Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
A Novel
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٤٫٠ - ٥٧٨ من التقييمات
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- 15٫99 US$
وصف الناشر
New York Times Bestseller
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This laboriously detailed follow-up to Reamde explores where human imagination ends and artificial intelligence begins, providing some speculative concepts without any real payoff. Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, founder of the gaming company Corporation 9592, is rendered brain-dead when a routine surgery goes horribly wrong. His will stipulates that his brain be scanned and preserved by a tech company run by elusive Elmo Shepherd, in hopes of future regeneration. Decades later, Dodge's grandniece, Sophia, designs a method for turning on Dodge's brain, making him a lone god of sorts in a new digital world. Her invention allows people to leave Meatspace, or the terrestrial world, which is reinventing itself after the implosion of the internet, and travel to Bitworld, where Dodge and the now-dead Elmo battle for power. Though Bitworld is liberated from physical constraints and Meatspace is exploring a "post-truth" era, both simplistically replicate present-day societal power structures, showing the limits of Stephenson's imagination. Fans of Stephenson's passion for the minutiae of technological innovations will revel in the intricacies of his construction, but unwieldy dialogue, uneven pacing, and a narrow-minded view of the future betray the story's promise.
مراجعات العملاء
Big ideas about what it means to be alive
I just finished rereading this book and loved it just as much the second time. Aside from a funny, entertaining story, the ideas about preserving human consciousness and life after death are really thought provoking. Plus there are all the fascinating and scary projections about how our society and use of the internet will evolve in the future…
Good but fizzled out.
The whole story concept is really genius and it starts off great but
70% in it fizzled out and can not bring myself to finish it. The storyline in the bit world got really boring and really bad and I am so bored I can’t read it anymore.
Thank god it’s over
I stuck with it this time (abandoned after 150 pages five years ago), but it was TOUGH going. I simply can’t believe Stephenson wrote this boring mess.