Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell is a speculative fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 2019.

Its central figure is Richard Forthrast, known as Dodge, who made a fortune from a gaming company and who is declared brain-dead after a routine medical procedure. His family finds that his will asks for his body to be preserved cryonically so that his brain can be scanned later, and the scan is carried out, leaving a digital copy of the connections in his brain saved as data. The novel then follows the world that comes after: years in which portable augmented reality becomes ordinary, personal information is shared and fought over in public, and the project of reviving scanned minds becomes a business with its own politics and its own arguments about what it is doing. What Dodge experiences inside the system becomes a second narrative, and the book moves between the two.

Stephenson has written novels about cryptography, money and the history of science, and this one returns to a character from his earlier book Reamde.