That road, in usual Stephenson fashion, includes a wealth of concepts that help flesh out the near future of Fall-the one outside of Bitworld, at least. In shrinking and spacing out those returns to meatspace, the book begins to stall, and eventually unravels. In the world outside of Bitworld, little of that matters-but the more time spent in Bitworld, so too does that outside world matter less and less. Maybe it’s an ode to the power of collective storytelling, playing out how humans inevitably return to their own creation myths. Maybe it’s a repudiation of genre lines, showing purists that sci-fi and fantasy aren’t so different after all. Stephenson is going for something in this final third of the novel. Fall spends more and more of its time in Bitworld, watching its souls reshape the space in ways both archetypal and transgressive-until about halfway through, when the narrative balance tips, becoming a fantasy novel about a quest inside the still-evolving Bitworld.

Running Bitworld requires quantum leaps in quantum computing, and the world outside slowly turns into the engine running Bitworld.Īs does the book. It stumbles from infancy into pubescence, with Bitworld (and its denizens) slowly gathering power and fidelity throughout the book until it becomes a death-haven for those able to afford it. In Stephenson's hands, that innovation is very much in progress. The uploaded mind is a well-loved trope in sci-fi, but it's often treated as a 'hey, humans can do this now' sort of innovation.

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