Neal Stephenson. Fall. Morrow, 2019.

Subtitled Or, Dodge in Hell, the overall impression that Fall comes across as a cyberpunk Lord of the Rings. Stephenson, as always, imagines some things that are plausible, if not quite yet possible. With Fall, he seems to be trying to create or continue a Stephenson mythos, but in the Pacific Northwest rather than, say, Yoknapatawpha County.

Stephenson said in an interview after Cryptonomicon came out that he was thinking of sequels. Possibly, Reamde or Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell are some of those. (One character, Enoch Root, is from Cryptonomicon; he must over a hundred years old at the end of Fall.)

Dodge is the nickname of Richard Forthrast, the main character in Reamde. The young hacker in that novel has become a tech billionaire thanks to online gaming. He has even bigger plans.

There is a great line in the American film Fever Pitch when a Red Sox fan exclaims, “Ted Williams must be rolling over in his freezer!”

So Forthrast’s will states that his remains are to be frozen with the bodies of eleven others that have been cryogenically preserved in Eastern Washington State. There such elaborate freezers can run inexpensively for the foreseeable future on hydroelectric power. Some time after Dodge made his will, another wealthy techie from Silicon Valley, Elmo “El” Shepherd, had taken over the cryogenic firm and makes plans to preserve the twelve clients’ connectomes digitally.

Just as the genome is a map of a creature’s genes or chromosomes down to each part of the DNA, so a connectome is the map of how an individual’s brain cells connect with each other and the rest of the nervous system. The idea—and this is the willing suspension of disbelief required by the reader—is that reorganizing neural networks in exactly the same pattern in a virtual computer setting would duplicate a person’s thoughts and personality and possibly even his or her memories. Now, we have seen how brain surgeon Eben Alexander or psychologist Caroline Leaf have demonstrated that the mind and the brain are not exactly the same thing, but for the sake of argument, Fall assumes they are.

Some time after Dodge’s sudden and untimely passing, Shepherd scans his connectome along with those of the eleven other frozen bodies. Almost two decades later, the Miasma (the common name now for the Internet and the Cloud) has been developed enough that the scanned information is uploaded and Dodge’s neural bits begin creating a virtual world. The brains of the other eleven are similarly uploaded to join Dodge in this new virtual reality. As people see the brain scanning as viable way of somehow living past death, the preservation of one’s connectome becomes popular for those who can afford it.

About one quarter of the novel takes place in the real world, a.k.a. Meatspace, and covers about fifty years. When most of the living people in the story die, their connectomes are uploaded so that they live on. It is giving little away by saying that by the end of the story, the virtual world, a.k.a. Bitworld, can be sustained by a network of solar-powered satellites. This means that Bitworld will keep on functioning on its own without needing any more hands-on attention from Meatspace. It has become a world, albeit one of complex computer data, on its own.

As the book points out, and many programmers including this reviewer know from experience, nowadays most computer code is made up of previously written code. (662) After all, who does machine language any more? So couldn’t computerized characters reproduce and sustain themselves? They would just have had the right code to do so.

As is typical of Stevenson, there are many clever observations and philosophical musings. It helps a little to be familiar with the Bible and, even more so, Paradise Lost. Stephenson cleverly applies some of Milton’s cosmos including Chaos to Bitworld, and there are numerous other allusions as well. The serpent first appears to Eve in a dream in Milton’s epic. The last we see of the devil, he is a small worm. Expect something similar in Fall.

Without going into great detail, by the time Dodge Forthrast’s connectome is uploaded, the Miasma is a true mess. People believe whatever they want to believe. Much of what passes as news is total fabrication. (Like Bitworld?) One of technology’s super-rich stars creates an elaborate hoax that, even years later, many believe was an historical event.

A lawyer in the story declares:

The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand. (174 emphasis in original)

A good example of unreason is spoken by the villain of the tale (I am trying to avoid spoilers) who says, speaking of religion “…prophets and theologians didn’t have factual information to work with” (400) What about history? Fulfilled prophecy? The Exodus? The Resurrection of Jesus? The speaker here becomes the fool.

