Greg's Reviews > Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

Fall is occasionally exceptionally poignant, when Neal Stephenson chooses to engage with his near-future real world, with the wide implications of AR, automation, post-truth, culture-divides and even the implications of running an after-life simulation.

Most of the time, it's bogged down in it's own self-mythology created from the patrons of the transhumanist afterlife, with a few "I kid you not" moments of old-gods resembling greeks being ousted by judo-christian replacements souls complete with Adam & Eve and garden of Eden. Stephenson seems quite preoccupied with his rather-bizarrely-paper-thin allegories. The bigger crime is it's just not that interesting. I suppose Stephenson purposely is making a point for how much humans are trapped in their own frames of reference, and the commonality of myth is an outgrown of our limited conceptions but man.... I just wanted to get it over with. I was always waiting for the book to return back to the real-world instead of the snoozy VR world.

I was impressed/entertained and then bored in equal quantities. Meatspace is good near future sci-fi, bitspace is boring fantasy, spanning eons and hundreds of pages for lame-duck lore. Like even the best of Stephenson, he’s never quite sure how to wrap it up with a cogent and poignant ending... and it hurts more as half of the story isn’t that good. The last 1/3rd of the book I just wanted to end.