For those who read my book review for Reamde or the Neal Stephenson introduction, you already understand that I love Neal Stephenson’s writing and I loved Reamde. I cannot recommend it enough! I wish I could be as enthusiastic for the sequel, Fall, or Dodge in Hell. This new book contains more big ideas and has more substantial intellectual ideas than Reamde, but it is nowhere near as fun to read.
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The book then splits the narrative between the ‘meatspace’ (see below) of the physical world and the virtual world from Dodge’s perspective. For the reader, is a bit jarring and confusing as the switch in narrative often is accompanied by a time jump in either location along with significant changes to the environment. This probably would have been easier to understand if Stephenson had been able to take more time to develop the changes, but then again, the book is already 880 pages long so perhaps he was not allowed to do so.
I will avoid most spoilers as much as possible in this review of The Fall, but the big ideas are revealed in the published synopsis of the book anyway so let’s start there and I’ll only tease about what happens next.
Richard “Dodge” Forthrast, one of the main characters in Reamde, dies early on in Fall; however, his brain is preserved and scanned into a computer. Shortly afterwards, the miasma (see below), also known as the internet, becomes exposed as susceptible to fraud when hoaxers create footage of a nuclear attack on Moab, Utah (see below for more details). When the people of Moab Utah greet the president of the United States on TV to expose the hoax, the hoaxers double-down and claim the TV footage is a cover up!
This hoax creates a division in the world between those who believe only the most entertaining and engaging ideas on the internet and those who try to tie their beliefs in facts and the real world. This eventually leads to a split of the USA in which the rural areas become overrun with gun-toting extremists, becomes known as Ameristan, and uses threats of death to force intellectuals (ie: educated, rational thinkers) into the cities for safety.
Meanwhile, these intellectuals need to have their internet feeds verified so they are not overwhelmed and biased by the flood of hoaxes, misinformation, and general toxic behavior that follows the Moab incident. They begin to hire editors to protect them, but this further splits the world between those with enough money to afford the truth and those condemned to be inundated with noise.
In the book, Enoch Root’s character notes that “people want to be mislead” and adds that you can’t make people want anything else. While this is depressing as hell, it is also human nature. We crave simple lies much more than we want to deal with a complex truth. This becomes a theme in the book in both the meatspace and within the virtual world as various factions create various lies and try to make those lies central to a dominating culture.
I happen to be a believer in Occam’s Razor, so I recognize that this pushes me more onto the side of the simpletons in Fall and represents, rather than challenges, Stephenson’s assertion. However, I would also add that it matters how much people have their emotions and their world view tied into the issue. For example, many people passionately believe in a vast conspiracy that must be behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy despite no evidence showing the conspiracy exists. This is because they don’t want to believe it possible for one unknown person to successfully change the world in such an evil way. On the flip side almost no one cares about the actual conspiracy between the various plastic utensil manufacturers who plead guilty to price fixing because a Spork conspiracy is painfully boring. But I digress…
Dodge’s grand-niece grows up and finds that technology is sufficiently developed to upload the scan of her great-uncle’s brain to a quantum-computing server farm – and she gets permission to see what would happen. She is hoping to spend time with her great uncle; the people investing in brain scanning were hoping to show their investors proof of immortality. Instead, initially all they can show is that something is happening even if they had trouble defining just what that something is.
Fortunately, Stephenson takes his time to develop this virtual world from Dodge’s point of view because it establishes an important theme of the book – our brains are strongly integrated with our bodies and our senses. Initially, we see Dodge’s confusion as his brain, scanned without his body, struggles to make sense of its intact, but unconnected memories, his drifting sense of identity, and his alienation. His natural brain connections are missing, but so is the physical body that ties many of these memories to the triggering sensations of smell, touch, etc.
Then, Dodge has a random thought of the color red and senses it is important. Using this as a focus, his brain begins to knit together memories of one of his last physical encounters – holding a bright red leaf that fell from a tree. By focusing on this memory, his brain creates a leaf, and when it doesn’t quite seem right, a better leaf. Then, where did the leaves come from? Trees suddenly appear. Before long, he causes a world to spawn around him filled with trees, mountains, wind and rivers.
