This is going to be a relatively long post, because it’s about a massive tome: Neal Stephenson’s Fall, or Dodge In Hell, which clocks in at 892 pages! As a matter of fact, it’s been sitting on my bookshelf since it first was published in 2019, intimidating me with its length.
I’ve been a fan of Neal Stephenson’s work since 1999 when Cryptonomicon came out. That sprawling novel bounced back and forth between WWII action and the late 90s, involving computer science, cryptography, and cryptocurrency. It was like nothing else I had read. I immediately picked up his Baroque Trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) which is a rollicking tale of how Isaac Newton, Gottfried Liebniz, and other characters came to establish our modern world. It encompasses England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, Louis IV’s attempts to conquer Europe, and some strange alchemical gold attributed to King Solomon that might have the ability to prolong life indefinitely. What is most fun are the ancestors of characters in Cryptonomicon showing up in major roles in the trilogy. The Waterhouse and Shaftoe families end up making cameos in several later novels, including Fall, or Dodge In Hell.
Stephenson is not afraid to span decades of time in his novels, and even though Fall is initially set in 2019, it soon jumps twenty years. The “Dodge” in the subtitle is Richard “Dodge” Forthrast, a billionaire who developed an incredibly popular online game, T’rain. We first met Dodge in a previous novel, Reamde. As a matter of fact, Fall could best be thought of as the sequel to Reamde.
Dodge goes to the doctor for a very routine medical procedure, where, for some unexplained reason, things go terribly awry, and he is pronounced brain dead. His loyal and trusted colleague, Corvallis “C-plus” Kawasaki, is the executor of his will, which stipulates that he is supposed to be cryogenically preserved until technology exists to map all of his neuron connections – his connectome – to some sort of digital server.
One of Stephenson’s quirks as a writer is to take side trips that superficially seem to have no bearing on the actual plot, but I love them. The first several pages of Fall are devoted to Dodge half-asleep in bed wondering why the length of time during his phone’s snooze function lasts exactly nine minutes, which leads him to consider the benefits of naps that allow him to drift off into dream sleep but not deep sleep, which then leads him into wondering about those muscle spasms that occur just when you’re about to fall asleep…. These tangents can be irritating or entertaining; I choose the latter, because they’re often quite humorous:
Pompitus Bombasticus was Richard’s favorite group. Apparently it was just one guy working alone in a studio in Germany; the philharmonic, the choir, and all the rest were faked with synthesizers. This guy had noticed, some years ago, that all inexpensive horror movies used the same piece of music—Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—in their soundtracks. That opus had become a cliché, more apt to induce groans or laughs than horror. This German, who had been living the starving-artist lifestyle while trying to establish a career as a DJ, had been struck by an insight that had transformed his career: the filmmakers of the world were manifesting an insatiable demand for a type of music of which Carmina Burana was the only existing specimen. The market (if the world of composers and musicians could be thought of as such) was failing to respond to that demand. Why not then begin to make original music that sounded like the soundtrack of the sort of movie scene in which Carmina Burana inevitably played? It didn’t have to sound exactly like Carmina Burana but it needed to evoke the same feelings.
Stephenson, Neal. Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel (p. 26). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Stephenson is a fascinating predictor of our near-future. Twenty years after his death, Dodge’s grand niece, Sophia, is a student at Princeton, and America as we know is unrecognizable. She and some friends are planning a trip to the west coast, and they decide to make a detour to visit some of her relatives in Iowa. Outside of the interstate highways and the major cities is “Ameristan”, which is populated by different tribes of people, like the Leviticans, who adhere to the strictures of the Old Testament book Leviticus. Sophia and her friends stop at a Levitican gathering, and they have to change clothes, because of the biblical injunction that no one is allowed to wear fabric that has more than one type of fiber in it.
Another interesting detail is how each person is expected to employ an “editor” – a person (if you’re ultrarich) or a bot that curates what information feed he or she receives and what is transmitted to others. Everyone wears smartglasses that pick up data about everything and everyone, so they are surrounded by icons and avatars that show others various aspects of their identities. You are swimming in data and media. As Stephenson explains,
In old movies sometimes you could see apparently sophisticated characters saying things like “I’m going online” or “I’m surfing the Internet,” which must have seemed cool at the time, but now it was a non sequitur, as if someone, in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation, suddenly announced, “I’m breathing air.”
