Neal Stephenson: Fall

The dust jacket notes for Fall position it as a sequel to Reamde, and, indeed, for the first fourteenth or so of the book that's just what it is, as the initial part of what is covered on the jacket blurb is worked through. But then, on page 69, the name Waterhouse pops up, and then "Waterhouse-Shaftoe", which tells an attentive reader that this is Cryptonomicon territory. About a chapter later this is confirmed with a museum which implies that Randy got quite a lot of information out of Enoch Root regarding the past once they all got back to safety.

Of course, this could be the typical SF writer brain worm, where it turns out that R. Daneel Olivaw is behind the Foundation, or that Jubal Harshaw is chatting with Lazarus Long, the urge to combine previously unconnected universes. It's not: the developing social context in meatspace pretty thoroughly excludes the Snow Crash and The Diamond Age continuity.

As an aside, a reader who had read only Reamde wouldn't be too adrift, although they'd be somewhat puzzled by Enoch Root, and wouldn't get some of the bits of humour regarding his references to his background.

Root is the only character directly linking Cryptonomicon and Fall. (We never see Randy or Amy in propria persona; I have my suspicions about who they may be in the secondary world.). Early on, he provides a context-setting statement for the whole arc from the Baroque Cycle to Fall:

"I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible - states of affairs removed from them in place and time - ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along."

The extended Baroque Cycle was an optimistic work, a chronicle of a rising arc from a pre-Newtonian world to a bright-side view of the dot-com boom: the key texts being Daniel Waterhouse's metaphor of the understanding of the world as a ship passing in reverse time order from the aftermath of a storm to a clear sunny day, and Avi's / Goto Dengo's resolution to eradicate the possibility of abuses of human rights of the type associated with World War II.

Snow Crash and its successor, The Diamond Age, present a fragmented world of distributed micro-states which feels like some sort of at least potential improvement over the old nation-states. The "real world" of this book is very different: the fragmentation in Ameristan is a set of steps backwards, an amplification of today's fake news into a world where people can believe that a thriving town a few miles away had been obliterated in a nuclear explosion twelve years before without ever going to check on it.

It can be a bit of a shock to remember that when Cryptonomicon was published Clinton was still President of the United States and the Red State / Blue State meme popularised by David Brooks' "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" had not yet come into existence. Whatever continuation into the future Stephenson might have been contemplating for that continuity at that time it would assuredly not have been this one, along this particular axis.

The second obvious major theme, the habitation of virtual reality, has been a continuous interest of Stephenson's since Snow Crash with its metaverse. This picks up and plays with alternative models of uploading minds.

A third ongoing concern of Stephenson's, less obvious in previous books, is the coordination of religion (or at least mysteries unmappable by science, if we want to rope in the Philosopher's Stone) and science. Enoch Root raises the question just by being there, and the developing history of the simulation inside the book picks up on and juggles elements of both Hellenic and Hebraic mythologies.

Reamde was slightly atypical Stephenson - more a pure technothriller - and there's elements of that sort of storytelling here as well, especially as we get to the latter part of the book. Overall, though, it's classic Stephenson, full of ideas and digressive detail.

It even has an ending, or pair of endings, which tidy up some loose ends and bring us, in a way, pleasingly back to the beginning.