What I Am Reading: "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson

This is the book I selected for the air travel portion of my trip to Newfoundland. I have been reading Neal Stephenson novels since I discovered Snow Crash in high school, and I was happy to see this new one come out this year.

It took me about ten pages to figure out that this book reuses the characters from Reamde, the least-essential of Stephenson’s novels. One of the main characters of that book, MMORPG designer Dodge Forthrast, dies; and has a whimsical stipulation in his will that his brain be preserved to be returned to consciousness once the technology exists to do so. This sets off a legal and technical scramble to accomplish such a reincarnation, which eventually takes the form of running Dodge’s brain as a simulation.

The central antagonist is Elmo Shepherd, an eccentric billionaire obsessed with similar technological reincarnation. He spends the early part of the book experimenting with a massive hoax of the US government regarding a nuclear attack on a small town (one of the book’s most memorable parts) and executing his own shady maneuvering to gain partial control over the process. Eventually, Dodge’s brain is “awoken,” and must create order from the chaos that it finds itself in, designing its own virtual world reminiscent of the real one. El’s reaction to this, that it was unnecessary to simply recreate the world, and that there were infinite possibilities for the virtual afterlife, reminded me of Battlestar Galactica’s best speech:

Number One: (…) I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air.

Ellen Tigh: The five of us designed you to be as human as possible.

Number One: I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I - I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws; and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I'm a machine, and I can know much more. I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body. And why?! Because my five creators thought that "God" wanted it that way.

As the virtual world is created, finessed, and evolved, the novel shifts from high-concept hard science fiction to a fantasy novel, as the “souls” of characters in the virtual world live oblivious to their previous lives. At first, as Dodge creates and lives in a small world with a model village, the comingling of this world with the activity in the real world remind me a bit of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. As El Shepherd ascends to his higher plane and stages a takeover, Dodge’s banishment reminds me strongly of Paradise Lost. Finally, after a few thousand virtual years have passed in the virtual world and characters must go on a quest to unlock Dodge’s power, the classic fantasy novel structure mostly takes hold for a while, and the real world isn’t seen again until the very end.

I liked the book pretty well, it was Stephenson’s usual “novel of ideas,” not only about reincarnation and such futurist topics but also a bit on the shape of America as it is today, including a sort of cold civil war between the two cultures, each with their different newsfeeds (though devoid of the real bloodshed that we see in the real world, as that divide progresses). It didn’t replace Cryptonomicon or anything, but I liked it much better than the techno-thriller Reamde, and I’m glad to see that Neal Stephenson is still chugging along.