Cyberhell: a review of Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
Author Neal Stephenson
Illustrator Nick Springer / Springer Cartographics LLC
Cover artist Fritz Metsch
Publisher William Morrow an imprint of HarperCollins
Publication June 4, 2019
Pages 883
All fiction involves, to one degree or another, ‘world building.’ No matter how hyper-realistic the story wants to be, no matter how dependent on real events, if it’s fiction it involves people who don’t exist outside of the author’s mind interacting with events that didn’t actually occur. Forest Gump is a good example of that.
That’s the barest minimum of world building. From there, the only limit is the author’s estimation of how much the readers (or editors) will stand for. In a historical romance, which often comes with a pretty low bar, a writer might get away with Henry V glancing at his wrist to see what time it is. But you can’t have him driving a Tesla. Verisimilitude (believability) is a big part of world-building in fiction.
It is often the central feature in fantasy and science fiction, where the world may bear no resemblance to ours, and be populated by a non-human population.
It’s hard work for the writer. He has to keep it consistent, keep it coherent, and balance sheer strangeness with enough familiarity that the readers don’t fall right out of the story.
One of the most horrifying imaginary worlds is also the most minimalist: Larry Niven’s Bordered in Black which describes a bipedal life form on a planet with one island, surrounded by one ocean containing one lifeform; an algae that they eat, and their excrement feeds the algae after it washes out to sea. And that’s it. Their entire existence. And they are intelligent…
A favorite theme is the afterlife, dating back to Goethe’s Faust and probably well before that. It’s likely the pantheons of gods visited various afterlives and had weird adventures thousands of years before writing came along. Some afterlife worlds are satirical, such as Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series, some are hilarious, such as Parke Godwin’s Waiting for the Galactic Bus, and most are grim, and based on various religious beliefs.
Science-oriented fiction (or at least fiction that might give science a vaguely friendly nod of recognition on the elevator) came up with its own variations of postmortem existences, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This led to an endless succession of stories featuring live human heads (or at least brains) in a bottle who were (usually) not particularly happy about being kept alive after death in that fashion, and plotted revenge. This, given the limited options available to the heads, often led to some pretty good writing.
With the rise of computers and cyberpunk came the notion of copying human personalities into hardware. It began with androids and evolved to computers. “Thinking” spaceships were fairly common, although most filled the same narrative niches as the smart-ass animal sidekicks in Disney cartoons.
Cyberpunk came along, and made post-life cyber existence darker, grittier and fractionally more realistic.
And now, Neal Stephenson has come along and made that cyber afterlife a universe into itself, complicated, profound—and immensely entertaining.
The story begins with a tech industry trillionaire, Dodge Forthrast, who manages the neat trick of being both the titular protagonist and the role known in Act I as “The Body”. Dodge fucks around for 50 pages being a trillionaire who likes his niece and maple leaves and bad electropop music, and then keels over, asphyxiated during a routine medical procedure. But, typically of a narcissistic tech plutocrat, he has a provision in his vast will that his head be cryogenically preserved against the day they can upload his mind to the cloud.
That’s done, and the world hums along, a techno-corporate dystopia of the sort Stephenson excels at creating.
Finally, the next of kin and lawyers finish squabbling, and Dodges icy corpse is uploaded.
That’s when the fun really begins.
Remember my long spiel about world-building and fiction? Oh, come ON! You read it not two minutes ago. Yeah. That. Sheesh. You get to watch a master build his world, step-by-step.
Dodge, with no real sense of identity or place, ‘wakes up.’ He calls himself “Egdod.” His entire universe resembles the static of an unused channel on an old-fashioned black and white television. Then, after a measureless amount of time, he turns a single pixel red. This pleases him, so he turns other pixels red, eventually ending up with a simple red maple leaf shape, about as detailed as the one on the Canadian flag, and is totally unaware that such a leaf was one of the last things he saw before he died.
He makes more leaves, and then a branch. Then a tree. Trees. Grove. Forest. He puts a path through the forest. He devises flowers to make the path pretty. It’s not photorealistic; his ability to ‘draw’ his surroundings are about the same level as a talented child. But it is a world, and he is creating it.
In our world, people monitoring the power demands of the cyberspace are noticing spikes, and finally realize that they are not random, but betray some sort of purpose. And the only element in that chaos capable of purpose is the uploaded digital signature that was Dodge.
Word gets out, and other preserved heads are uploaded. The watchers, intrigued but baffled, sit back to watch the patterns multiply.
Dodge discovers he has company. New ‘souls’ appear each day, at a multiplying rate.
Technology on Earth improves, and whole-body-neural-net uploads become possible. Oddly, this limits the abilities of souls in this second grouping; the first generation could assume any form, and had far greater powers to manipulate their environment (although it proved not possible to pave over Dodge’s work).
Slowly it evolves into what, out of context, would be considered a well-constructed fantasy world, one in which people live alongside intelligent hills, centaurs, gods and strange creatures that can replicate themselves. In one scene, a man-sized crow grouses that he spends far too much of his time fighting sentient tornadoes. It gets delightfully weird.
Half the fun is watching Stephenson develop this amazing and complex world, one step at at time. The other half is the world itself, complex, original and unique, one created by its residents.
OK, there’s a third half. Stephenson loves digressions, and those can be fun outtakes. He takes a boy-meets-girl scenario that a lesser writer might write as “They met at Starbucks and hit it off” and turned it into a sixty page side story about the reported nuking of a medium-sized American city. Normally that might seem vast overkill (literally!) just to get a pair of your characters to hook up, but even though it has no real bearing on the rest of the story (even the hookup is of minimal importance) it is massively entertaining to read, and well worth the blown hour in reading time.
It’s not Cryptonomicon (although some of the characters from the ‘present’ in that amazing book appear here), but it comes close, and captures the wonder and intellectual challenge that is the hallmark of his writing.