Fall is a massive book that runs across multiple generations in two different planes of reality. In the world we are familiar with, characters we know from previous books by Stephenson appear, and we are pleased to be reunited with them, even though we don't remember much about them. In the alternative world we are entertained by an entirely coherent mythical universe that contains some of the same characters as they play into an epic struggle. The barrier between the two planes of existence is opaque but events in one affects the reality of the other.
What makes this book particularly brilliant is how well Stephenson's mythical universe dovetails with archetypes we all know. In that it is part sword and sorcery, part game of thrones, part creation story, part clash of the titans.
Allegorically, as is expected, Stephenson proposes answers to some eternal questions that vex us in contemporary American society. How bad can a post-reality internet get? What might be the consequences to an America subject to powerful schismatic cults? How far could a War of the Worlds level hoax be perpetrated on social media? But even more curious to fans of his fiction, what is really going on with Enoch Root? How can we live in virtual reality? What about the Singularity? And even, Why does God allow suffering in the world?
Where REAMDE was a giant action movie in book form and Seveneves was a hard science fiction, this is an extended study and romp into virtual reality. Moreover it proposes some questions about the nature of the human mind and what are the inevitable effects of is disembodiment? Nothing is so revealing as Stephenson's understanding that the limits of our imaginations are essentially nothing more or less than the human drama of dreams. More importantly that our dreams are of little value to us if they are not shared with other people. So whatever humans can be, they must dream it first, and guess what - practically all dreams are familiar, but being social creatures nothing quite defines humanity as 'make my dream come true and share it with you'. Well, the other side of the coin, which is 'I am your worst nightmare'.
There is something altogether familiar in science fiction that I think C. S. Lewis came to understand, Arthur C. Clarke explained famously and now that Stephenson understands. That is that science fiction and ultimately science is best understood as magic. Magic is nothing more than the wish fulfillments that defy the constraints of our knowledge of cause and effect in the physical universe. What humans will always want from science is predicted by science fiction which is nothing more or less than magic. Once you connect magic to science fiction, you inevitably connect it to fantasy, and human fantasy is, in that way, predictable. Fantasy tastes like mythology - in the end these are the stories we use to teach ourselves, and religion is how we discipline our mythologies and engrave it in memory and dreams. It's all connected.
So in that way, Stephenson knows that he is writing books that come full circle in mythology, in fantasy, in science fiction. In all of these, miraculous things happen. The only difference is the selection of machina, type of deus and the direction of ex. In Fall, they are executed in parallel between the two planes of existence, each an opaque reflection of the other.
It comes as no surprise, and is a usefully instructive matter that Stephenson does not create a post-scarcity universe in either plane of reality. In fact, his illustration of the relativity of time and its relationship to energy and matter is spot on. I'll let you read that. His words do it best. That is best when you are wanting to please readers of science fiction. But in a cryptic ending, Stephenson gives us a surprise we have to leave as a mystery. It is either a massively hokey joke or the test condition of a recursive story. In the case of the former, it can be forgiven considering the scope of the tale. The very idea of history stopping is a hokey joke and Stephenson's best books are historical fictions. But there is a playground out there for alternate planes of reality that are not only turtles all the way down, but perhaps turtles all the way around. After all, which way is down?
Fall, does not induce dizzying nausea. It delivers some stunning moments that are exciting and dramatic in the way the best fantasy can be. Stephenson's characters are less well defined as a matter of course if you read the book as I did, which is to give equal weight to both analogues in both planes of reality, but it is easy to be enchanted by those on either side. Nevertheless Stephenson weighs more deeply on the fantasy side - as some fraction of the book plays interestingly with rather hackneyed stereotypes of extreme Americans. The heroes and villains are not so clear in our world.
My overall take is that this book is an ambitious attempt at something only a few writers are bold enough to try. I don't know any who have come close. I would like to say that Stephenson has been reading Gene Wolfe who is, to my reckoning, the absolute master of sword and sorcery fantasy writing. He remains intrigued by the probabilities of magical science and remains upbeat on the whole. Although Fall might have been made profoundly darker - all the elements were there - there is a happy ending. And in the end one must confess that in this rendering, Hell is a relative term. Where there might have been some Kafkaesque absurdity throughout, Stephenson's characters never lose their minds or abandon their purposes in confounding frustration. Where there might have been some great experimentation with the element of chaos, a fundamental building block of the fantastic plane of existence, it is only marginally mysterious and stochastic.
Since I cannot believe that Stephenson is finished with his characters or the fecund prospects of co-dependent universes, I must conclude that Dodge and his entourage must have more adventures in our future. Please.
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