Нил Стивенсон - Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

Sophia’s finger had already strayed to the island of Calla (she had heard this story a hundred times) and come to rest on a castle rising from the top of a green hill. “Hello, giant!” she said. “I see you!” For the artist had cleverly drawn the hill so that if you looked at it the right way you could see it as a hill-giant curled up on the ground sleeping.

“Ssh, you’ll wake it up!”

“That’s not what it says in the book!”

“All right. After King Brindle gave his life for the Quest, Paralonda Bufrect was the rightful queen of Calla. But she had no desire to rule and so she passed the crown to Prince Anvellyne.”

“His friends called him Lyne,” Sophia informed him gravely.

“And King Anvellyne ruled wisely over Calla with Mardellian as his closest friend, adviser, and…”

“Magician!”

“Mard the One-Handed became a wizard, yes. Together they saw to it that…”

Sophia’s finger had already strayed north to a cottage surrounded by livestock. A white-haired woman was shown carrying a bushel of wheat on her hip. “Edda!”

“…that Edda the Giantess was made to feel welcome whenever she chose to stay alone in her cottage. But she loved to wander back and forth between there and…”

Sophia’s finger made a huge swipe eastward across Bits and Shivers and Bewilderment to a golden glen in the mountains not far from a towering black fortress.

“Yes,” said Dodge, “the glen where she loved to spend time with her mother and her grandmother.”

A wild look came into Sophia’s eyes and she looked up into Dodge’s face. “How tall is a giantess, Uncle Dodge?” she asked, as if she did not ask the same question every single day.

“As tall as she wants to be,” said Dodge.

Eric Fahlman and Casey Little of Fahlman Olson & Little, PLLC are gratefully acknowledged for their patient and cheerful efforts to bring me up to speed on all matters related to wills, health care directives, per stirpes, and the bureaucracy of death in general.

Anyone who has read David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality will notice that Fall owes an intellectual debt to it. Anyone who hasn’t, but who found Fall interesting, is urged to do so.

Another source of ideas was a series of conversations over the years with Steve A. Wiggins, author most recently of Holy Horror: the Bible and Fear in Movies and of the blog Sects and Violence in the Ancient World. His area of specialization is the ancient city of Ugarit, which to make a long story short was an interesting place from a religious standpoint, sitting in the Venn diagram intersection of what we think of as Semitic and what we think of as Greek ideas about god(s), and in an interesting transitional phase between poly- and monotheism.

Some of the ideas mentioned in the Moab section of the book, under the heading of the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking, have been floating around for decades; Matt Blaze first mentioned them in my hearing under the name of the Encyclopedia Disinformatica, during the mid-1990s, at the Hackers Conference.

The term “Meatspace,” frequently used in this novel, appears to have been coined by Doug Barnes in 1993.

Finally, there have been various big-picture conversations over the years with George Dyson and Jaron Lanier that undoubtedly influenced this book.

NEAL STEPHENSONis the bestselling author of the novels The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland), Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning… Was the Command Line .

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland)

Seveneves

Some Remarks

Reamde

Anathem

The System of the World

The Confusion

Quicksilver

Cryptonomicon

The Diamond Age

Snow Crash

Zodiac

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

FALL; OR, DODGE IN HELL. Copyright © 2019 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Cover design by Owen Corrigan

Cover photograph © plainpicture/Design Pics/Philippe Henry

Maps by Nick Springer/Springer Cartographics LLC

Title page and section opening art from Now Night Her Course Began by Gustave Doré (1832–33)/Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design/Bridgeman Images

Names: Stephenson, Neal, author.

Title: Fall; or, Dodge in hell : a novel / Neal Stephenson.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, [2019]

Identifiers: LCCN 201900947| ISBN 9780062458711 (hardback) | ISBN 9780062458728 (paperback) | ISBN 9780062887467 (large print) | ISBN 9780062458735 (ebook)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Technological. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | GSAFD: Science fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3569.T3868 F35 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002947

Digital Edition JUNE 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-245873-5

Version 05212019

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-245871-1

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