In the outside world, Dodge’s grand-niece and the foundations supporting Dodge’s brain detect the activity and declare it to be a success. Eventually other brains are uploaded to the internet and they begin to interact and form a society of people who have transcended death within Dodge’s virtual world. With proof of interaction, those watching the computer activity founded several billion-dollar foundations were dedicated to keeping this man-made afterlife running.
Further on in the story, as Dodge’s virtual world becomes populated by hundreds of reborn souls, the denizens of meatspace begin to be able to map and view Dodge’s world. This new-found observation rapidly increases interest in the digital preservation of brains and begins to become the primary entertainment source on the planet. People become more interested in the activities of the dead than in doing anything themselves. Simultaneously, the people of earth essentially become shut-ins who only experience the virtual world. Paradoxically, now that people can live forever, they are afraid to live outside in the dangerous world that might cause their brains to be damaged (since immortality is only achieved through the brain scan after death).
Although technically a sequel to Reamde, Fall there are many difference between the two books. To flesh out the review, I am going to make comparisons between the two and then dive into some of the fascinating memes that Neal Stephenson has developed within Fall.
The key characters carried over from Reamde consists of Dodge (AKA: Richard Forthrast) and his niece, Zula. Corvallis Kawasaki, also known as C-Plus, is a minor character in Reamde who plays a much more prominent role in Fall as he is required to become the executor of Dodge’s will and help Zula manage several charitable foundations created by Dodge’s will to preserve his brain.
Corvallis and Zula work together to create the technology to preserve and upload brains into the cloud by joining forces with an antagonistic billionaire named Elmo Shepherd and the Waterhouse foundation. The Waterhouse foundation is a tip of the hat and a connection to characters from several other Neal Stephenson books (Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle), but the enigmatic Enoch Root is the only character that makes a brief, but memorable appearance in Fall.
While there are other minor characters in common between Reamde and Fall, they do not play a large enough role to merit mention – which is a tragedy! Reamde’s rich collage of interesting three dimensional characters is replaced by primarily two-dimensional people drifting along with the developments instead of exerting their will to change their fate. Perhaps this is intentional? Neal Stephenson appears to have soured on technology’s influence on the world and is projecting a future where we become uninteresting people completely absorbed by our windows to a virtual world.
Neal Stephenson is trying to tell a grand story that encompasses both an entire virtual world and the meatspace world as each evolves through phases of development. Unfortunately, unlike in previous books such as the Baroque Cycle, Fall does not have the space to devote time to developing the characters and the world to the level where one is truly emotionally invested.
My deep respect for Stephenson as an author finds me desperately searching for excuses for why two of his most recent books have not been up to his usual level of quality. As with SevenEves, Fall seems like it was an outline that was fleshed out under the whipping of an editor who refused to let Neal Stephenson develop another multi-book series (my apologies to his editors who are probably very supportive and overworked).
Or perhaps Neal Stephenson is just rushing to get his ideas out of his head because he senses his mortality? Mortality and life after death are key themes in Fall. However, instead of celebrating life, Fall drags through its chapters with characters more obsessed with the dead and dying than in enjoying their own lives.
Reading Fall makes me wonder if Neal Stephenson has recently lost a loved one or suffered a broken heart. The tone, the story, and the characters go through the motions of living while weighed down by grief and despair. I was just so sad after finishing the book even though it has what could pass as a happy ending! Still, I may be biased. I am an optimistic person and I resonated with the tone and outlook of Reamde much more than the fatalistically pessimistic tone and outlook of Fall.
The story contains several portions that could have been 800 page novels on their own so the lack of development leaves me feeling robbed. While there were similar hints of potential expansion in Reamde, in that book Neal Stephenson wrote the story so that you wanted more, but you could enjoy what you had. In Fall, what you have is so lacking that you wish he had explored one of the other themes in more detail so that the overall story could have time to develop emotionally and more naturally. It felt more like ticking boxes on the outline than in true development of the story.
The different books that could have come out of Fall include:
- The death of Dodge and the destruction of internet credibility after the ‘bombing’ of Moab, Utah.
- The separation of the intellectually rich and poor to create America (urban, wealthy, educated) and Ameristan (rural, poor, violently opposed to education and science).
- The first virtual world created by Dodge until the arrival of Elmo.
- The virtual world run by Elmo, but infiltrated by Dodge and his pantheon.
