Fall, or Dodge in Hell 

Novel by Neal Stephenson

©2019 William Morrow

Reviewed by Peter Jekel

If you’re looking for something to read and finish over the weekend, don’t even think about starting Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson. Don’t get me wrong. It is not a book to avoid; however, at 883 pages and with a unique plot, it is not a light read.

Stephenson, one of the primary figures in science fiction’s  cyberpunk movement, said the story was inspired by physicist David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality, which is essentially Deutsch’s interpretation of quantum mechanics and how it applies to reality. Another inspiration was John Milton’s Paradise Lost, an epic poem dealing with the fall of humankind. That’s enough to let the reader know Fall isn’t just another drugstore paperback.

Fall starts off slowly, and a rookie Stephenson reader might be tempted to put it down for fear it will be a drag. If the reader can trudge through the first fifty or so pages, the book takes off. Slow out of the gate is common for Stephenson’s books; the reader has to be persistent.

The story begins with gaming company billionaire Richard Dodge Forthras being declared braindead after a medical procedure.  Stephenson aficionados will recognize the character first introduced in Stephenson’s 2011 book Reamde, but this is not a sequel. Forthras’ will states that his brain’s connectome (its wiring) is to be scanned and saved in digital form. The idea of uploading our consciousness upon physical death is an aspect of immortality that in this age of artificial intelligence and cloud-stored information is conceivably possible. Although mind uploading is a well-loved if somewhat clichéd trope in science fiction, Stephenson’s wordsmithing talent makes it sound new and groundbreaking.

The scanning process unfortunately destroys Dodge’s memory, and he awakens in his virtual afterlife as an amnesiac. He wakes as Egdod, his avatar in a video game his company created. Together with other brains uploaded to this computer-maintained space called Bitworld, Dodge’s avatar creates landscapes, ecosystems and cities. In many ways, this part of the book reads like the Biblical story of Creation.

The story takes a turn when the intelligence of a mentally disturbed billionaire named Elmo Shepherd is uploaded to Bitworld. Using his superior computing powers, Shepherd overthrows Egdod and sets himself up as the god El, mirroring the Devil of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The reader could argue that setting the story in a virtual world is merely a fancy way of creating a world that mirrors the power struggles of our world. However, the fanciful setting provides Stephenson, who regularly contributes articles about technology to WIRED magazine, with opportunities to extrapolate from modern technological concepts that exist in the border between reality and science fiction, such as collective consciousness (the singularity), cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, as well as to explore the increasingly vague boundary between the physical and digital worlds. It also allows him the luxury of diving into themes like consciousness, individuality, memories, and the nature of reality. He provides his ideas and philosophies through one of his trademark methods, essentially an information dump presented through the interactions of its characters. Stephenson’s talent as a writer makes the usually dreaded “infodump” enlightening rather than boring. Stephenson fans have come to expect and like this technique; however, it might not be to every reader’s taste.

All in all, Fall  is certainly worth reading. Stephenson is a true science fiction pioneer and a master of that mind-bending subgenre known as cyberpunk.