Fall or, Dodge in Hell

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.