Fall, or Dodge in Hell

Review of the novel by Neal Stephenson

This starts as present-day scifi, meaning that you don’t know which technology is real right now and which is still in labs and which is clever invention by the author.

Then Stephenson moves the present “meatspace” world forward, step by step about forty years while building a parallel “bitworld” totally from scratch.

When characters die, their brains are scanned and the data is saved. The scans become more detailed and accurate as technology advances, and the characters come “alive” in the bitworld. The first such digital entity becomes a godlike figure there, creating the universe, with echoes of Genesis and Paradise Lost, as well as echoes of Dungeons and Dragons and of massively multiplayer videogames.

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