The #1 NY Times bestselling author of Seveneves, Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon returns having a wildly inventive and entertaining science fiction thriller—Heaven Lost by way of Phillip K. Dick—that unfolds soon, in parallel worlds.

In his youth, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast founded Corporation 9592, a gaming company that produced him a multibillionaire. Right now in his middle years, Dodge appreciates his comfortable, unencumbered life, controlling his myriad business interests, and about Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel spending time with his beloved niece Zula and her young daughter, Sophia.

One beautiful autumn day, even though he undergoes a regimen surgical procedure, something moves irrevocably wrong. Dodge is pronounced brain deceased and placed on lifestyle support, leaving his stunned family members and close friends with challenging decisions. Long ago, when a very much younger Dodge drew up his will, he directed that his body be given to a cryonics organization now possessed by enigmatic tech business owner Elmo Shepherd. Legally bound to check out the directive despite their misgivings, Dodge’s family has his mind scanned and its own data structures uploaded and kept in the cloud, until it could eventually end up being revived.

In the coming years, technology allows Dodge’s brain to become turned back on. It really is an achievement that is nothing significantly less than the disruption of loss of life itself. An eternal afterlife—the Bitworld—is established, in which humans persist as digital souls.

But this brave new immortal world is not the Utopia it might first seem .

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell is normally pure, unadulterated fun: a grand theatre of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and fans, the finite and the eternal. In this exhilarating epic, Neal Stephenson boosts profound existential queries and details on the revolutionary breakthroughs that are transforming our future. Merging the technological, philosophical, and spiritual in one grand myth, he delivers a mind-blowing speculative literary saga for the modern age.