Whether it is pride or prejudice that keeps us from “factual information,” we are told that some people “deliberately” overlook facts (2 Peter 3:5)—they do not want to know. Even Jesus before his death noted that some people would not believe even if they saw someone rise from the dead (Luke 16:31).

A subplot which demonstrates this introduces us to a new popular religion called the Leviticans. It sounds like an extreme Jehovah’s Witness offshoot. They burn crosses to show they don’t believe that Jesus was crucified or that he rose from the dead. As the Yiddish saying goes, “He didn’t climb the tree, and he didn’t fly.”

Not only are we inclined to disbelieve what is true, but because of “the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws,” Utopia cannot exist, either in this world or Bitworld. The “life after death” in Bitworld still involves the human mind. Perhaps that is why the book is subtitled Dodge in Hell. It is an afterlife, but no paradise. Because Bitworld is code-based, techies have more power there, but they are no smarter than anyone else when it comes to making everyone live harmoniously.

As with other Stephenson novels, there are many ideas and numerous subplots. In fact, Fall does not really have a single plot. We are reminded that Aristotle said it was okay for epics to have more than one plot because they are longer. Fall is epic in proportion, certainly. We should note that besides being familiar with the epic Paradise Lost, it might help the reader to know Greek mythology (at the very least, D’Aulaire or Hamilton). Such mythical allusions carry on through the story.

The key myth is the overthrow of the titans. In Fall, Dodge is overthrown by El, just as the gods overthrew the titans in the ancient mythology. El is short for Elmo, but it is also the Semitic root meaning god or God. In fact, Stephenson has fun with names generally. So Dodge becomes Egdod in Bitworld. Verna becomes Spring. Like a videogame, those who “die” in Bitworld may get a new life. And that usually means a new name.

Because Fall has nearly nine hundred pages with numerous subplots and characters with various names, it has the effect of a Russian novel or Mexican telenovela. Many editions of tomes like War and Peace or August 1914 contain a list of characters. Perhaps Stephenson should do the same to help his readers here.

By the way, even though Dodge is the creator of Bitworld and is named in the book’s subtitle, he only figures in about ten percent of the story—and that may be a generous estimate. Is he in hell? His niece asks that question (600). When El takes over, he kicks out Dodge anyhow and sends him to Chaos (readers of Snow Crash may recognize it as snow). So most of the story is not about him.

Approximately the last third of the book tells of a quest reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings—or the Grail quest or The Argonautica or The Guns of Navarone or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader or The Diamond Age or…

The quest takes place in cyberspace. Meatspace is becoming depopulated. People figure that they can live on in Bitworld, so why procreate? A group of eight or ten travel by foot, boat, and horse over much of the new world to confront…well, no spoilers, but it is fun for the same reason that those other stories are. Characters are working together and there is lots of solid conflict.

There is a final showdown. The key to Hercules’ victory over Antaeus decides the outcome. Only here it is not just physically losing touch, but psychically losing touch as well.

One episode takes place in what the viewers from the real world call Escherville. Dodge designed a part of Bitworld to unfold like an M. C. Escher print, so people there cannot tell up from down. As the episode was unfolding before me, I said to myself, “I’ve read something like this before.” Back in the sixties (yes, I am that old) I read and thoroughly enjoyed Heinlein’s Glory Road. One world in that space odyssey (lower case) was like a Kelin bottle and the traveler had to figure out how to navigate around that.

And it goes on.

One interesting question Fall raises is this: If there is an afterlife, how much of our previous life will we remember? Most of the “souls” in Bitworld have their brain forms, their neural networks, but not their memories. It is as if most of them were dunked in the River Lethe before being reincarnated. And yet, there are clever discussions among them about whether or not there is another world and what exactly their relationship to that world is. In that sense, their world is no different from ours.

Cosmic and comic, Fall, like Paradise Lost, gets all of us thinking about the big picture.

N.B. For more of our reviews of works by Stephenson and similar stories, search for Stephenson in the search bar above.