Stephenson, Neal. Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel (p. 197). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Because different people and groups receive different media streams, they literally inhabit different realities.
A prediction that, unfortunately, seems very plausible, is that the gulf between the rich “elite” and everyone else has become unbridgeable. Because Sophia and her friends attend Princeton, they are guaranteed an enormous income. The rough and tumble inhabitants of Ameristan are reduced to barely scraping by, with all the professional class having abandoned them – no doctors, no dentists, etc.
While Sophia is visiting her relatives in Iowa, she helps rescue a “missionary” who had gone into Ameristan to see if he could get some of the inhabitants to abandon their meme feeds and rejoin reality. Their response was to crucify him. This missionary turns out to be Enoch Root, who has shown up in several other Stephenson novels, including Cryptonomicon – set in the 1940s and 1990s – and the Baroque Cycle – set in the late 17th century. In other words, Root seems to be an immortal who is often involved with the affairs of the Waterhouse/Shaftoe/Forthrast clans.
Sophia decides to devote her senior capstone project to seeing if she can make any sense of Dodge’s connectome. After discussing things with her family’s foundation and Corvallis Kawasaki, she is given the go-ahead to “flip the switch” and upload Dodge’s connectome to a quantum computer server farm. And that’s when the story really begins.
Dodge’s consciousness is initially only aware of static – chaos. Gradually, he is able to control parts of it until he creates a small world called The Land. He doesn’t remember anything about his past life, but since his background was in gaming, his self-created world is very much like the terrain of a videogame. As Stephenson describes Dodge (called “Egdod” in this virtual reality) creating his world, there are undeniable parallels to the creation account of Genesis. And as more peoples’ connectomes get uploaded to the server farm, they assume roles that are very similar to the mythical Greek pantheon. There’s even an episode that is like the Tower of Babel. What I have a hard time accepting is the proposition that these files of data existing in a quantum computer cloud are actual beings. Do they have souls? Stephenson describes them as having “auras”, and they have consciousness, but I’m skeptical.
Meanwhile, in reality, there is lots of legal and technological jockeying going on. A mysterious billionaire (and mentally ill psychopath), Elmo Shepherd, is not happy with the way Egdod has set up things in “Bitworld”, so when he dies, he is uploaded and confronts him. He goes by “El”, and he quickly expels Egdod and his pantheon from The Land – Paradise Lost, anyone? El begins developing a hive-like community for the millions of connectomes being uploaded now.
That’s Book 1. Book 2 begins with a boy and girl in a garden in Bitworld, whom El is carefully isolating from all outside influence. They are the progeny of Egdod and Spring (another member of Egdod’s pantheon) – the first beings created by uploaded entities. Egdod manages to interact with them, despite being banished from The Land. He suggests they name themselves Adam and Eve. When El finds out, he is furious, and throws them out of the garden, to fend for themselves. Any resemblance to Genesis is purely coincidental :).
The rest of Book 2 involves a quest some descendants of Adam and Eve undertake to overthrow El. By this time, the Hive is spreading all over The Land, and he has also installed Autochthons – created military commanders – to oversee things. If I were back on Earth, I definitely would not want to be uploaded to this grim feudal society.
The remnants of the original souls, some descendants of Adam and Eve, and other misfits are marginalized to “Bits” – landmasses which have broken off of The Land. The main protagonist of the aforementioned quest is a young woman named Prim, who has an interesting origin of which she is not aware. I won’t divulge it either, to avoid giving out any spoilers. Suffice it to say that there is a climactic battle and a happy ending.
Towards the end of the novel, we briefly revisit our reality, where there aren’t too many humans left. Robots and AI have taken over most tasks, and the virtual reality of Bitworld is more “real” than our world. Which, I suppose, was Stephenson’s point all along: are we living in a simulation?
Fall is a good return to form for Stephenson after the disappointing Seveneves, but I still think Cryptonomicon is his best book, closely followed by Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. Like other popular authors, I think Stephenson has reached the point where he’s a big enough name to pretty much write whatever he wants, regardless of what an editor might tell him. Fall is long…almost 900 pages, so it asks a lot of the reader. I could have done without a lot of lengthy sections, but on balance, it is worth the effort. One thing about Neal Stephenson – he is one of the most inventive writers working today; every book has a fascinating and incredible premise that he manages to make believable. I’m looking forward to his next one!
FracTad's Bookshelf 