Fall or, Dodge in Hell

I saw Neal Stephenson when he came to Seattle to do a reading for Fall and, based on his Q&A session, was pretty excited for it. Turns out, it's is just not for me. Much of the book takes place in a virtual realm that comes complete with an extended pseudo-biblical creation story.

Personally, I was unable to get the point of caring about the virtual world or its inhabitants. The story of how that world was built was unconvincing and the restraining parameters seemed arbitrary and inconsistent.

As other reviews have mentioned, the “meatspace” characters are great. Had the ratio of the book been something like 80% real world, 20% virtual world, I would have loved it. As it is... I bailed about 700 pages in.

Toch ook nog heel even zitten denken over 3*... Uiteindelijk wint de grootsheid van de achterliggende ideeen het van de paar mindere stukken in het boek.

Zoals gebruikelijk gaat een boek van Stephenson over veel (en waar je fijn over kunt nadenken). Dit boek is losjes verbonden met Reamde (zelfde hoofdpersoon, maar prima los leesbaar) en Quicksilver (diverse opnieuw terugkomende families/personages).

Richard Forthrast gaat onverwachts dood, maar had ooit een beetje rammelend contract afgesloten om zijn hersenen te laten invriezen. Lang verhaal kort: op een gegeven moment is de techniek ver genoeg om daadwerkelijk zijn hersenen te “uploaden” en de computer aan te zetten.

Wat volgt zijn min of meer twee parallele verhalen: wat er in de “echte” wereld gebeurt, en wat er in “bitworld” gebeurt. Die laatste loopt namelijk niet altijd even snel (langzaam) als de “echte” wereld – gebrek aan stroom en rekenkracht om maar eens twee voorbeelden te noemen.

Een van de betere hoofdstukken is die waarin Richard voor het eerst “ontwaakt” in chaos. Als alles mogelijk is, wat ontstaat er dan? Iets helemaal nieuws, of slepen we ook daar onze voorgeschiedenis mee?

Stephenson heeft (uiteraard) weer veel tot op detail overdacht en uitgewerkt (als iedereen zomaar ge-upload kan worden, en we gaan niet meer dood, waar moet alle rekenkracht eigenlijk vandaan komen?) maar verliest zich soms ook wel een beetje in de details:

“Probably straight text, as opposed to a word processing document. The quotation marks and other punctuation suggested that it had originally been composed in the nerd-friendly text processing program Emacs.”

In het boek zitten twee sub-verhalen (over hoe in de nabije toekomst een stukje fake news flinke schade kan aanrichten; en eentje over “Ameristan”, als Amerika min of meer in twee delen uiteen is gevallen) waarvan ik denk dat ze (zeker de eerste) beter als losstaande boeken/verhalen zouden werken, ze hangen er nu een beetje bij.

Het Adam/Eve thema was wat mij betreft het minste deel, dat duurde me te lang.

Giving up on this one at page 255. I've loved his other novels, though it's been quite some time since I read one, so not sure if this was me or the book. But judging from the other reviews, I'd say it's the book. The premise is interesting, but this needed a heavy edit and I lost interest and the will to slog through overly detailed asides when my reading list is already miles long. Also, Neal, you need to forevermore stop referring to human women as “females.”

8/10

I made it to about the 20% mark and then started jumping chapters. No where did I run across the “Fall” mentioned in the title, or “Hell”, and Dodge had completely disappeared from the story, except in past tense. He's like a “red herring” with the actual story being everyone else, and the generations and technology that comes after.

What I did like was the exploration of the technology of the time, that today seems to be the beginning of, not yet at the level of, the book.

In my opinion, the story didn't live up to my expectations. In many ways, the key technology of turning human consciousness into an algorithm, and the changes that might evoke in society, was lost in a bog of words that could have apeared in any fantasy novel.

3.5

Epic

If recreating the Old Testament in Minecraft sounds like a good idea to you, you're going to love this.

The first third of the book was ok. It then turned into a ramble, in excruciating detail, of game world creation, which then segued into a morality tale of good vs evil. The book just ended with a feeble unsatisfactory whimper. Disappointing.

Far from previous works of Stephenson. The parts about bit-world are a little bit amusing at first, but that quickly wears off, and you get stuck with 60 percent of the book exploring on that. Those parts felt more like mysticism than SciFi.

Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors. This is far from his best work. This book was so boring and haphazard it was hard to finish. If you like character driven stories this is not for you because it changes characters too often. If you like plot this is not for you because the plot meanders, jumps, and is ultimately inconsequential. If you like setting the first 1/3 is good; you may even like the latter 2/3 if you care about the obtuse and vague “good” versus “evil” story. As for theme, I am sure there is something there but the main theme I got from it was boring.

This is the most negative review I've ever written. That is not to say this is the worse book I've ever read but considering how much I love books like Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anthem, this book was a massive disappointment.

The world-building in this book is crazy good. I found myself getting lost in Bitworld and the Quest often. My only real gripe is how the ending was reached. I didn't really understand half of the battle, which is partly down to having a hard time grasping the layout of the location Neal has created. But the most disappointing thing to me was the ending of El's story. I thought it was anti-climactic and should/could have been one of the best parts of the book.
Despite all of that, it was a great book and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

I enjoyed this one much more than Reamde, and it was so much fun to visit some old friends again with some of the characters from Cryptonomicon. That the two worlds are connected was something that I hoped for when I read Reamde, but that I couldn't pick up on.

I loved the fate that they gave Enoch. I loved the world that they built together. But the time spent in Bit-World with Adam and Eve grew a bit long for my tastes. It's brilliant bit of world-building, but at times seems like it's more focused on the world building than on the characters themselves. The language seemed to mimic an almost biblical rhythm, which was completely appropriate for the circumstances, but had the effect of removing me from really wanting to be involved.

I was more interested in the modern world of earth, with the strange religions and the information stream editors than I was in the bit-world that they had created.

I was nervous going in. Stephenson doesn't write small, tidy books - but from the start I was happy to amble along with his big, writerly brain. I loved this near future world where the entire town of Moab is obliterated by nuclear detonation - except not really. The natural progression of fake news and internet hoaxes, this staged event predicates the dismantling of the internet. We move from there into a drastically changed country divided between the Moab truthers living in fundamental “Ameristan” where the crucifixion is the conspiracy and the law of the land is a strict interpretation of Old Testament values punishable by stoning. (though in this case automatic weapons are favoured as machines that can facilitate stoning faster and harder) Meanwhile the coastal elites employ editors to cull digital feeds and mediate information bubbles. I could happily swim around in this world for pages!

But that's just meatspace. The real action in a Stephenson novel is going to be in Bitworld. It's the Creation myth in Cyberspace and I'm on board for imaging a post meatspace world where we will find ourselves uploaded in death. But I find myself losing interest as the page count mounts. Stephenson invokes a clunky voice like some way too into it Dungeon Master and suddenly I find myself in a fantasy, sci-fi novel. There's too much Lord of the Rings in my Neuromancer. It's Christian myth, the Grail quest, and Paradise Lost with epic villains and a Pantheon of heroes and it should be awesome. But I'm not invested. In Bitworld I'm just a NPC, a servile peasant at the whim of the wealthy and their strange machinations. This post-human heaven is still the realm of the 1%'ers and I'm still caught in the middle - my life not much different regardless of who takes power. A bit grim really and maybe too on the nose for my liking.

Nope, Audible, I did not enjoy this program...

The first 300 pages were fantastic. Then the story delved further into bitworld and became less interesting to me. Many reviews said that the last part of the book was almost entirely a fantasy novel within bitworld, so I gave up at around page 500 and will not be finishing the book.

This is disappointing, because the first 3rd was so very good.

Another ambitious Stephenson project. It has some of the adventure and futurism we've grown to love, but definitely gets stuck in some laborious character building in the middle that doesn't seem to matter all that much in the end. This aspect made the book more tedious for me, and in a way that was more boring than the esoteric technical and bureaucratic details of Cryptonomicon, for example.

I'd really love to see more adventures in the Stephenson worlds already built—Seveneves, please!—than more attempts to build new ones whole cloth. This one, like some others in the past, feels unfinished and frayed with innumerable loose ends.

