Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel

Written by Neal Stephenson

Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner

A New York Times Notable Book

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Seveneves, Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon returns with a wildly inventive and entertaining science fiction thriller—Paradise Lost by way of Philip K. Dick—that unfolds in the near future, in parallel worlds.

In his youth, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast founded Corporation 9592, a gaming company that made him a multibillionaire. Now in his middle years, Dodge appreciates his comfortable, unencumbered life, managing his myriad business interests, and spending time with his beloved niece Zula and her young daughter, Sophia.

One beautiful autumn day, while he undergoes a routine medical procedure, something goes irrevocably wrong. Dodge is pronounced brain dead and put on life support, leaving his stunned family and close friends with difficult decisions. Long ago, when a much younger Dodge drew up his will, he directed that his body be given to a cryonics company now owned by enigmatic tech entrepreneur Elmo Shepherd. Legally bound to follow the directive despite their misgivings, Dodge’s family has his brain scanned and its data structures uploaded and stored in the cloud, until it can eventually be revived.

In the coming years, technology allows Dodge’s brain to be turned back on. It is an achievement that is nothing less than the disruption of death itself. An eternal afterlife—the Bitworld—is created, in which humans continue to exist as digital souls.

But this brave new immortal world is not the Utopia it might first seem . . .

Fall, or Dodge in Hell is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and the eternal. In this exhilarating epic, Neal Stephenson raises profound existential questions and touches on the revolutionary breakthroughs that are transforming our future. Combining the technological, philosophical, and spiritual in one grand myth, he delivers a mind-blowing speculative literary saga for the modern age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Jun 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781511328401

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Termination Shock, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland), Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . .Was the Command Line. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Reviews for Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

[SM “AR” T · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It's not Dodge who's in hell. It's obviously me.

The beginning was so engaging and weird, I really loved the different directions this was going and the characters we were introduced to, I even liked the utterly ridiculous overwritten descriptions of basically everything- and then I read the most uncomfortable sex scene of my life, which would set the tone for the rest of the story.
Just go read the bible and some greek mythology books. It'll probably be more interesting than this.

[Danielle Cerrato · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Starts out strong but quickly becomes drudgery as the creation of the digital world is laid out in excruciatingly long winded detail. A bit too much time is spent laying out tech-this and idea-that and advanced-whatever. A lot of time spent world building that all seems to come to no purpose. I honestly I have no idea how the huge amount of pages spent on Sophia’s road trip really matters to the story.

The real world plot line loses luster about 3/4 through— lacks any tension, so much time is spent on the digital world its hard to figure out why we should even care about the remaining real world characters anymore. The thread is lost.

By Chapter 42 I realized I honestly did not care at all how it ended. A dismal and disappointing follow up to the chaotic, unpredictable, hilarious, action-packed Reamde.

[Mihai Persinaru · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well worth the patience and time if you decide to read.Highly recommended.

[J · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Story lacks coherence, and although it was not strickly terrible, it was not worth the time invested

[Christopher Hegan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

From the terrestrial first part it segues into something like third rate Tolkien. A disappointment.

[Kevin Wilcox · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book just rambles on and on. I literally skipped about eight hours of this book and didn’t miss anything. It’s way too long, repeats itself over and over, it’s dry, and pretty boring.

[NatanJackel · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Starts out very well, but at some point the book turns into a confusing fantasy quest

[Amy Chan · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Starts with interesting ideas but really drags once we move into the Bitworld story which is essentially the Bible retold. Not what I was expecting out of a scifi author.

[everand · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very good reading of the book. I read the hard copy myself a few years back and thoroughly enjoyed it. The dystopian political commentary in the early mid section of the book is a little to close to a possibility right now and also not really relevant to the story as a whole. Also, it would have been nice if they fixed typo in the book, near the end when El's name is used where it can really only be Egdod in the context. I remember reading the page a few times to see if I was missing something and the same feeling of 'wrong' hit me on listening, but I let it slide this time. On a final note the narrator needs to stay away from Australian accents, but other than that I enjoyed the reading very much.

