Fall, Or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell is an exploration of the human relationship between the world that surrounds us, the mind that we use to experience it, and the ideas of other minds that influence our subjective experience of the world. The main premise of the work is exploring the possibility of replicating the function of human brains in a digital environment and thus achieving ‘immortality’ by uploading minds to a digital world. In the course of its exploration the novel attempts to be a science fiction thriller about a faked terrorist attack, a dystopian reflection on social media impact and the political divide of America, a secondary-world fantasy quest novel and a Miltonesqe retelling of the Bible, but the only thing it really could be said to succeed at is being transhumanist pro-mind-uploading propaganda.
Spoiler Warning
The ideas of the novel are fascinating but they are robbed of their power, impact, and meaning by the fact that the author does not allow the ideas to be questioned by the circumstances of the novel. The interesting moral and philosophical questions that could be raised by the plot concept surrounding death, life extension, and mind uploading are entirely swept under the rug with a dogmatic presentation of answers. There is no discussion of the problem presented by the possibilities of copying a ‘soul’ which immediately highlights the possibility that there might be a disconnect between the past living self and the future digitized self. Stephenson sidesteps the copy problem by presenting a mind-digitization process that is destructive and having it used only as a resort in the moment of normal death. The system the ‘souls’ are put in also is accidentally built on a secured system that does not allow outside interference or even communication and no ‘souls’ are ever copied. This removes from play the most powerful criticism of the concept of mind-uploading as a feasible technology and allows the novel to proceed into general acceptance of a digital afterlife with no real debate.
Before the mind-uploading into the digital world (which is somewhat blandly but amusingly referred to as ‘Bitworld’) begins the novel takes a side-track to explore a few plots attempting to tie together the core exploration of the fundamental working of human existence of living as a brain receiving signals and forming them into a view of the world based on patterns we have learned from past exposure to different signals. First a nuclear attack on an American city is faked on Social Media leading many people to continue believing far into the future that this city was destroyed by a nuclear attack while others receive the correction and learn to distrust the information they receive from new and old media. After that we go on to explore the fallout of this through an exaggerated projection of the rural/urban divide in near-future America with the elite being subscribed to editing services to cull the nonsense and wrong-think on the internet and the poor middle-Americans being fed crazy conspiracy nonsense that radicalizes them into what the coastal elite refer to in the novel as Ameristan. The radical party mentioned directly in this part of the story is called the Leviticans and believe that the New Testament is a collection of lies to weaken Christianity by presenting Jesus as loving and kind and that makes him a weak ‘beta-cuck’; they are a cult of guns and crucifixion led by a warlord in the middle of the USA and hold to Old Testament laws regarding homosexuality and wearing clothes of mixed-fibers and believe that the Bible commands gun ownership.
During this section of the novel one of the characters makes the claim that belief in the supernatural break your idea in the ‘real’ way the world works and makes you more susceptible to illogical memes and radicalization. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what religion offers and clearly suggests that the author thinks that religious people are lesser, that if they believe one thing that the author thinks is false that they must be too stupid to understand the truth and are then open to all kinds of crazy falsehoods that separate them from other people and leaves them alienated. But this fundamentally is the opposite of how religion works; it provides a shared view of the world that brings people together and gives them communal cause, which can lead them to shared radicalization but does not leave them alone and unmoored at the same time.This negative characterization of religion also seems to be at odds with how religion is portrayed in the Bitworld as the main character begins to be worshiped and this behavior is not directly critiqued; indeed the whole conflict of the last half of the book stems from supporting one ‘god’ over another and ‘souls’ putting themselves in danger to support or oppose one or the other side without a clear set of beliefs. But the author is so intent on tearing down the supporting fabric of society in favor of a digital paradise that he can’t see which direction the religious parallels flow.
