would have preferred to spend more time with fewer characters. Perhaps if the narrative had been more episodic with less connection between the sections then I might not have minded as much. Making more of the time jumps in both the "real" world (is it really?) and "virtual" world would have helped.

I strongly suspect that I will be reading this one again. After failing to finish [b:Seveneves|22816087|Seveneves|Neal Stephenson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1449142000l/22816087.SY75.jpg|42299347] I had wondered whether I would be able to get in to this book. I had no similar problems with [b:Anathem|2845024|Anathem|Neal Stephenson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1488349209l/2845024.SX50.jpg|6163095], which a lot of people struggled with continuing.

Every once in a while you get to read a book that has excellent worldbuilding that excites the imagination, rewards you in its creativity and splendor, and also satisfies your left brain by being logical and cohesive. I remember feeling this way when I read Dune or The Lord of the Rings (eagles problem notwithstanding). I love an epic, grand scope.

Fall conveyed that to me through its mixture of mythology, exploration of story archetypes, ethical and spiritual questions about humans living forever, and most importantly of all, its plumbing the depth of the human state of being, or consciousness. This is its grand theme, from page 1 to the end. It does so through several different stories that are part of a very cohesive larger story. This book is very long, and for many people this will detract, and I can also imagine many people not understanding why there are so many different characters and places explored. It made perfect sense to me however, as I was tracking the way Stephenson built up the concepts of his theme.

He starts off by developing the concept of qualia--what they are, where they come from, how they work--in the day-to-day experiences of Dodge, our main protagonist. Then Dodge dies (this isn't really a spoiler as it happens very soon), and we get the story of an unusual legal process involving the care of his remains so that he can be scanned and possibly, one day, made to live again. We have several different characters involved, and the reason why may not seem readily apparent, but I believe it was so that we could compare and contrast the different ethical ideas about death, whether humans have souls, and what is truly sacred.

The story then has a section about an enormous hoax that is played on the world, and then a section about a dysfunctional Ameristan that's cut off from reality, and then a section about Sophia coming into her own and how she came to boot up Dodge's brain and how that worked with the academics, the legals, the rich foundation, and the eugenics people, and then there's a section about Dodge's brain waking up, what that's like, how his reality gets created, and then you see how other brains coming into the system naturally want to glob onto what he has created (the groundwork for that was laid earlier by explaining how brains are truly not meant to exist in a vacuum, but with sensations hooked into it)...and that's just the first half of the book. The second half is a series of stories that mostly play out in Bit World, the new world that is created first by Dodge and then inhabited eventually by thousands, then millions, and then billions of people.

There's also a diversion we get early in the book that, at first glance, seems to not be very related. Dodge's niece Sophia takes a trip through Ameristan with some friends and discovers the way that some parts of America have developed now that everyone has individualized feeds that filter and alter their entire realities for what they respond to. I believe the purpose of this section is to show how self-modifying systems can get into extreme places that cause the brain to be completely disconnected from reality. In a system where the brain is able to alter what is presented to it as "real", however indirectly, a person's brain and beliefs can change drastically, and not only that, but these realities can be shared, and it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to anything real. This lays important groundwork for later on a conceptual level, although plot-wise, this section of the story does almost nothing.

When I say this book is vast, I mean it. It's nearly 900 pages and it's not always easy reading (although sometimes it certainly is very delightfully easy). I don't read as many longs books as short ones, but I believe this one is a magnum opus worth reading. I will say that Stephenson's weakness as a writer is conciseness. But I don't think he needs to be concise in terms of the number of stories he is weaving into the book, because for this deep topic it required groundwork to be continually laid and concepts to be built upon each other, and in order for that to be done in the format of an engaging story, it takes a long time. I relished this book on every level--emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and just the pure enjoyment of reading a wonderful story well told. My one criticism of his verbosity is at the level of sentences and paragraphs and chapters. He has a habit of starting off most scenes by describing the setting and background in great detail--even if the setting is just a boring conference room in an office building. This habit did not appear to help the plot or themes. But once you learn to skim these sections, the book is nigh perfect--or at least it was for me.

I didn't even mention some of the stories being told in this book, and there really is a whole pantheon of interesting characters. There's lots of worldbuilding that's related to mythology, but not in a way that is a turn-off when you don't know the reference, because all the important references are explained anyway.

Another thing I loved is the gradual creation of the world that you get to experience with Dodge and the others. There are maps in the book at regular intervals so you can see how the land develops. And the whole story just perfectly captures and conveys that wonderful process that happens in our minds when we create new worlds. I've never read a book that captured that for me like this one. None of them hold a candle in that regard. As a worldbuilder and designer of all kinds of systems, this aspect made the book very personal for me, furthering my enjoyment past all of the other reasons this was a good book.

I can't possibly summarize this book in an exhaustive way, so I will end by saying, it has been one of the best things I've read in the last year. I loved it and will now be looking into his other works with hopeful expectation.

"Absolutely amazing" is an understatement.

Not my favourite kind of Stephenson book, but enjoyable, still. I found the ‘post-truth’ themes in the first part quite interesting. I found the second part less interesting, but I kept seeing parallels to Peter F. Hamilton's Void trilogy.

I'm not sure what just happened