[SwitchSpencer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fantastic book! Brilliant story, awesome characters. A world built similar, but like not other.

[James G · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting book with some very interesting concepts, which veered from Sci-fi to fantasy / Lord of the Rings style part way through.
I felt that it could have been heavily truncated with a good editor.

[Ron · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It starts strong. A tech genius dies and leaves a will that he wants to be cryogenically frozen until the tech comes that could revive him. His family/friends do what they can to make his wishes come true. That ends with his brain becoming digitized. Some things ensue and the book flips between “bit space” and the real world of “meat space”. Everything is pretty good for the first 2/3’s. Then the wheels fall off hard. The last 10 hours or so are awful. It turns into a fantasy novel about digital people. It’s bad. If it was half as long and much better edited it would be ok. But it’s way too much of a time investment for such a poorly put together story.

[Yevgeny Frolov · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a Quest sci fi book.
With many characters and their stories.
Blend of science, potential future, and mythology.

If one starts to read with such “epic quest” understanding then this is great book.

And along the way one can ponder about some of the ethical questions like all “good vs evil“ quests must provide; But with a modern twist and eye to the future changes.

[Shaun · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An epic story weaving myth and modern together. Really well done.

[dennis morgan · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Nothing is good or evil but thinking makes it so. But overthinking the Bible in a fantasy world is neither. It’s just boring.

[martialalex92 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

His books tend towards long but there's usually more of a payoff than in this one so it ends up just feeling like a slog. Would have been a more compelling book had it been told in reverse - starting from the fantastical epic and working backwards to the sci-fi origin. The ending you get instead just doesn't feel like it matters in the grand scheme of things

[dougbaker · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Good concepts but way over written and large sections are boring and tedious. There is a good novel in here somewhere.

[mainrun · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Not a great way to start 2022. Neil Stephenson used to be a favorite of mine. However, I was not able to finish Quicksilver, and also this one. I think I just do not have the intelligence. Oh well. I decided to stop reading about half way through, and also remove Stephenson from my favorites list.1,038 members; 3.41 average rating; 2/21/2022

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely sucked me in, this one ... and then it seemed to devolve into nonsense and by the end I just wanted it to be over. I've said this before about Stephenson's works but I really wish that someone would be rather more ruthless with the editing pencil.

[themulhern · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The most dystopian thing Stephenson has ever written. Something only Stephenson could have written these days; so long, and funny in parts, and smart. Stephenson's take on our internet and the world of delusion it has created is bleak; he's come a long way from the tech-happy Stephenson of, e.g., Zodiac.

[jercox · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Basically a fantasy novel embedded in a science fiction / ideas story. And Stephenson is always a good story teller with interesting ideas.

But not the best story in a lot of ways. Overlapping characters and world from Reamde, moving in a completely different direction, and it struggles to be coherent and make sense in many ways.

My response to the ideas in his books has often been - interesting, I should think about that further and more deeply. This time it felt much more like unlikely and vaguely incredible projections for the singularity / technological afterlife. Less worth thinking about than normal.

Also -he retells essentially a Biblical creation story, with twists (starting with a very limited creator). And he does so VERY slowly. Some of this lack of progress makes the book feel like it should be much shorter.

[capewood · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

2021 book #26. Dodge, make a fortune designing an on-line RPG. After he dies, his brain is scanned and uploaded to a quantum computer where he basically designs game to live in. The IRL parts were OK, but the digital world was dull. Sorry I wasted my time on this 900-page book.

