Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel

Beginning with Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash, I have enjoyed many of Stephenson's maximalist novels, including especially the entire nearly 3,000 pages of the steam-punk Baroque Cycle. After "Snow Crash", one might have assumed that Neal Stephenson was a died-in-wool, bit coin crazy, MAGA, anti-government libertarian. But in this book, it appears that he has begun to ridicule what he sees as the long term consequences 40 to 50 years from now of rural American anti-elitist hostility. In Fall, the consequence is the development of Ameristan (portmanteau of American and Afghanistan).Early in the book, Stephenson introduces an internet scam that involves the alleged nuclear bombing of an out of the way town in south eastern Utah, Moab.Despite the scam being revealed as a lie, one of the lead protagonists laments (pg 174):"That billions of people went on believing everything they saw on the Internet in spite of it. . . ."'What's the point?' The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There's no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool's errand.'"'I've seen El on social media, suggesting that Moab actually was nuked. Like openly pandering to the people who still believe that,' Corvallis said. "Those observations (and many others) clearly reflect Stephenson's current views regarding social media.Part Three, Chapters 12-16, pg 177-252 are what I consider the anti-MAGA chapters.The ultimate protagonist, Sophia, and her friends plan a trip to visit "a little pocket of blue" which is the ancestral family farm in Iowa just east of Sioux City, "near where Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota came together." p. 181To get to the farm, they must leave the interstate highway system, which means "going off grid" on a two lane highway. This area they call "Ameristan" where there are roadblocks by those who see everything as a government plot. It seems that bridges are the only government structures that those in Ameristan don't "ANFO" (meaning blow up). pg. 180To get to Ameristan in order to visit the "little pocket of blue" they must rent a tactical vehicle and be accompanied by two bodyguards who drive a pickup truck fitted out with a 50 calibre machine gun on a tripod for use "when venturing into regions where an impressive show of force was deemed prudent." Oh, and the pickup truck is also fitted out with a fixed wing drone which is launched from the truck's roof. pg. 183Each person is assumed to subscribe to an "edit stream" received through special web based glasses. Looking at the manager of a car rental office who has an assault rifle slung over his shoulder, Sophia wonders what edit stream he is using and the "particular flavor of post-reality it was pumping into his mind." pg 182Sophia questions, Tom, one of the gun slinging Iowa bodyguards about his southern accent. It turns out he has no southern heritage what-so-ever, but has "adopted - affected - Southern stylings. Northerners don't talk like that, they don't drawl, the don't say 'y'all' . . . Or put the Stars and Bars on their bumpers."As they are driving Northwest into Ameristan, Sophia and her friends discuss the characteristics of their body guard whose truck they are following in a 40 year old Land Rover (their normal vehicle is a self driving electric). The truck of the bodyguards has a Confederate Flag sticker on one side and a "Remember Moab" sticker on the other side of the license plate.Sophia notes that "it would have seemed weird for Northerners to post the traitor's' flag on their bumper or cop an accent from Alabama" as late as 17 years ago. But, as her friend points out, "The cultural border shifted north."In narrative, Stephenson writes: "the border, staked out by Walmarts and truck stops, was as real as anything from Cold War Berlin."When the group crosses over into Iowa's "Ameristan," the body guards pull over and remove all the license plates from the two vehicles, which were mounted with magnets for easy removal.As they drive into Ameristan, they pass "the occasional fiberglass statue of a political leader, erected by a farmer in the front yard of an isolated house, or a makeshift billboard railing against contraception." pg 186When the body guards launch their fixed wing drone from the top of their truck as they drive Northwest, Sophia speculates that they have "access to edit streams of geodata showing hot spots of gunfire and traffic slowdowns that might suggest roadblocks or check points" manned by local Taliban.After a while, they reach a hill on which is positioned "the giant Flaming Cross of the Leviticans" which is about the size and shape of a standard wind turbine (i.e. about as tall as the 300 foot Statue of Liberty). pg. 188As Sophia wonders if she should contact Tom, the body guard in the lead truck of the armed caravan, about the giant gas powered Flaming Cross, she realizes that "his edit space and Sophia's were totally disjoint . . . and anything that came from Princeton or Seattle would never reach Tom's feed until it had been bent around into propaganda whose sole function was to make Tom afraid and angry."The rest of this portion of the novel is a hoot. Too soon, for me, the novel returns to the always inventive and entertaining science fiction that has earned Stephenson his incredible reputation. But this little pericope is marvelous commentary on the likely consequences of the current rural/urban divide. And, it's hard to see how it can represent anything less than Stephenson's contempt for the MAGA movement, which is a surprise, considering the libertarian-anarchical tone of his work in the past, especially including "Snow Crash."To make a brief comment about the bulk of the novel, Stephenson's dramatic analysis of the notion of a mind bereft of a body living on in eternity is very thought provoking at several levels. In developing this idea, Stephenson reaches not inconsiderable heights of quasi-religious allegory, including creation ex-nihilo. In view of the working out of a drama based on that idea, this reader is impressed with the absurdity of the idea of downloading a brain into the AWS cloud.Not that it couldn't be done, but why would you want to do it?

