Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell

I was nervous going in. Stephenson doesn't write small, tidy books - but from the start I was happy to amble along with his big, writerly brain. I loved this near future world where the entire town of Moab is obliterated by nuclear detonation - except not really. The natural progression of fake news and internet hoaxes, this staged event predicates the dismantling of the internet. We move from there into a drastically changed country divided between the Moab truthers living in fundamental “Ameristan” where the crucifixion is the conspiracy and the law of the land is a strict interpretation of Old Testament values punishable by stoning. (though in this case automatic weapons are favoured as machines that can facilitate stoning faster and harder) Meanwhile the coastal elites employ editors to cull digital feeds and mediate information bubbles. I could happily swim around in this world for pages!

But that's just meatspace. The real action in a Stephenson novel is going to be in Bitworld. It's the Creation myth in Cyberspace and I'm on board for imaging a post meatspace world where we will find ourselves uploaded in death. But I find myself losing interest as the page count mounts. Stephenson invokes a clunky voice like some way too into it Dungeon Master and suddenly I find myself in a fantasy, sci-fi novel. There's too much Lord of the Rings in my Neuromancer. It's Christian myth, the Grail quest, and Paradise Lost with epic villains and a Pantheon of heroes and it should be awesome. But I'm not invested. In Bitworld I'm just a NPC, a servile peasant at the whim of the wealthy and their strange machinations. This post-human heaven is still the realm of the 1%'ers and I'm still caught in the middle - my life not much different regardless of who takes power. A bit grim really and maybe too on the nose for my liking.