[farrhon · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

conveniently ignores death

[phrim · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

With Fall, Stephenson explores the possibility of reincarnating the recently deceased in a digital afterlife, using the characters he created in his previous novel REAMDE. The creation of this afterlife is done rather haphazardly, with its denizens maintaining their personalities but having no memory of their former life, and the world itself having literally no form. The first denizen of the afterlife, Dodge, happened to be a MMO computer game creator in his life, and creates the world's form. As the book proceeds, it becomes less and less about the real-world implications of there existing a digital afterlife, and more about the goings-on in the afterlife--mainly a power struggle between Dodge and the project's main funder El, in what turns out to be a swords-and-sorcery-type fantasy environment. The book culminates in a quest to overthrow the usurper El by the characters who have been slowly dying and being added to the afterlife world. I was a bit disappointed by this book, as the society implications of the afterlife are fascinating but largely ignored, and instead we get a book that focuses more on how the different characters from early in the book manifest themselves in the fantasy afterlife.

[mithril_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellently blows the mind as usual. A few points where the pacing slows for mood reasons but still.

[modioperandi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This work is big. Big. It is large and by and large it is a very rewarding read. I mean obviously you have just got to go in looking at this hulking chunk of a slab of book and know you are going to be told all of the things that Neal needs his characters to tell you.This was my first time reading a novel by Neal Stephenson - I first got into his work via Atmosphaera Incognita which was just wildly fantastic. Fall is very different from that novella. Fall opens up and hooks you in hard with the beautiful musings on Richard 'Dodge' Forthrast and his interests in mythology and death and life and what specific cultures mean and what it means to view the world from mythological points of view. This is then tied into his relationship with his niece. From there the novel descends into the Fall things happen to Dodge. He dies and is uploaded or a version of him is uploaded and a universe is created in virtual world and the place where people in the reality we known becomes termed meatspace. In anycase the development of all this over huge stretches of time in vitural world and the transformation of human culture as uploading people to virtual world becomes increasingly a thing is just super interesting. Its a great read if you can hang in there for long descriptions and such but if your picking up the book or interested its obvious you are going in knowing that: YOU WILL BE TOLD ALL OF THE THINGS. Neal Stephenson does this and does it with art and style. Parts read like what you might know from Stephenson and then other parts the beginnings of virtual world read like in a biblical prose poetry ancient sort of tone and that in-itself is wildly cool and effective. A great read.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Neal Stephenson is one of the most engaging writers I know, and also one of the most idiosyncratic. Fall is simultaneously an engrossing story and an often frustrating read. I've read criticisms that this novel is a rip off of Milton, and I can see how one might come to that conclusion, but there is more going on here despite characters named Adam and Eve, El, and Sophia. Stephenson is using mashups of different religious traditions (consider the Raven character and the Pantheon) to reflect on the nature of reality, the nature of death, the question of alternate universes. Ultimately, I called this science fiction because the enabling premises are tropes of that stream of fiction, but this novel is unclassifiable in genre terms. A very worthwhile way to pass the time until it's time to go out into the word again.

[cad_lib · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

At furst compelling. Excellent thoughts on the current situation with internet/social media-fueled tribalism. But the alternate narative, of uploading brain patterns (souls) to a computer-based environment proved to be a flaky, bad, mishmash of religous thought and fantasy novel.

[mbmackay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Another B I G book from Neal Stephenson. I'm a fan of his, and I enjoyed this book, but think it could have benefitted from a shortening of the Quest part towards the end.As a whole, it is Sci-Fi meets Lord of the Rings with biblical themes and language thrown in. The start is brilliant. The section on Ameristan is comic genius (but sadly too true). The sci fi of brain scanning and later rebooting is good sci fi - believable enough for fiction. The large section on life of the rebooted "souls" is thought provoking - but too long for me.So, well worth reading, but no cigar.

[adzebill · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm increasingly convinced that Neal Stephenson desperately needs a ruthless editor, like Thomas Wolfe did. You can with little harm skip hundreds of pages of this. Like Anathem. Even in The Diamond Age you can see the beginnings of the bloat. Nice questions, good SF settings, interesting resolution; it just could have been half the length.