As always with Neal Stephenson books, this one is immensely difficult to describe. But this one is also incredibly difficult to rate, as it is really two distinct narratives, one wrapped within the other, with shifting emphasis throughout the book from the one to the other as the latter develops. Despite the latter occupying the majority of the book, I'll refer to it as the "secondary" narrative as it takes place within a construct of the "primary" narrative.Effectively, this is a book dealing with death and the ability for technology to simulate consciousness to provide a simulacrum of a life after death. The primary narrative involves the world of earth and the figures central to the scanning, digitizing, and decoding of dead human forms to code digital consciousnesses that maintain traits of the original individual. Along the way in this primary narrative are lots of twists and turns, relating to our current socio-technological relationship (including large, and fascinating extrapolations of algorithmic content generation, fake news, human susceptibility/gullibility, stimulus echo chambers, religious evolution in techno-secular world, class division in America, the influence of access to information on education especially in an ever-present IT age, mythology, history, cryptography, etc.), and, per usual with Stephenson, does a spectacular job of not only creating something believably tangible, but encompassing it with such detail and richness as to feel real, and delivered enough through dialogue and characters' own learnings along with the reader as to make it easily digestible and feeling like a progressive journey.The secondary narrative is the creation of universe of the digital world of the dead, and the experiences of those within it. This begins with the creation of the first sentient "being" (God metaphor) who shapes the universe through to a time period roughly equivalent to the Middle Ages but with, at the same time, loads of deviations from our true history. There are creation myths explored (and much of the book explores mythology - both in our real world and the fabricated "mythologies" that arise in this world of the dead) with allusions pervasive throughout (in both narratives) to our own conceptions of existence. While the second narrative begins with a truly philosophically provocative depiction of the first being "waking up" with no concept of time, existence, or self - a horrifying depiction of a potential hell - and then dedicates an immense number of pages to the evolution from sentient nothingness to established world, then to borrowed myths, then to alternate history, it finally concludes (at which point the primary narrative is largely abandoned) with a fantasy-novel-esque journey/quest. This journey is by no means bad - it was some of the most entertaining, page-turning content in the book - but rather that it lacked the depth, complexity, and provocation seen in the main story.Aside from the immensely detailed construction of that world, and the depth of history provided, it was not a particularly special quest story - whereas the rest of this, and most other Stephenson writings, offer something more. What's more, so much of that historical context-setting seemed perhaps overly detailed in retrospect. Or perhaps not, because it added a lot of considerations regarding philosophy, society building, history, and religion/mythology - relevant to the reader's world and in the world of the secondary narrative. All of this did make for a more interesting world, but so many characters to which many, many pages were afforded came and went without much consequence (surely in part to demonstrate the amounts of time passed) or ultimately played little role. Others seemingly sprung up without much introduction to become pivotal.At roughly 900 pages long, I found that it could have cut 100+ pages (especially from the Adam and Eve narrative which, beyond making readers question what it may have been like to be Adam and Eve, didn't offer much in my view) without much loss. And yet, at the same time, I wished the story would continue.The climax and falling action happened so quickly, especially contrasted with how many pages and how many details were dedicated to their build-up. The conclusion did fit fairly well within the universe constructed, it's more just that I wanted more, given how much the story had been giving up to that point - it kind of fell flat by comparison. And it's also just that I wanted the story to keep going. The universes (for at that point, we briefly jump back to the primary narrative one last time, which is also quite far into the future) are so compelling and well made that I wanted to get to keep experiencing them. As always, Stephenson delivers something that is both weightily thought-provoking and extremely entertaining.Despite its being almost 900 pages, and my exceptionally slow reading rate, I finished this in under 2 weeks, unable, for the most part, to put it down. The first 400 or so pages were and incredible mix of provocative, societally reflective, and entertaining. The next maybe 200-300 were a mix of dense but provocative, and fairly dull, but stage setting. The final 200-ish were mostly just entertaining (albeit fairly shallow and generic, lacking much of the depth that typically makes Stephenson stand out to me as an author). All in all, a dynamic and excellent book that borrows bits and pieces of its structure from Stephenson's Anathem (multiple dimensions and a quest) and Snow Crash (considerations for technology's ability to augment existence and how the human condition/human society may adapt and evolve in due course), while taking on altogether fresh subject matter, adding its own twists, and intermingling so many disparate concepts and knowledge subject areas - in a manner only Stephenson seems capable of doing - as to leave me struggling to describe everything the book explores and encompasses.

