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

I picked up the first library book I'd been able to check out for five months on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and by Sunday night I had already finished reading it.

That's right; it took me only a bit more than 24 hours to burn through Neal Stephenson's 883-page novel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (that semicolon in the title appears and disappears, by the way, depending on where you look, but I like semicolons anyway so I'm leaving it in).

Maybe I should have paced myself.

On the one hand, Stephenson immersed me deeply and immediately; I spent hours that weekend doing nothing but reading Fall, which speaks volumes (heh) about Stephenson's fluid prose, and about how well this novel meshed with my own science-fictional interests.

On the other hand, though... I shouldn't have been able to zip through Fall so quickly. Despite its length and deep philosophical underpinnings, this novel was not nearly as challenging, nor as original, as I'd hoped it would be. Much of it, in fact, reads like an extended cutscene from some online role-playing game.

Which isn't a coincidence...

*

We last saw Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, along with his daughter Zula, in REAMDE. Familiar names like Waterhouse, Shaftoe and even Enoch Root also appear, connecting this novel directly with Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle as well. It seems that Stephenson has fallen into the expanded-universe trap, or contracted the continuity virus, or... whatever metaphor you like for the all-too-common urge authors get, later in their careers, to tie all of their fiction together into one grand "future history."

In case you can't tell, I think that the contortions this usually requires are unnecessary at best.

Anyway... as Fall begins, Dodge—introspective billionaire, dispassionately monitoring his sleep cycle—awakens in his not-quite-penthouse condominium in Seattle, and starts getting ready for a routine medical procedure. He's been told not to eat anything, but this Vietnamese immigrant baker he knows makes the most amazing croissants, and the bakery's on Dodge's way...

Oops.

So Richard Forthrast dies—no spoiler to us, although it was rather a surprise to Dodge, as well as to his family and friends. His untimely expiration triggers provisions in his will that require every effort be made to preserve him cryogenically and secure his eventual resurrection. And since Dodge was a billionaire (he made his pile pioneering a massively-multiplayer role-playing game), those efforts lead to his brain being frozen, then scanned and uploaded to a quantum-computational server farm in central Washington, just about as soon as it's possible to do so.

Oops.

If you haven't already twigged to this, let's lay it out clearly: Fall is incredibly awash in privilege. Dodge is just one example—all of the primary characters are at the very least millionaires. These are people who think nothing of hiring a private jet, and then redirecting it midflight, for just one example. Maybe it had to be that way—the amount of storage and computing power required to reproduce an entire human mind (or even a reasonable facsimile of its connectome) ain't gonna be cheap, at least at first.

But it is weird, how comfortable Stephenson felt showing us this future almost entirely from above.

I also wondered about uploading's popularity—Stephenson portrays this process, once it got cheap enough, as eventually affecting the human birthrate!

*

So Dodge—or something very like Dodge, anyway—awakens to... nothing. The trauma of death seems to have wiped out his memories, and the environment he finds himself in is completely unstructured... just a field of zeroes. Chaos. The phrase that comes to mind from Genesis is "without form, and void." In a physical sensory-deprivation tank, there are at least a few cues (one's own heartbeat, if nothing else) to focus on. Dodge has nothing—nothing except what he creates for himself.

So he creates. But, of course, what Dodge creates is still shaped by his limitations and (though he can't remember much about them) his experiences. And when other uploads inevitably begin arriving, they are obliged to accept the parameters that Dodge has already chosen—and it quickly becomes clear that Dodge's game-design experience has a very real effect on the sort of post-mortal digital paradise he can devise.

Oops...

*

With everything I disliked about Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, what did I like? Well, quite a lot, actually. I did find it compulsively readable, after all—and if I'd read it more slowly and thoughtfully, I might well have fallen through some of the many plot holes that I escaped noticing at the time.

I even liked the relatively slow section just after Dodge's upload awakens in that empty environment, with its sly references to Greek mythology and the timeline in Genesis. I thought the way Dodge's connectome had to build everything around him anew, from scratch, with multiple handicaps along the way, was... well, "realistic" isn't precisely the right word, but certainly plausible.

And when the ensuing Quest starts looking like a second-rate fantasy novel... well, that's plausible too—after all, Dodge's role-playing experience both in this novel and its predecessor is more than a little derivative. It's unsurprising that a relatively faithful copy, unable to remember much about the source material for his ideas, would recapitulate a lot of time-worn tropes.

And while I have deep reservations about the practicability of the notion that an amnesiac copy of my dead brain might be in any way immortality for me—at best, a scanned-and-uploaded mind is a copy of the original, whose fidelity begins to diverge as soon as it's booted up—I still like the idea, and it does make for some good science fiction.

*

It's taken me far longer than 24 hours to write this review; I've been struggling with my ambivalent reactions to the book. So no, I'm not going to tell you to trot right out and read it. Too many people have already bounced off of it (and there's a lot to bounce off of—my Goodreads friend Peter T., for example, reacted rather badly to the satirical sections set in "Ameristan," although I saw that part more as a cautionary tale).

But if you like Stephenson's work anyway, and are willing to turn off some of those pesky critical faculties for a few hours, you might enjoy Fall every qubit (heh) as much as I did.