Neal Stephenson’s latest mammoth story (883 pages) is, as usual, a very elaborate, complicated, technical story. It starts off with easy to understand modern day cryonics (you know...freeze the body and bring back to life when the cure is found) and then transmutes into a cloud computing system using a network of remote servers to delve into the connectome of millions of peoples brains. The hoi polloi will line up to sign contracts to have their remains upon death scanned, vaporized, and rebooted into a cloud computing system that guarantees life after death. Welcome to BITWORLD. The story comes up with many speculations that will make your head spin. “We are stuck with the process. We must find ways to keep it running as we learn how to inspect it, and - if it actually does work like a brain - to talk to it.” If you turn the computer off...is it murder? Could your soul always be rebooted if something went badly wrong? Maeve, an amputee with artificial legs, asks, “Does that mean I won’t have legs in Bitworld?” Why do some souls in Bitworld have wings and a few are godlike surrounded by a host of angels? To paraphrase the author, known for speculative fiction, “That he got the idea for this novel from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (published in 1667 - It consisted of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse), a weird and interesting poem, but wanted to go somewhere with a technological or science fiction slant.”
Richard Dodge Forthrast was a multibillionaire who lived in Seattle, Washington. He was at a point in his life that all he wanted to do was spend time with his niece, Zula, and her young daughter, Sophia. His gaming corporation, 9592, was running smoothly and no longer needed his guidance. One day he was going to drop off some books to Sophia and then have lunch with his friend, Corvallis, but first he had to stop by his doctor’s office for a routine procedure (a tinnitus ringing in his ear). His friend, Corvallis, was in the waiting room while Richard was wheeled into the operating room on a gurney. "Richard felt a mask over his nose, a cold gas flooding his nostrils, a hiss". While waiting for Richard, suddenly all hell broke loose. “He (Corvallis) did raise his head and look when the front door of the office suite was punched open by a team of three fireman (EMT’s). Waiting for them was a woman in scrubs. She had made eye contact with the firemen before they even reached the door. As they burst in, she turned on her heel and ran into the back, and they understood that they should follow her...they wheeled the patient out of a room, down the hallway toward the exit. Just like that Richard Dodge Forthrast was brain dead. Corvallis is the named executor on Richard’s living will. Dodge wanted to be frozen for a future awakening. Wow, it was only the first 37 pages. With great enthusiasm I looked forward to the next 800+ pages! Wrong. The book treads water from there on...at least it did for me.
After some jostling and in-fighting among the relatives over the will, the story converts to Sophia taking a cross country trip that takes forever to complete along with Corvallis investigating a fake nuclear attack. That dual interlude gobbles up at least 200 pages! It ruined the momentum of the story. This was 200 pages that didn’t need to be in the book. Finally, the story returned to Dodge’s brain and future improved cryonic’s research. On the plus side, I did enjoy the simulated world of the dead and the battle of heaven and hell starring previous life foes, Richard Dodge Forthrast/Egdod and Elmo Shepherd/El. Talk about technical improvements: “You could hover above the town squares in the cities of the dead and watch them mingle with one another and, to all appearances, talk, trade, fight, and copulate...depending on the current value of the Time Slip Ratio.” (what?) “So it was with speciation on the activities of the dead in Bitworld. In many ways, these were as mundane as they could be. Except that there was one difference, which was psychologically important to living spectators: the dead were dead...but there was no doubt that they had gone on to an afterlife.” So have your thinking cap on and Google on standby when ruthless powerhouse companies battle for the cryonic business. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate the effort Neal Stephenson needed to write this complicated story, it’s just that I’m not a Mensa Society member (close, but no cigar). Every so often, I need to read a book like this (are you listening China Mieville?) to throw a bucket of cold water on my face
RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
Comment: Whereas this Neal Stephenson novel was a chore to get through, I can think of two oldies that I’ve read that were extra painful to read (at least for me). The toughest was Utopia by Sir Thomas More published in 1516 (see my review of 10/26/2015). It’s the first book that defines utopia as an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. How many Utopian novels have been written since? Or Dystopian?
The second toughest was The Divine Comedy written by Dante Alighieri and originally published in three books in 1320 (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso). This mind bender was a long narrative poem highlighting his view of the afterlife.
I needed two large buckets of water to keep me awake.