If you've never read Neal Stephenson before, don't make this your first choice. It starts well, continuing with some of the characters introduced in 'Reamde', but about half-way through it turns into a plodding fantasy quest that seems to be attempting to rehash the Fall of man story (Paradise Lost etc.), which drags along for way too many pages before it seems to remember what the novel was supposed to be about and makes a poor attempt at a satisfactory conclusion.Stephenson is at his brilliant best when drilling down in long expositions into technical minutiae, and although this story seemed to be about focusing on how to achieve communication between real world and 'bit world', it never achieves that.I almost lost interest (and certainly lost track of what was going on) in the quest part of the book, and only kept going because I was expecting some dazzling denouement at the end of the book, but sadly that never happened and I was left with the distinct impression that I must surely have missed something as I couldn't believe a Stephenson book could be this bad. It's like he gave up with the story half-way through and asked somebody else to finish it.

Started slowly but not terrible. Built up to some classic Stephenson road trip action albeit with rather anodyne characters. After this it was a sharp slump and a long slog to the end. NS felt it necessary to fully describe and narrate his digital Narnia while leaving all of the interesting questions posed by his post-life technology to wither on the vine. The ending managed to be saccharine, nonsensical and underdeveloped. An achievement of sorts I suppose.I've loved all of Stephenson's books for years now but perhaps it is time our hyper verbose polymath wordsmith considered getting himself an editor with some teeth

I have long waited for the next Stephenson. Snowcrash, the Quicksilver books, DODO,, hey, i don't remember much about it, but anyway, I got this down, and dived in. Pages, after ppage, good stuff, until I started to notice how politically-sorrect all the 'good' characters, and then I got to the books equivelent to the marshes on thhe Nile, the hero's awakening. Page after page skipped, and nothing. I realized than that is book is bull****, mostly well written, all right, but

The book seems like an early draft - albeit one by a talented writer, such as we know Stephenson to be. It would have benefited enormously from some severe pruning. Rambling, irrelevant digressions slow the pace down to a crawl at times. The unfamiliar world of the near(ish) future is unfolded without any deftness. There is far too much clunky dialogue of the "Hey, John, why don't we discuss some commonplace aspect of our world that the reader might be puzzled by" variety, leaving one with the impression that Stephenson is more interested in burnishing his credentials as a futurologist than with writing a gripping yarn.The big flaw though is that about two-thirds of the way through, the book just changes into a different sort of story altogether. It is utterly misconceived and the narrative loses all shape and becomes an unwieldy mess. I eventually gave up the struggle.That said, anything by Stephenson is worth a go, even something that reads like a philosophical speculation with plot and characters tacked on for the sake of appearances - just don’t expect to make it through to the end.

Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of darkness” is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature (even though it was technically written in 1899). It directly inspired one cinematic masterpiece (Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 “Apocalypse now”) and was allegedly an inspiration for at least two other masterpiece-adjacent films (James Cameron’s 1986 “Aliens” and James Gray’s 2019 “Ad Astra”). I personally consider it to be rather hollow, and thus allowing a talented artist to use it as a canvas to draw their own, unique vision on rather than a masterpiece in its own right , but I’m not going to deny its impact and relevance.Moreover, Conrad managed to contain the complete novella within 65 pages. Aldous Huxley fit “Brave new world” into 249 pages. J. D. Salinger fit “Catcher in the rye” in 198 pages, while George Orwell’s “1984” is approx. 350 pages long (and yes, page count depends on the edition, *obviously*). I seriously worry that in the current environment of “serially-serialised” novels these self-contained masterpieces would struggle to find a publisher. This, plus we’re also seeing true “bigorexia” in literature: novels have been exploding in size in recent years, and probably even more so in the broadly defined sci-fi / fantasy genre. Back when I was a kid, a book over 300 pages was considered long, and “bricks” like Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” or Frank Herbert’s “Dune” were outliers. Nowadays no one bats an eyelid at 500 or 800 pages.And this is where Neal Stephenson’s “Fall, or Dodge in hell” comes in. At 883 pages it’s a lot to read through, and I probably wouldn’t have picked it up had it not been referenced by two academics I greatly respect, professors Frank Pasquale and Steve Fuller in their discussion some time ago. I previously read Stephenson’s “Snow crash” as a kid and I was pretty neutral about it: it was an OK cyberpunk novel, but it failed to captivate me; I stuck to Gibson. Still, with such strong recommendations I was more than happy to check “Fall” out.I will try to keep things relatively spoiler-free. In a nutshell, we have a middle-aged, more-money-than-God tech entrepreneur (the titular Dodge) who dies during a routine medical. His friends and family are executioners of his last will, which orders them to have Dodge’s mind digitally copied and uploaded into a digital realm referred to as Bitworld (as opposed to Meatspace, i.e. the real, physical world – btw if you’re thinking “that’s not very subtle”; well, nothing in “Fall” is; subtlety or subtext are most definitely *not* the name of the game here). It takes hundreds of (mostly unnecessary) pages to even get to that point, but, frankly, that part is the book’s only saving grace, because Stephenson hits on something real, which I think usually gets overlooked in the mind uploading discourse: what will it feel to be a disembodied brain in a completely alien, unrelatable, sensory stimuli-deprived environment? This is the one part (only part…) of the novel where Stephenson’s writing is elevated, and we can feel and empathise with the utter chaos and confusion of Dodge’s condition. There was a very, very interesting discussion on a related topic in a recent MIT Technology Review article titled “This is how your brain makes your mind” by psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, which reads “consider what would happen if you didn’t have a body. A brain born in a vat would have no bodily systems to regulate. It would have no bodily sensations to make sense of. It could not construct value or affect. A disembodied brain would therefore not have a mind”. Stephenson’s Dodge is not in the exact predicament Prof. Barrett is describing (his brain wasn’t born in a vat), but given he has no direct memory of his pre-upload experience, it is effectively identical.One last semi-saving grace is Stephenson’s extrapolated-to-the-extreme a vision of information bubbles and tribes. His America is divided so extremely along the lines of (dis)belief and (mis)information filtering that it is effectively a federation of passively hostile states rather than anything resembling united states. That scenario seems to be literally playing out in front of our eyes.Unfortunately, Stephenson quickly runs out of intellectual firepower (even though he is most definitely a super-smart guy – after all, he invented the metaverse a quarter of a century before Mark Zuckerberg brought it into vogue) and after a handful of truly original and thought-provoking pages we find ourselves in something between the digital Old Testament and the Medieval, where all the uploaded (“digitally reincarnated”) minds begin to participate in an agrarian feudal society, falling into all the same traps and making all the same mistakes mankind did centuries ago; a sci-fi novel turns fantasy. It's all very heavy-handed, unfortunately; it feels like Stephenson was paid by the page and not by the book, so he inflated it beyond any reason. If there is any moral or lesson to be taken away from the novel, it escaped me. It feels like the author at one point realised that he cannot take the story much further, or, possibly, just got bored with it and decided to wrap it up.“Fall” is a paradoxical novel in my eyes: on one hand the meditation on the disembodied, desperately alone a brain is fascinating from the Transhumanist perspective; on the other I honestly cannot recall the last time I read a novel so poorly written. It’s just bad literature, pure and simple – which is particularly upsetting because it is a common offence in sci-fi: bold ideas, bad writing. I have read so many sci-fi books where amazing ideas were poorly written up, and I have a real chip on my shoulder about it, as I suspect that sci-fi literature’s second-class citizen status in the literary world (at least as I have perceived it all my life, perhaps wrongly) might be down to its literary qualities. The one novel that comes to mind as a comparator volume-wise and author’s clout-wise is Neil Gaiman’s “American gods”, and you really need to look no further to see, glaringly, the difference between quality and not-so-quality literature within broadly-defined sci-fi and fantasy genre : Gaiman’s writing is full of wonder with moments of genuine brilliance (Shadow’s experience being tied to a tree) whereas Stephenson’s is heavy, uninspired, and tired.Against my better judgement, I read the novel through to the end (“if you haven’t read the book back-to-back, then it doesn’t count!” shouts my inner saboteur). Is “Fall” worth the time it takes to go through its 883 pages? No; sadly, it is not. You could read 2 – 3 other, much better books in the time it takes to go through it, and – unlike in that true-life story – there is no grand prize at the end.What are the lessons to be taken away from 5 months’ worth of wasted evenings? Two, in my view:1. Writing a quality novel is tough, but coming up with a quality, non-WTF ending is tougher; that is where so many fail (including Stephenson – spectacularly);2. If a book isn’t working for you, just put it down. Sure, it may have a come to Jesus revelatory ending, but… how likely is that? Bad novels are usually followed by even worse endings.