Jason Pettus's Reviews > Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

So to establish my bona fides right away, let me mention that I've read and loved all 16 novels that Neal Stephenson has now written in his life (yes, even his disavowed 1984 debut, the now out-of-print The Big U), and consider him one of my top-three all-time favorite writers currently alive and publishing new work. So what a profoundly heartbreaking thing, then, to finish his latest, the 900-page virtual-reality morality tale Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell, and have to be forced to admit to myself, "You know, that book was...well, it was kind of crappy, is what that book was."

During the first half of the manuscript, I became convinced that this was because Stephenson turned in a clunker of an actual storyline here; because, for the first time in his career, Stephenson takes on here the very contemporary real-world issue of the "Red Pill" revolution of the 21st century (which I'm defining here as the interconnected throughline that links together the Bush administration, the rise of Fox News, the Tea Party, Gamergate, Sad Puppies, 4chan, the Meninist movement, incels, the alt-right, and the dark ascendency of "God Emperor" Trump). Seemingly not a single person in the last twenty years that opposes this movement has been able to write critically about the subject without just losing their shit and quickly devolving into lazy, badly written doomsday scenarios about the nightmarish hell our world will become if these people were to ever gain unstoppable power; and Stephenson too succumbs to this hacky temptation, painting an America 30 years from now that has essentially broken down into a civil war between "The Stupids" and "The Smarts*," in which the Stupids have forcefully overtaken large swaths of the Midwest through a Christian version of the Taliban (a brand-new strain of Protestantism which rejects the entire New Testament because it depicts Jesus as a "beta cuck," about the most lazily on-the-nose reference to the alt-right one can even make), who then proceed to literally crucify people from burning crosses for such Old Testament sins as wearing clothes that mix together different strains of animal fibers.

[*Also, let me confess that I lost my patience quickly with Stephenson's attempts in this section to paint autistic people as superheroes, through his unending self-righteous declarations about how much better he and his little STEM buddies are than the rest of us mouth-breathers. Autistic people aren't fooled by fake news! Autistic people's feelings aren't hurt by blunt opinions! Autistic people don't feel obliged to engage in pointless small talk! Thank God we autistic people are around to save all you blathering morons from yourselves!]

Then in the meanwhile, we also follow the fate of one of the characters from Stephenson's 2011 novel Reamde, billionaire videogame developer Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, who unexpectedly dies one day at which point it's revealed that, earlier in his life, he got convinced by a startup buddy to have his body frozen, so that maybe one day in the future his brain can be brought back to life if science ever invents a way to do so. And through a convoluted series of events, science does in fact invent a way, and just two decades after his death at that, by essentially scanning a complete digital copy of the trillions of neural pathways in his brain, then letting those digital pathways virtually interact again within a town-sized complex of newly invented "quantum computers." But this being a game developer, the first thing Dodge's digital brain does to make sense of his situation is to start building out a World Of Warcraft-type fantasyland for him to place himself in, with Stephenson burning through literally hundreds of pages in describing in excruciating detail just what it must be like when a brain has its consciousness wiped, then starts filling it in again bit by bit from the retained memories of its subconscious. "What are these two fleshy appendages underneath my torso? What are these ten smaller appendages attached to the bottom of these two? What are these squiggly symbols I keep picturing when attempting to count these appendages? What is this locomotive motion I seem to be engaging in when placing one appendage in front of the other? What is this hard gravelly surface these appendages seem to be pushing against during its locomotion?" Jesus CHRIST, Stephenson, ENOUGH already, we fucking GET it, WE FUCKING GET IT ALREADY!!!!1!!

It was at this point, already 400 pages in, that I finally lost my patience for good, and initially decided to abandon the novel altogether; but just out of curiosity I ended up flipping through the rest of it and reading the increasingly smaller non-virtual-world parts, because I was simply too interested in knowing how the story ends up finishing out. And that's when I realized that it's not actually the storyline itself that's the problem here; when you look at the overall plot in quick big-picture form, it's actually quite interesting, an attempt by Stephenson to do no less than retell the religious story of God's creation of the universe, his war with Lucifer, the manipulation of Adam and Eve as pawns of this war, the path towards self-sentiency and human technological progress that was the fallout of this war's manipulation, and the final battle between good and evil that's foretold in the Book of Revelations, but all seen through the filter of the speculative question, "What if our old religious stories actually came about because an alien race figured out a way to digitize themselves, and the first couple dozen people who got imperfectly digitized became the angels and devils of our Bible, and everything we know and experience in our universe is actually just the result of a giant computer running on this alien planet, and the aliens are actually watching and analyzing us in minute detail but have no way of communicating with us about it?"

Seen in this light, then, the real problem of the novel becomes immediately clear; because while Stephenson has claimed in recent interviews that his intent with the virtual-world part of this manuscript was to "bury a fantasy novel within the middle of a science-fiction novel," what he actually did was write a slightly altered 500-page version of the King James Bible. And as anyone who was ever forced to go through this during Bible summer camp as a kid knows, reading big chunks of the King James Bible as if it were a narrative novel is the most tedious activity in the entirety of human existence, which sadly turns out to be the case here too with Stephenson's rewritten version of it. When examined in Wikipedia form, Fall actually has a lot of fascinating things to say, not least of which is Stephenson's ultimate conceit at the end, which is that maybe the human race's fate is to live on in body-free, pure-energy form, cruising the universe in a self-perpetuating and self-repairing Dyson sphere long after the fragile biological version of our species is dead and gone back on Planet Earth.

If Stephenson had explored these topics through a tight, action-packed 350 pages, it could've been one of the best books of his already excellent career, exploring many of the same issues in his 2008 Anathem but through the prism of our real contemporary society. So what a shame, then, that he instead turned in this profoundly overlong, page-fluffing, endlessly rambling and pretentiously purplish version, a book that will be hard for even his hardcore fans to finish, and that everyone else will give up on long before that point. It pains me to have to admit that, because up to now I had thought of Stephenson as an author who could do no wrong; but alas, it turns out that he's just as capable of clunkers as every other author, his first major miss here in a career that's otherwise been full of hits. As much as I hate to say it, my recommendation here is to skip Fall altogether, and wait a few more years for what will hopefully be a return to his normal brilliancy.