When Neal Stephenson takes on a subject he does not fool around, or he does but with purpose. In Fall, Neal Stephenson takes on the small topics of our times like how to fix the internet, immortality, artificial intelligence, and the Singularity. He even gets in a prolonged jab at modern American culture when he takes us with Sophia to Ameristan for a quick and terrifying visit (hint: the border is made up of WalMarts).
Who is Sophia? She’s Dodge’s great niece. Dodge, also known as Richard Forthrast, is the key character in this sprawling novel. One of Dodge’s last acts before entering a clinic for a simple procedure (which proves fatal) is to be distracted by a red leaf that he catches on the palm of his hand before it hits the pavement (Fall). He asks “if we lived on as spirits or were reconstituted as digital simulations” would things still have “quale” (for example) ‘the subjective experience of redness’.
Dodge, although his demise is premature, has made legal arrangements to have his brain frozen (a legal dilemma since the cryonics company has folded, but also not a dilemma because Forthrast is a very wealthy man with relatives who love him). So his brain is separated from his body until those at the forefront of using computers to scan brains and preserve them in digital form can progress. Once this is accomplished Dodge awakens in an empty digital simulation, a digital afterlife. But Dodge earned his fortune as the inventor of a popular world-building game called T’Rain. He begins to build a world to give the afterlife form. Back on earth living people can watch Dodge’s simulation unfold (he remembers his name as Egdod)
Dodge’s cohorts and rivals are Corvallis Kawasaki (cohort) and Elmo Shepherd (rival) and, of course his niece Zula, mother of Sophia (loyal family). A fake nuclear incident which leaves many people believing that the town of Moab, Utah was attacked points out some of shortcomings of the internet. “The Internet – what Dodge used to call the Miasma – had just gone completely wrong. Down to the molecular level it was still a hippie grad school project. Like a geodesic dome that a bunch of flower children had assembled from scrap lumber on ground infested with termites and carpenter ants. So rotten that rot was the only thing that was holding it together.”
Our intrepid computer wizards and coders invent a new way to protect an individual’s identity by using their actual “lifeprint”, called a PURDAH (Personal Unseverable Designation for Anonymous Holography). The internet needs to keep expanding to keep Dodge and all the new souls being scanned into the afterlife alive. Then Dodge, creator of the land mass of the afterlife from his Palace to the Knot, decides to see if he can bring forth new souls in the Landform Visualization Utility (LVU). When he is ultimately successful his old rival El (Elmo) Shepherd feels the entire design has been taken in the wrong direction. He decides to end his own life (he has a fatal disease anyway) and get scanned into Dodge’s creation. He ousts Dodge and takes over.
Eventually, of course, all the friends and enemies of Dodge die (or are murdered) (bots are no better than their owners). The population of Earth is declining. Who will be left to make sure the afterlife is supplied with enough energy to continue to exist? How do we get to the Singularity?
It’s a long strange trip (from the Grateful Dead song ‘Truckin’). Neal Stephenson is always amazing and Fall might just be the quintessential gamer fantasy novel/or you might think it is just past weird. As for me, although it lagged in a few parts, it worked. That does seem like one way we could get to the Singularity and leave the Earth to its own devices to recover from humans. On the other hand, I have not signed up for any tech leading to a digital afterlife, and as far as I know, no such tech exists. I don’t think the afterlife looked all that appealing unless you were a member of the ‘Pantheon’. We may find out if books copy life, or if life copies books. Keep your ears open.
Here is my list of books published in July, available in August. Lots of fiction, not as much nonfiction. If you are someone who loves crime books or thrillers and these kinds of books top your summer reading list then you are all set. There is also quite a bit of interesting science fiction and fantasy for you if that is your taste. And there are several good biographies and memoirs that were published recently. The ones that struck me when I read the summaries are starred. If you Google a book you will get a very short summary of what it’s about. Go to Amazon or your library for a longer description if you’re not sure what to pick. Don’t worry, you can’t keep up. Just dive in and carve out a little niche for yourself. Happy reading.
Amazon
Best Books of August
Literature and Fiction
Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center
American Saint by Sean Gandert *
Chances Are…by Richard Russo *
Tidelands by Philippa Gregory *
Inland by Téa Obreht *
The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christi Lefteri *
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokaczuk, Antonia Lloyd-Jones *
Summerlings by Lisa Howorth *
Gods with a little g by Tupelo Hassman
Mysteries and Thrillers
The Escape Room by Megan Goldin *
The Bitterroots by CJ Box
The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
The Whisper Man by Alex North
The Last Widow (Will Trent) by Karin Slaughter
The Whisperer (13) (Inspector Sejer Mysteries) by Karin Fossum, Kari Dickson
True Believer (2) (Terminal List) by Jack Carr
The Perfect Wife by JP Delaney
A Keeper by Graham Norton
Don’t Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokaczuk, Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Biographies and Memoirs
Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law by Haben Girma
Idiot Wind: A Memoir by Peter Kaldheim
Alexander the Great: His Life and His Mysterious Death by Anthony Everitt
Barnum: An American Life by Robert Wilson
Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands by JohnClayton
Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan by Alan Paul, Andy Aledort
Nights in White Castle: A Memoir by Steve Rushin
The Sober Diaries: How One Woman Stopped Drinking and Started Living by Clare Pooley
Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers Pervs and Trolls by Carrie Goldberg
Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver by Jill Heinerth
Nonfiction
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill, Dan Piepenbring
Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer
Strange Harvests: The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects by Edward Posnett
The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains by Joseph Le Doux *
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi
The Mosquito: A Human History of our Deadliest Predator by Timothy Wineqard
The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes by David Robson *
The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Woman Who Pursued Him, and the Murder that Shocked Jazz-Age America by Karen Abbott
The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina
Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain
Do You Dream of Terra-Two? By Temi Oh
Blood of an Exile (Dragon of Terra by Brian Haslund)
Shrouded Loyalties by Reese Hogan
The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War) by R F Kuang
Cry Pilot by Joel Dane
Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buston
Turning Darkness into Light by Marie Brennan
The Gossamer Mage by Julie E Gernada
The New York Times Book Review
Crime
Conviction by Denise Mina *
More News Tomorrow by Susan Richards Shreve *
The Island by Ragnar Jonasson
Finding Mrs. Ford by Deborah Goodrich Royce
Fiction
Last Day by Domenica Ruta *
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson *
The Body in Question by Jill Ciment *
Nonfiction
The Guarded Gate by Daniel Okrent *
The Way We Eat by Bee Wilson *
Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen
A Thousand Small Sanities by Adam Gopnik (defense of liberalism) *
The Buried by Peter Hessler
The Shortlist (books on mental illness)
The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia by Marin Sardy
Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness by Anne Harrington
Tyrannical Minds: Psychological Profiling, Narcissism, and Dictatorship by Dean Haycock *
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 