In addition to presenting that the coastal American elites are fundamentally superior due to the quality of the meme that they have constructed Stephenson also seems to propose that there is a tiered hierarchy of souls: the majority of the people whose minds are uploaded show no creative energy and merely copy basic human forms and customs, while the early adopters are made into magical beings by a combination of struggling against circumstance of imperfect copying technology and personal force of will to adapt their brains to the ability to shape their appearance and the world they find once they are uploaded. Dodge, the protagonist and first ‘soul’ to be uploaded struggles the most as he finds himself uploaded to a blank digital world as just a copy of his neural pathways at death and has to construct his identity and the entire world he lives in is treated as if he has a right to be a tyrant in this world while El, the transhumanist billionaire investor who financed much of the technological development that lead to Dodge being ‘awoken’ gains power by constructing dedicated server farms to throw more computing resources at his soul is seen as a usurper who does not deserve respect. But the powerful naturally accept worship and roles of leadership over the lesser beings and wow them with their supernatural powers without any consideration of appropriateness or morality of their actions. This hierarchy of souls creates an interesting reflection of mythological primary-world precursors as the novel slips into a sociological exploration of the development of the digital post-death society through a story that closely parallels the Bible but falls flat with no moral dimension. There is no debate or discussion of ideas: just a straight up power struggle over which super-powerful top-tier soul is to lead the realm. No presented path to salvation or self improvement, just the tenant that life is pain, suffering, and conflict that the brain wouldn’t accept without struggle.
There are moments that could be used to address the moral dimension of conflict between ‘souls’ that are just passed over. Early on Dodge (the protagonist Luciferian better tyrant in opposition to El the transhumanist tyrant who must be opposed for no clear reason other than Dodge and his friends can’t stand losing power) punishes an ordinary ‘soul’ for harming one of the lesser ‘gods’ by unmaking him with a Jovian thunderbolt. This action is presented as if it is right, but not really discussed or the ramifications explored. Later we learn that ‘souls’ when killed by more conventional means can reincarnate in the world, but there is no indication that this soul was not completely destroyed which seems to me a presumptuous power for Dodge to take over others that El is never shown to take for himself.
The book seems to be confused about a lot of things. The mind-uploading and pseudo-religious mythology of the secondary world is not criticized and is generally portrayed as a good thing so long as Dodge is in control and not El. The decay of the primary world into a self-sustaining robotic vessel for collecting more and more computing power to feed to the secondary world is not criticized and seems to be accepted as a reality with no consideration of the eventual entropy of the primary universe and what that will mean in the end for the simulated world. The relationship between the brain experiencing, influencing, creating and being created by the stimulus of the world around it is touched on but it does not have a large impact on the outcome of the story. The idea that death and sleep are essentially the same type of consciousness-ending process and the assumption that the brain is just like a computer that can be turned off and back on again is not questioned. But there are a lot of things about the text that don’t make sense if they aren’t questioning these ideas; why is Dodge portrayed in the Lucifer role; why is the title ‘Fall; or, Dodge in Hell’ referencing this whole story as about a fall, and where is the Hell that Dodge is said to be in? and why do the characters in the secondary world seem so unaware of their religious and eschatological practices that they have entered into if this is not itself supposed to be questioning whether the whole project of mind uploading was a good idea?
There are several parts of this novel that I really liked and in broad strokes it is an ambitious and potentially amazing story. The first third of the novel before Dodge is awoken in the digital world is pretty solid and has a lot of interesting ideas. The section right after his digital copy awakes and finds itself disembodied in the digital world and learns to interact with the digital world is really well done, but then it devolves into a much more boring quest story in a secondary world over a disjointed timeline and not nearly enough intellectual conflict or debate between the prime actors after the first half of the story. Since Stephenson obviously doesn’t understand or respect Christianity it is confusing to me why he chose to have his almost completely atheistic cast play out a retelling of the Bible in their digital Paradise. A proper respect for the meaning and understanding of the fundamentals of Christianity (or even merely Paradise Lost) could have made a fantastic set of connections. In my mind the shadow of this story that could have been overshadows the novel that is delivered.
View all my reviews