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.