Oleksandr Zholud's Reviews > Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

This is a SF novel about digitalizing consciousness.

The author, Neal Stephenson, often writes books, which in paper version can be used by powerlifters. 896 pages, over 31 hours of audio! Just like late Robert A. Heinlein he is in urgent need of an editor, who will cut the manuscript in half without losing all the great ideas. To answer a question whether other books (Reamde, Cryptonomicon) should be read to enjoy this one, No.

Richard “Dodge” Forthrast is a Silicon valley billionaire, who founded Corporation 9592, which made a successful massively multiplayer online game TRain. Now he lives for fun, investigating different questions of interest for him, from how sleep works to a common source of Norse and Greek myths. One day he goes though a routine medical procedure, which unexpectedly leaves him in coma. In his living will, there is a remnant of the late 90s, just before the dot-com crash, hype among suddenly wealthy geeks to save their bodies for a resurrection in a sufficiently advanced future. Nothing new here, other SF authors used the idea to ‘send’ their protagonists on an adventure, from The Door Into Summer to We Are Legion to name just two. However, if in other books this is just means to an end, here we have pages and pages on how to do it and what we’ll get at the end.

The first half of the book is great, one gets a lot of interesting ideas, like for example that scanning brains alone probably won’t work if we recall that from hormones made by our bodies to chemicals produced by bacteria in our guts, there are tons of out of brains stuff, which affects (determines?) us and our decisions. The initial creation of a bitworld, made subconsciously based on allusions to Norse and Greek myths and the Old Testament is pure gold. However, as with most of his other novels, story bogs down around 2/3 through the book and starts to wander aimlessly.

A five star start with a two star finish.

it’s one thing to simulate a brain. It’s another thing to talk to it. We forget this because our brains are hooked up to bodies with handy peripherals like tongues that can speak and fingers that can type. As long as those work, you can always get some idea of what’s going on in a brain. But a brain in a box doesn’t have those. Which is probably another reason that no one has tried this yet.”
***
Pluto, well aware of his own social ineptitude, had obviously pored over an etiquette manual before showing up, and so, during his rote interactions with Zula and other immediate family members, had acquitted himself well if bizarrely, addressing them in high-Victorian grief speech straight out of whatever scanned and archived Emily Post book he’d memorized.
***
“So, Martin Luther was running a false-flag operation for the Pope,” Phil said. “In that case—” But he broke off as he felt Sophia stepping on his toe, under the table.
He looked down at her. Having caught his eye, she panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn’t Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level. “Professor Long,” she muttered, “the Red Card.”
It was a reference to one of their teachers at Princeton who had gone so far as to print up a wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren’t going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on:

Speech is aggression
Every utterance has a winner and a loser
Curiosity is feigned
Lying is performative
Stupidity is power