The premise and first few chapters of Fall led me to believe that it would be about what the experience of a disembodied consciousness might be like. Dodge is the ultra-rich founder of a gaming company who falls into a coma due to a mishap during a routine medical procedure. His health care directive insists that his heirs upload his connectome to the cloud. Pre-coma Dodge takes particular note of how his mental model of the world depends on kinesthetic awareness; he ponders the fate of the Ancient Greek shades on the other side of the river Lethe, with only vague memories of their previous lives. Can we even be conscious without our bodies or the stimulation of our senses?
I don't know, because that's not where Stephenson goes with the story. After a few hundred pages of tangential action involving internet hoaxes and increased polarization in the United States, Dodge's niece finally boots him up. The restored consciousness struggles to make sense of the digital chaos around it, but eventually settles into... creating a virtual world like a game designer would.
This doesn't make sense to me. A consciousness in a radically new environment would apply what it knows in order to find patterns in the input, but where is that input coming from? Assuming there is input of a digital sort, how would systems optimized for finding regularities in the real world possibly lend themselves to interpretation of online chaos? If we grant that Dodge is able to impose structure on the input, how is it that subsequently uploaded connectomes share the world Dodge fashioned? Why do avatars like trees, rocks, and mosquitoes act exactly like their stubborn real-world counterparts?
More deadening than my confusion is my indifference. I don't care about any of the undeveloped characters, either in Meatspace or Bitworld. The story develops into a retelling of Paradise Lost (with Dodge in the Satan role, hence the title) followed by a generic quest narrative. Stephenson doesn't even attempt to follow up on any of the knotty issues raised in the beginning, about consciousness, the legal implications of digital immortality, or our increasing dependence on digitally mediated experience.
I don't know, because that's not where Stephenson goes with the story. After a few hundred pages of tangential action involving internet hoaxes and increased polarization in the United States, Dodge's niece finally boots him up. The restored consciousness struggles to make sense of the digital chaos around it, but eventually settles into... creating a virtual world like a game designer would.
This doesn't make sense to me. A consciousness in a radically new environment would apply what it knows in order to find patterns in the input, but where is that input coming from? Assuming there is input of a digital sort, how would systems optimized for finding regularities in the real world possibly lend themselves to interpretation of online chaos? If we grant that Dodge is able to impose structure on the input, how is it that subsequently uploaded connectomes share the world Dodge fashioned? Why do avatars like trees, rocks, and mosquitoes act exactly like their stubborn real-world counterparts?
More deadening than my confusion is my indifference. I don't care about any of the undeveloped characters, either in Meatspace or Bitworld. The story develops into a retelling of Paradise Lost (with Dodge in the Satan role, hence the title) followed by a generic quest narrative. Stephenson doesn't even attempt to follow up on any of the knotty issues raised in the beginning, about consciousness, the legal implications of digital immortality, or our increasing dependence on digitally mediated experience.
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