Fall, or Dodge in Hell

I quite enjoyed Neal Stephenson's latest novel, which is a return to his Snow Crash days of mixing technological advancements with Biblical mythology.  It also serves to highlight the worst problems and excesses that are typical of Stephenson's writing.

This novel combines transhumanist notions of The Singularity, life-extension, and post-humanity with the Book of Genesis.  As in most of Stephenson's works, there are good guys and bad guys, with the good guys being individualistic and reality-oriented, and the villains being authoritarian and preferring a weird quasi-religious techno-communism that is also, bizarrely, rather anti-technology.  There are also numerous sub-stories involving telepresence robots, visits to decayed sectors of America, a nuclear bombing scare, and the interaction of prosthetics and the human brain.  In other words, it's a typical Neal Stephenson novel.  Oh, and Enoch Root is in it.

The technological vision is, as always, fascinating, but toward the end the plot progression breaks and everything degenerates into a mindless action sequence which, in a movie, would have an immense special effects budget.  And then it just sort of . . . ends, and none of the ideas in the novel are really resolved.

My suspicion is that the reason why his novels end this way is that Stephenson is unable or unwilling to explicitly name the fundamental motivating principles of his good guys and bad guys.  He does an amazing job with characterizing the sides and building up the conflict and motivations, but at the point in the novel when it would be appropriate to cash in on the build-up he falters, shies away, and slaps on a Standard Action Movie Ending that feels like it belongs on a completely different book.

It smacks of a refusal to commit; a preference for a quasi-academic detachment that gives one the license to say anything without being criticized for meaning anything in particular.  As long as ideas remain floating allusions, metaphors, and allegories instead of being nailed down by explicit, stated terminology, there isn't much that anyone can say.  Attempts to argue can be effortlessly evaded by claiming some other intended meaning or none at all.  It is a request not for one's conscious agreement, but to smuggle some half-understood, partially-baked notions into one's subconscious.

It's an approach that is fundamentally at odds with the notion that to be a "good guy" means to be rational and reality-oriented.  It comes across as a declaration that while mysticism doesn't work and has to be rejected if one wishes to function as a human being, Stephenson still really, really wishes this weren't so.  It is a reluctant, embarrassed acceptance of rationality on the pragmatic grounds that it works, but it's also a fallen, broken, miserable substitute for an impossible, but still ultimately desirable, transcendence.