Review of "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson

This is sort of a sequel to Stephenson's Reamde, but only a little bit - some overlapping characters with back-stories from that book, and one or two from Cryptonomicon too. But it's a very different kind of book. Ream.de was very much an action thriller, whereas this is philosophical science fiction. Where Reamde is taut, this is a bit flabby, and sometimes I skimmed or had to force myself to keep reading. A shame, because the subject matter - uploading minds into a virtual world so that we can live after our physical-body death - is interesting and engaging. 

The virtual world here is more or less created, ex nihilo, by the eponymous Dodge (Richard Forthrast from the first book) after his mind is uploaded, and he then loses control over it as other minds join him there. Somehow the minds end up recapitulating the myths of ancient Mesopotamia (more or less) - remember that Stephenson was keen on that as far back as Snow Crash - and sometimes that just drags a bit. I lost track of some of the too-many characters at this point, and the way in which the virtual world was and was not constrained by the principles of physics started to get on my nerves. Glad I read it, and worth reading, but I do wish an editor had cut it by at least a third.