I also can't avoid a heavy eye roll at the final (and, one could argue, over-arching) concept landed in the book. Stephenson doesn't spend any time convincing his audience, but instead gives a cheap wink to the people who already agree with the concept. No spoilers, but suffice to say that this has become the techno-religious totem of our time, and I find Stephenson's entry into that debate—if we can call it that—thoroughly uninspired.

I was really looking forward to this. So much so I re-read [b:Reamde 10552338 Reamde Neal Stephenson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1305993115i/10552338.SY75.jpg 15458989] (and enjoyed it almost more than the first read) I had also seen enough to know not to expect a true sequel and it truly wasn't. Like [b:Seveneves 22816087 Seveneves Neal Stephenson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1449142000i/22816087.SY75.jpg 42299347] it is a book of three parts and i loved parts 1 and 2 with the discussion of the concepts, ethics, practical implications of a “digital afterlife.” Other books I have read recently like [b:Head On 35018901 Head On (Lock In, #2) John Scalzi https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1497994548i/35018901.SY75.jpg 45415409], or [b:We Are Legion 32109569 We Are Legion (Bobiverse, #1) Dennis E. Taylor https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474344826i/32109569.SY75.jpg 52752877], take the concept post facto, and run with it, but Stephenson, to his credit, sweats the details. I would have loved to be thrown a bone to know what Marlon was up to of if Yuxia and Seamus were still together, but that's OK. However when Enoch Root pops up I got excited. He was the perfect timeless character to enter this time shifting world, and as we were progressing through part 2 I thought Neal was going to join this world with [b:Snow Crash 40651883 Snow Crash Neal Stephenson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1530057753i/40651883.SX50.jpg 493634] world of the Metaverse. I would have sqeeeed with delight. But No. The third part was a rather mundane “Fantasy Quest” that fell flat. Now Stephenson knows how to write a certain kind of Fantasy - [b:Anathem 2845024 Anathem Neal Stephenson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1488349209i/2845024.SX50.jpg 6163095] is such a rich tapestry, but the “merry band on a quest” seemed thin, especially as we did not really have the time (except for Prim) to get to know the band. Maybe my main frustration is the fact that of all the books that are dying for a sequel (Seveneves and Anathem first among others) Reamde was not the one.

In typical Stephenson fashion, this book is overly long. But instead of enjoyable digressions into scientific or philosophical topics, this contains long recapitulations of ancient mythologies in a stilted tone and jarringly incongruent language.

It's fine, but far from my favorite Stephenson novel.

Executive Summary: This book starts out quite strong, but as it goes on it becomes essentially two interconnected stories and I liked one of those stories a lot more than the other. 3.5 stars.Audiobook: Malcolm Hillgartner did a solid job with the narration. I checked and he's the same narrator as [b:Reamde 10552338 Reamde Neal Stephenson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1305993115s/10552338.jpg 15458989] so I appreciate the continuity. He does some voices, but nothing that really blew me away. Audio is a good option, but not really a must listen.Full ReviewNeal Stephenson has been one of my favorite authors since I first picked up [b:Snow Crash 40651883 Snow Crash Neal Stephenson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1530057753s/40651883.jpg 493634] in college. I've enjoyed just about every one of his books. He has a writing style that tends to meander at times, and is prone to tangents. I always seem to find this just as entertaining as the main plot. This book didn't seem to have any major tangents, but it did follow his other typical pattern of telling multiple connected stories in one book.This book is a loose sequel to [b:Reamde 10552338 Reamde Neal Stephenson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1305993115s/10552338.jpg 15458989] and shares characters and history with [b:Cryptonomicon 816 Cryptonomicon Neal Stephenson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327931476s/816.jpg 1166797]. If you haven't read those books, you can probably read this stand alone, but of the two Reamde would be the better one to have read as some the characters at the center of the plot for this book were also at the center of that.I enjoyed Reamde and the start of this book as it feels much the same. However by the end of the book more time is spent inside the simulation and less out in the real world. Things feel far more like a fantasy book rather than sci-fi. Now I love a good fantasy story, and that makes up the majority of the books I read, but I found this one to be far less enjoyable than the sci-fi story that preceded it.Overall I found this book good, but not great. I'll happily pick up his next book and more than likely enjoy it. If you've enjoyed most of his past works, you'll probably enjoy this. If you haven't ready any of his work, there are better books to start with.