From Slate...
In the 12th chapter of Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Fall, a quartet of Princeton students set out on a road trip to Iowa to visit the “ancestral home” of one of the students, Sophia. This part of the novel is set about 25 years in the future, in an age when self-driving cars are the default and a de facto border exists between the affluent, educated coasts, where Sophia and her friends live, and the heartland they call “Ameristan.” The latter is a semi-lawless territory riddled with bullet holes and conspiracy theories, where a crackpot Christian cult intent on proving the crucifixion was a hoax (because no way is their god some “meek liberal Jesus” who’d allow himself to be “taken out” like that) literally crucifies proselytizing missionaries from other sects. You have to hire guides to shepherd you through this region, men who mount machine guns on top of their trucks “to make everyone in their vicinity aware that they were a hard target.”
How did things get so bad? For one thing, residents of Ameristan, unlike Sophia and her well-off pals, can’t afford to hire professional “editors” to personally filter the internet for them. Instead, they are exposed to the raw, unmediated internet, a brew of “inscrutable, algorithmically-generated memes” and videos designed, without human intervention, to do whatever it takes to get the viewer to watch a little bit longer. This has understandably driven them mad, to the degree that, as one character puts it, they even “believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to come and take their guns and other property,” and as a result stockpiled ammo in order to fight off the “elites” who never come.
As much as you may have come to hate what the internet has done to American society, the savage, Swiftian satire of this part of Fall suggests that technology’s harbingers like Stephenson, author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, hate it even more. Sophia’s road trip takes place after the fall of the open-access internet as we know it now—what the software engineers of this part of the novel call “the Miasma.” To destroy the Miasma, an enigmatic tech billionaire named El Shepherd, staged a massive hoax, persuading the media—social and traditional—that the town of Moab, Utah, had been obliterated by a nuclear weapon. The stunt was meant to demonstrate how fundamentally unsound and unreliable the Miasma was, and to prompt the public to take measures to protect themselves from junk communication, privacy violations, and social media in general. The problem was it didn’t entirely work, and as a result, while Sophia’s cohort takes measures to block bad information, in the world of Fall, not everyone else does or can afford to do so. Hence, a huge chunk of the population of Ameristan believes that Moab really was destroyed by an atom bomb and that the hoax story is just a government cover-up. And that’s despite the fact that anyone can walk or drive into Moab and see evidence to the contrary with their own eyes.
Of course, this is only Chapter 12 of Fall—that is, around Page 190, which to someone who’s read the subsequent 700 pages the novel seems a very long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Fall tricks you into thinking it plans to be this or that sort of fiction (a bitingly plausible near-future dystopia or tale of corporate intriguing, for example), only to heel around and head off in a new direction entirely. It does this more than once, yet remains a coherent whole. The audacity of Stephenson’s intentions is itself part of the entertainment value. What will he think of next? If the anticipation of that can get you through the awful lot of talk of the first 200 pages, the rest is a feat of mind-blowing adventure powered by deep existential questions.