Fall Or, Dodge In Hell - Neal Stephenson

Fall or, Dodge in Hell is the latest (rather awkwardly titled) novel from Neal Stephenson, who has a reputation for writing novels full of big ideas, laid out in interesting ways. If you’re new to Stephenson’s work, or you’re a long time reader coming in to see if this one’s worth taking a look at, let me see if I can help.

First of all, the answer is yes.

Yes.

This is vintage Stephenson, in several senses.

First: It’s a book so thick you could probably use it to stun livestock. That’s somewhat ameliorated if you’re reading the ebook, but be aware, up front, that this one is a doorstop, and it’s probably going to require some time commitment.

Second: Yes, this involves some of the same characters as one of Stephenson’s previous works, Reamde. Arguably, they’re not the centrepiece of the text, which sprawls across geographies and generations with equal aplomb. But they’re there, and if you’ve read Reamde then there’s some nice callbacks and thematic notes for you. If you haven’t, don’t panic! The story works perfectly well as a standalone. Speaking of which: This is a story with two broad strands. 

The first of those is in what we’ll nominally call the real world, a near future not too many steps from our own.  Here, the narrative homes in on the idea of information flow. The United States is defined no longer by its geography, but by the types of information that its citizens imbibe, consuming their media with varying editorial slants, advances in technology allowing them to experience reality as they perceive it, rather than as it may actually be. Urban centres and core agricultural areas seem to be largely members of the “reality based community”; outside of these are lawless wastelands, people poisoned by memes, shaped by the ravings of the internet into warlords or shapeless wrecks of ideological polarisation. Stephenson, always a creator of masterful prose, manages to make this world seem real, its rural areas navigated by gun-laden pickups as plausible as the towering urban enclaves reached by self-driving cars that won’t go off the Interstate system into the potentially dangerous backwoods. It’s still a bit on the nose, honestly. Stephenson has looked at the power of ideas and ideology before, in the seminal Snow Crash, and expands on that here. How people shape themselves around an idea is explored, and the ways in which feedback allows people to change a concept even as it alters them, also.

This is a compelling, believable near-future, filled with plausible characters, whom it is easy to empathise and sympathise with. That includes, to an extent, even the less-than-heroic ones, those whose self interest and selfishness is at odds with the more egalitarian space most of the protagonists inhabit. But even those “baddies” if you will are so because they want to shape the future mindset of humanity, to take it out of the comfortable mould in which it has sat for so long, and give it the freedom to become something new. Of course, they do this, in part, by being terrible people. Both protagonists and their adversaries are vividly detailed, and feel like personalities rather than cutouts.

However, whilst this word is intricate and believable, the text is not satisfied. It shows us a world on the edge of some sort of informational meme-pocalypse, and then throws in something else entirely.

Immortality.

Well, something like it. The idea of scribing the patterns of the brain, and deploying them into a virtual world. In typical Stephenson style, this is lavishly and painstakingly described – both the process by which the events occur, and the world which the bodiless souls begin to inhabit. Parallels with Genesis are both inevitable and seemingly intentional; whether that’s a narrative device, or the subconscious shaping of now-virtual minds is left as an exercise for the reader. Still, as the near-future and the virtual world run in parallel, as each becomes accustomed to or even aware of the other, we find a rich and complex universe, where the big questions are at least being asked, and perhaps answered.

That fantasy world, that virtual space that is as real as the real, is the home for much of the latter half of the text, which feels more fantasy than science-fiction. For all that, it’s a living, breathing world, and one whose characters are firmly seated in their universe, and whole in themselves.

Stephenson has given us a playground here, a wide open world of infinite possibility, stocked with characters whose lives, in and out of the virtual, feel extremely real.

The plot…well, it’s something. It sprawls across the pages of the text, roots drilling down into subtext and metaphor, understanding sometimes easily present, at times obfuscated beyond the ken of the reader. It’s a dense read, and one which requires a bit of thought. At times, it seems too self involved, too far absorbed in its own cleverness. For all that, though, it has a story which grabs hold, which carries you across oceans and continents, and brooks no dismissal. It has a story which gives you people to care about, and I,, for one, did so. It’s a story where the stakes are never less than real, never less than personal – and that kept me turning the pages.

On that basis, it’s a deep, complex narrative, one rich in subtext, meaning and metaphor, one which asks the big questions, but also isn’t afraid of kicking arse and taking names when necessary. It’s one to approach when you have time for a tome, and space to absorb some overwrought ideas, but for all that, it’s a fascinating read.