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.