Paradise Lost meets World of Warcraft

Fall; or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

The Amazon reviews weren’t encouraging. 3.2 stars average. But the Neal Stephenson name was good enough for me. I bought a copy of Fall; or Dodge in Hell without even knowing what it was about.

I generally try to make my reviews spoiler-free, but Fall is a difficult book to talk about without spoilers. So be forewarned, there are some below. I’ll try to keep them to the minimum needed to explain the premise and the conflict.

The opening chapter wasn’t promising. A day in the life of Richard Forthrast, aka Dodge, the billionaire video game mogul who we met previously in Stephenson’s 2011 novel Reamde. Anyone who has taken a beginner’s novel-writing class knows not to start with the day in the life cliché. Get to conflict already. And while some novels manage to pull it off—Jack July’s Amy Lynn comes to mind—the way things were shaping up, Fall was not going to be one of them. Too many insignificant details as Dodge prepares to go to an appointment for “a routine outpatient medical procedure”: his thoughts on waking up, the bubbles on his bar of soap, the books he packed in his bag, his interaction with the owner of the bakery/café he stopped at for coffee, the leaf he found on the sidewalk outside the clinic, the music he listened to on his headphones, and so on for thirty pages. It reads like the work of a first-time novelist who's determined to capture all the little details to craft a perfect simulacrum of daily life, though in the meantime some necessary question of the story be then to be considered. Big difference from the hammer blow opening of Stephenson’s previous book, Seveneves, "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." My attention wandered, I looked up my review of Seveneves, and I was reminded that I thought that one started slow as well, but that I really liked it in the end. So I kept reading Dodge.

And then it hit me. I realized what Stephenson was doing: Dodge was not going to survive his procedure.

Sure enough, by chapter 3, Dodge is in a coma, and his family, friends, and lawyers are gathered in the hospital to make the difficult end-of-life decisions. It turns out that Dodge left very detailed instructions for his body to be preserved by freezing, “or through whatever means…were best suited to the desired goal of eventually bringing the deceased back to life.” And while freezing may have been state-of-the-art when Dodge signed the papers back in the ‘90s, in the near future in which the book takes place, the “best suited” means are scanning one’s brain and uploading it to a computer.

So Dodge is scanned, uploaded, and booted, and his consciousness awakens in “Bitworld.”

In the beginning, there was chaos. And Dodge, now known as Egdod, created the heavens and the earth, roughly following the seven days of creation in Genesis. He’s a video game designer, after all, so this comes naturally. Other souls who have been uploaded gravitate to “the Land” and take up residence there. Egdod is as a god to them.

As with Seveneves , the world-building part of the story takes up a considerable portion of the novel, and is, frankly, a little slow, with long descriptive passages of Egdod flying about the Land as he fine tunes the leaves and the rocks.

Meanwhile, in “Meatspace,” we take a couple detours. Part 2 of the book is about “the surprising obliteration of the town of Moab, Utah, by what was apparently a tactical nuclear weapon.” Part 3 is a cross-country road trip with Dodge’s niece, Sophia. These parts are a disturbing look at some current trends projected a decade or two into the future. Technology has advanced and, on the plus side, it’s an America of Google glasses and self-driving cars. But it’s also an America where social media “reality” is more real to some people than actual reality, and the Blue and Red states have split into two rarely interacting cultural enclaves.

I had mixed feelings about these plotlines. Clocking in at almost 900 pages, Dodge is a long book, and these parts could have easily been eliminated without leaving a hole in the main storyline. On the other hand, they are fascinating in their own right, and held my interest in what otherwise would have been a slow part of the book. I would have loved to eavesdrop when Stephenson discussed these parts with his editor. Or is Stephenson now too big to edit?

Anyway, the years go by. Other characters die off, building to a critical mass when there’s finally enough of them in Bitworld for the story to get started in earnest. In the meantime there are lots of conferences and video cons in Meatspace as the leaders of the various corporations and charitable foundations in charge of Bitworld struggle to keep up with the philosophical and technical challenges, including the massive amounts of quantum computing power needed to keep Bitworld running. They’ve built a “Landform Visualization Utility” (LVU) which gives them some visibility into what goes on there, low resolution at first, but with ever greater fidelity as the years go by.

One of the stakeholders in particular doesn’t like what he’s seeing on the LVU, or the way Egdod runs things. He’s a billionaire named Elmo Shepherd, and he’s a real dick. As he approaches his own demise, he's been building data centers, to ensure that his own process will have plenty of computing power when it gets to Bitworld. He's also threatening lawsuits if the other stakeholders don't give him administrator privileges. Elmo is called “El” for short and the book is called Fall; or Dodge in Hell, so it’s obvious to anyone who has read Paradise Lost, or even just knows the rudiments of Christianity, where this is headed. About halfway through the book, El finally dies and is uploaded to Bitworld and the long-awaited cosmic smackdown begins.

The notion of eternity in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game raises numerous metaphysical and practical questions and Stephenson’s answers to these are not always satisfactory.

Bitworld is certainly not the afterlife we typically think of when we think about uploading our consciousness to a computer. Rather, one expects to be part of Meatspace, generally via some sort of robot body. Stephenson yada yadas this. The Dodge process “never phoned home—never made any effort, so far as they could discern, to communicate with those left behind.” Mostly though, I think that just wasn’t the story Stephenson set out to tell.

It’s not a very nice afterlife. Most of the souls in Bitworld—those who aren’t in Dodge’s inner circle—end up as non-player characters. They either become Beedles—stunted, lopsided drudges who perform most of the grunt work for the Hosts of El. Or they live like bees, carving out a space in a hive and communicating with other souls through a sort of buzzing. I suppose I can understand why people still gave their money to be uploaded, in spite of everything. Immortality as a bee is still better than non-existence. And yet, given that Stephenson has demonstrated in his other books an understanding of what private sector entrepreneurs bring to the table, I’m surprised that companies didn’t spring up to offer competing Bitworlds that advertised a better afterlife experience.

Then there’s the Big Question: how do we know that our own world is not just a cyber-afterlife for some meta-Meatspace? There are hints in Fall that this is actually the case, and that the immortal Enoch Root, known to Stephenson fans from Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle, is in fact a visitor from that meta-world. But aside from these occasional hints, Stephenson never really develops the concept.

Once the confrontation between El and Egdod begins, the pace picks up and the book becomes quite enjoyable. After spending weeks slogging through the first half of the book, the second half was a real page-turner and I read through it in a couple of days. The last quarter, in particular, is a classic quest, in the spirit of The Hobbit, but much better in my opinion.

I'm glad I ignored those Amazon reviews.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): Amazon.com