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

TL;DR: This is fundamentally a novel about people with morally obscene amounts of wealth fighting over who gets to be what kind of god in a digital afterlife. It does not engage substantially with any of the questions you might expect to arise in a world where people's consciousnesses can be saved and restarted in a virtual world after death.


Before I started this book, I read one review which said that Neal Stephenson had graduated from science fiction to "philosophical adventure novels," in which the action occurs against the backdrop of big, important ideas. I would reject the notion that big ideas are somehow out of bounds for science fiction, but I would otherwise agree with this as a description of Stephenson's recent work. But I would most certainly not agree that 'Fall, or Dodge in Hell' is a book of big ideas. On the contrary, I would say that 'Fall' almost completely fails to engage with the questions raised by its core concept, instead burying the reader in data dumps that are informative but don't really grapple with any interesting questions.

In brief, the book is about a very rich man (Dodge) who dies suddenly. His will, signed years earlier, stipulates that his brain should be cryogenically frozen with the intent that at some point in the future medical science will be capable of restoring him to some form of life. Another very rich man with aspirations to immortality (Elmo Shepherd) uses this to compel Dodge's family to use his vast fortune to develop the technology to digitize the contents of the brain, so that it can be brought back to life inside a digital simulation. It works--Dodge comes back to life inside a computer and builds a new world (the Land) through a process that draws on many creation myths ("let there be light," a 'serpent' in a garden bringing forbidden knowledge, etc). As more digital souls are brought online, a battle breaks out to decide whether Dodge or Elmo will shape the afterlife.

Part of the problem of the novel is that it jumps around a great deal: big decisions happen offstage, characters die unceremoniously, new characters appear in the Land and are later revealed to be digital reincarnations of people who have died in reality. All of this makes it hard to make any emotional investment in the story. As an example, when Dodge's family first learn about his will, their immediate instinct seems to be to try to find a way out of it--they don't like the idea of his disembodied head being locked in perpetual deep freeze, and his religious brother hates the thought of a soulless duplicate of him trapped in cyberspace. The decision that's ultimately made, to throw all of Dodge's wealth into developing more advanced preservation technologies, happens between chapters. Despite the very strong competing interests within the family, we don't see this decision happen. It's a wasted opportunity to explore some of the concepts around identity, and existence, that the novel purports to be concerned with.

Another issue that's never considered is whether it makes any sense that people would want this kind of an afterlife. After the first handful of 'early adopters' go online, the company running the digital infrastructure starts taking subscribers: rich people pay premiums in life to ensure that when they die their brains will be digitized. This is despite the fact that the 'souls' running in the afterlife are either unwilling or unable to communicate back to those of us on earth, and we can only imperfectly observe what they're doing, though what they do tends to be the kind of thing you might do if you were reborn into a world designed by someone who played too much 'World of Warcraft'. But by the end of the book, we're told that most people who die opt to join the digital afterlife, and that more and more of the solar system's resources will be used to add computational power. So the fact that you might be reincarnated as a latrine cleaner, or that you might be kept in storage until the powers that be decide they have enough processor cycles to boot you up, apparently doesn't dissuade people from signing up. Nor does the book ever meaningfully ask why, in a digital world potentially free of the limitations of our physical reality, people need to eat, or sleep, or poop, or in general live the kinds of lives they might have lived in 'reality.' The core conflict of the book is between a guy who creates an afterlife that's recognizably like our world (Dodge) and a guy who thinks the afterlife should transcend the mundane realities of our world (Elmo), and yet this conflict produces almost nothing in the way of a debate between these two opposing philosophies. It seems like a philosophical adventure novel might want to engage with the question of what kind of worlds human minds build and whether that's something that we could choose to change, but there's no time for that, because fully the last quarter of the book is about people we've never met following a magic crow on a quest to the hidden realms of the Land. High stakes, indeed.

But the thing that made me most angry about this book is the sheer moral obscenity of the the way it treats wealth. Any character of importance in this book has a net worth in the tens of millions; everyone else is a servant. I mean this almost literally: we're told that people who aren't rich enough to buy their way into the afterlife can instead opt for a kind of indentured servitude, working as security guards, or janitors, or otherwise doing the scut work of keeping the digital infrastructure running. The rich characters in this book don't even need to think about money: when one character realizes she needs more cash to expand her computing operation, she just has her family foundation's stock trading algorithm shuffle some of their billions around to produce billions more. It's so easy, anyone can do it! You know, as long as you've got a family foundation with billions of dollars and a specialized stock trading algorithm to begin with.

Meanwhile, on Planet Poverty, the near-future America of the setting is collapsing from within, with climate change, resource scarcity, and viral internet memes that are literally driving people who use the unfiltered internet insane, and not once do any of the rich folks consider that their vast fortunes might be better spent making the world better for people currently alive and in need, rather than in building an afterlife for the deceased ultra-wealthy. No one ever suggests that in a world where the oceans are boiling, maybe generating more power to run bigger computers is a social evil, rather than a good. None of the living characters ever once stop and ask why it is they owe their lives to preserving the continued existence of people who have already lived and died in utmost privilege. I guess when you're a peon it's hard to look further than your Lordship's upkeep, even when your Lordship is bits in a computer.

This is fundamentally a novel about the richest people who have ever lived deciding that they deserve more still, and that we, the reader, should be deeply invested in the battle to decide which group of rich assholes gets to shape the next life. If that sort of thing sounds good to you, then have at it. Personally I found it spectacularly tone-deaf and obnoxious.