There is also a huge drop in the action between Reamde and Fall. In Reamde, Stephenson would cut away from characters and leave us hanging. Yet it was only so that he could pick up characters that had been left hanging in previous chapters and push them forward. The pace of the story felt like it was running, but never rushed. We always picked up in a logical extension of the previous action and the character’s choices drove the story.
In Fall, the story feels rushed by the jumps in time between chapters. We time on characters who are a shell of their former selves as they figure out life after death, or new characters who are mimicking archetypes. Yet even in spending this time, it is usually only to move from one story point to the next without many active choices by the characters. Some of this is required as Stephenson jumps hundreds of years at a time, yet somehow the chapters themselves seem to drag.
Clearly, I prefer to read Reamde. If you have never read Stephenson, I definitely recommend reading books at the top of the Fun list first. Fall, or Dodge in Hell is not a bad book, but it is not one of Stephenson’s most enjoyable. Yet it deserves enormous credit for what it achieves. It tackles some intensely difficult and touchy subjects and wraps them into an interesting, if bleak, fictional narrative. In my rankings of Neal Stephenson books by Substance, Fall lands at number 5 and for rankings by Mind Bending it ranks even higher at #3!
If you do like Neal Stephenson’s books, it is worth reading Fall. Despite the anguished tone and constant despair throughout the novel, Neal Stephenson continuously introduced new ideas and high-level concepts that force the reader to consider how we understand the world around us. Let’s explore some of those concepts in more detail.
The Miasma = the swamp of the internet. As Neal Stephenson revealed to Bob Marvin of PC Magazine, Stephenson feels like people can no longer agree upon the truth now that internet algorithms prioritize engagement over verified facts. This erosion of a basis to understand the truth of the world is a swamp that drags everyone down.
Crazytown = The abusive and active internet culture. Driven more by engaging content than by rational thought, Crazytown constantly reacts, overreacts, and refuses to let anything challenge their moral outrage – especially facts. Crazytown is the logical, although depressing, extension of the abusive people and bots that seem to pollute social media today.
Remember Moab – Information warfare that splits the world and destroys the credibility of the internet. After a million-dollar-hoax to simulate that Moab, Utah had been struck by a nuclear bomb, the president broadcasted from Moab to show that the city was unaffected. Crazytown refused to believe the president’s speech and instead believes that Moab is a radioactive crater. They only believe the internet noise that promotes that point of view and flee further and further from anything that upsets their worldview. The extreme extent to which this takes place is highlighted in the book by the throw-away fact that people in Moab, UT must hand-make their license plates and driver’s licenses because Moab ‘truthers’ have taken over the Utah legislature and believe anyone claiming a Moab address is perpetrating a hoax!
Personal Editors and the Trusted Internet. Personal Edit feeds filter the noise and circumvent the engaging algorithms so that their subscriber can see vetted facts in their internet feed. However, since they must pay for this feed, the truth becomes the privileged of the wealthy. The internet, instead of making the world more united and fair, becomes more segregated. The poor not only stay financially poor, they become intellectually poor!
APE = Autonomous Proxies for Execration = drown fake bad news with a flood of more bad news to destroy the credibility of the initial fake news. After the Moab hoax, Crazytown believers try to ruin the reputation of any person (and their families) who claimed that Moab was not nuked. In order to counter the venom, programmers created autonomous bots that would flood the internet with an exponential increase in exponentially larger volume of negative news about the person. While APE solved the problem of educated people believing the worst about the targeted victims, it also created such a flood of information that it created the need for personal editors. Sadly, the Crazytown readers seem to believe everything and become more and more divorced from reality.
PURDAH = Personal Unservable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography = a computer’s way to prove someone’s identity – even if they are anonymous. In this case, holography comes from the literal Greek definition of “one hand drawing” to define the digital signature. Some of the same programmers who created APE created PURDAH so that identities could be proven beyond a name. AI engines track people’s behavior, writing style, browsing tendencies and programming signature. These engines then compile an understanding of individuals more secure and incorruptible than passwords or biometrics.
