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Updated : Monday, 2/17 @ 21:31
2025 Running Total : (2)
Fall or, Dodge In Hell – Neal Stephenson (2019)
Recurring character and (sort of) protagonist Richard “Dodge” Forthrast begins this tale by… dying. Having made billions through the IP of a video game he created, Dodge dabbled in some of that billionaire shit. In this case, a will that directed that upon his death, his body was to be cryogenically preserved until which time technology had advanced to the point where his remains could be scanned and digitized, creating an assemblage of data called a connectome.
Jumping ahead, Dodge’s Great Niece Sophia, 4 years old at the time of his death, found herself a doctoral student at Princeton focused on the particulars of spawning her Great Uncle Richard’s connectome to a cloud-cluster of servers with the intention of igniting life beyond physical death. The hope being, Dodge’s connectome would achieve some level of consciousness and become the first human soul to embody their singular mind space in this nascent digital afterlife.
With this premise established, the story evolves from there as after a period of seeming infinite loops, Dodge’s brain/connectome eventually finds its bearings, achieves consciousness and begins to define the lay of the land within this new world. In Stephenson’s brilliant storytelling, things take on the air of Genesis in that it’s a god-like manner that the building of the world plays out. The narrative within this creation period creates a visceral experience like few others.
And then there’s Elmo Shepherd. While Dodge was still alive, Shepherd was the billionaire that got him to agree to have his brain scanned upon his death. Elmo Shepherd is a character that focuses all his worldly wealth towards the goal of the digital afterlife. He plays a huge role in financing the project and has very specific ideas on how it should be structured, however Dodge gets there first and figures things out, lays out the world along with his own version of a hierarchy. Suffice to say, Elmo Shepherd doesn’t agree with Dodge’s approach
In the end, not wanting to spoil anything, you’ll find the classic battle, good versus evil… and that’s at the conclusion of a Quest, a Quest made up of numerous unique characters that you get to know and love, which was very reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings in more than one way.
The span of time that elapses over the course of this book feels to be about 80 years. From a science fiction point-of-view, the planet Earth sees extraordinary advances in technology over this period, so much so, that I wouldn’t think the start of the book could be our own present day, although I’d say it’s close. At any rate, be forewarned, this book is 880 pages long, because that’s how long it takes to tell this story, which is Stephenson’s MO, most all of his books are longer than average. I wouldn’t recommend it as a vacation book though, too heavy to travel with. That said, the lion share of the final two-thirds of the book is watching this world evolve, and it’s fascinating. Provides many moments where you’ll put the book down for a while and just start expanding about this or that idea being pondered in the narrative.
Worth reading? I’d say definitely, but then, Stephenson has emerged as my very favorite author, so I’m biased.
1984 – George Orwell (1948)
I, like many, first read this book in high school. What’s funny about that for me was that first read came in the actual year 1984, which was my senior year, 36 years after the book was originally published. I suppose to Orwell, that must have felt like a sufficient jump into the future to make the dystopian world he describes possible. He was a bit off with that guess, but here in 2025, the Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds to midnight, as close as it has ever been.
If I’m being honest, it was Trump’s first week back in office that caused me to hunt down my copy from the archives. When it comes to the world transitioning from one state of being to another completely different social order, I give this idea more and more thought these days. How would it happen? For my money, the Covid pandemic acted as a sort of proof-of-concept, which is to say, how fast our daily routines can upend and become something different. What makes me uneasy is how globalization, Moore’s Law (enabling AI advances) and the ubiquity of the internet, namely social media, seem to be conspiring to take the world down a path that will ultimately become a different reality for what it feels like to live on Planet Earth.
The mid-section of this book is the part that still threatens to be possible in the years ahead. This is the part of the book where you get to read a portion of the treatise written by Emmanuel Goldstein, the supposed leader of the Brotherhood, a secret organization opposing the Party and Big Brother. The treatise is titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (wiki) and critiques the Party’s rule, explains the principles of ‘perpetual war’, the manipulation of truth and then describes how the hierarchical structure of society is designed to keep the ‘Party’ perpetually in power.
Writing this here in the first months of the second Trump Administration, a change in leadership that came into office with a furious issuing of proclamations and executive orders, creating a chaos not previously seen and showing no signs of relenting, one can’t help but wonder… to what end? What are they looking to accomplish in the long term? Sort of an out of body experience reading it as your mind reconciles the words you’re taking in with the current reality of our surrounding here in the United States.
So maybe revisiting this book at this particular moment wasn’t the best decision as my anxiety levels have certainly been tweaked a bit upwards, but who knows? Trump may decide to BAN this book tomorrow or the day after. Get it while it’s hot.