The Leviticans – nouveau pseudo-Christians who deny that Christ was so weak as to die on the cross. He must have been a warrior who went off to fight Romans going back and forth between heaven and earth at will. The cross is a lie, so they burn the cross to remind their followers that the book of Leviticus is the pinnacle of truth. Christ is not a beta male lead to the slaughter, he is Tactical Jesus, an alpha male who kicks ass and would use a gun. Essentially this is Neal Stephenson’s imaginary extension of the Religious Right merged with the NRA taken to a, hopefully, ridiculous extreme. They deny science because it is against the bible and purge the educated from their ranks.
Ameristan – Picture the 2016 election map of blue and red by county. Now picture that the red has become such religious extremists that they have taken up arms like the Taliban and driven the intellectuals into the large urban areas. Ameristan is where cars need Kevlar because everyone shoots guns, clothing is tactical, and the Leviticans are the elite, educated class because they can still read.
Shared hallucinatory mobs of Ameristan– Don’t make them think, don’t make them talk, don’t make them look away from their phones. Great masses of America have transcended the shared hallucinations of tv shows or modern education that form a cultural backbone that defines cultural norms for action and intelligence. Instead many use their phones to constantly pipe images directly into their brain. This stimulates different areas of their brain and provides them with their own personal hallucination stream. This is the cultural extension of the effects of Facebook combined with meth as people flee from the real world into an addictive digital world. They are incredibly hostile to education, religion and common sense. The top 1% may be Leviticans, but the others are a mindless zombie mob that occasionally bursts out in gunfire and violence.
The Red Card – A device be used to avoid being drawn into fake arguments. Red on one side to be shown to the other person as a non-verbal indicator of disagreement and non-participation. On the other side are five reminders to what is really going on in the other’s head:
- Speech is aggression
- Every utterance has a winner and a loser
- Curiosity is feigned
- Lying is performative
- Stupidity is power
While this was intended for in-person communication, it seems absolutely appropriate for today’s toxic social media morass. Even if it is better to block internet (or twitter or facebook, etc.) trolls rather than engage with them, having the reminders handy could help mitigate the psychological effects of their cruelty.
The Body is the Mind – How do we communicate without a body? Can the brain make sense of the world without a body? This was one of the more mind-blowing elements of the book. It really made me think about how much we use our bodies to interface with the world around us. One only has to look at profoundly disabled people and how our best efforts are limited to trying to provide them with tools to replace our normal body movements with the modest body movements they may have available to them (eye movements, etc.). In the book there is an exploration of the boot-up of Dodge’s brain from his perspective. It is a world of white noise with random coherence of thought. It is not until he starts to make connections between his memories and his processing thoughts that he can make sense even of his own thoughts. Without the world, the body or the brain, the information lacks enough coherence to be understood.
Our Flaws Follow – When Dodge and the first group of people transition to a virtual existence, they cannot really remember their past lives. In making sense of their memories, they recreate a new world that is based upon the old world. However, initially Dodge and a small group of others are so much more powerful than the majority of the dwellers in this world that they are like Greek Gods in comparison. When Elmo Shephard arrives in the afterworld, he arrives in an angelic form and biblical parallels begin to dominate the story as Elmo casts Dodge out of his own virtual world. These themes are not just there for show. Elmo was upset that the virtual world was so tied to the physical body and wanted the afterlife to be truly transcendent. He hoped that by casting Dodge from the world he might be able to remake it and improve it. However, although the pantheon changed, Stephenson has admitted that the purpose is to also show how the inherent humanity will leak into the system and make it imperfect. Our mythology tells of the human frailties of our gods, and our bibles tell us of the sinning nature of humanity. Stephenson illustrates that these fables go both ways. Just because we move to an afterlife doesn’t mean we leave our flaws behind – we cannot exist without them.
Our Simulated World – In creating an artificial afterlife powered by the sun and maintained by robots, Stephenson creates a self-sustaining and completely self-enclosed simulated world for Dodge and those who follow him. However, he also lays hints in the meatspace portion of the book that perhaps the original world wasn’t real either – it might also be a simulation. This concept reinforces a current theory that we are all living in a simulation!
Simulation or not, I believe that what is important is how we live our lives. The characters and actions in Reamde were full of life purpose and positivity even in the face of great challenges. The characters and actions in Fall are more limited and go through the motions of living despite existing in a world of infinite possibilities! Between the two, I’m going to go for the fun of Reamde!