Oof, yeah, I think Fall is a mess. I really enjoyed about half of the book, from the dystopian near future America to the machinations of people trying to navigate uploading consciousness to the cloud. But most of the mythmaking and virtual world building left me cold, and the final quarter of the book, the “grand adventure” is about as poor a section of Stevenson’s work as I’ve ever read. Characters are non-existent, and their exploration of the world doesn’t feel like it ties into any interesting questions. I’ve been a huge Neal Stevenson fan since 1995, but this book did to me what Metallica’s last album did; it convinced me that buying the newest product by my former favorites is no longer a sure thing.
In other news, I have put down Wanderers, by Chuck Wendig. About 250 pages in, I realized I was not interested in any of the characters, and the plot development was preceding slowly enough that it wasn’t pulling me along. Because it is consciously aping Stephen King in subject and style, I was constantly comparing it, and it did not do well by comparison. King does an amazing thing, where he goes into detail about minor characters ideas and dreams and thoughts in a way that somehow manages to be compelling; you will be introduced to a new person and then have pages and pages of their inner life laid out, and because he’s such a good storyteller, it works. Wendig attempts this but cannot pull it off, so there are long-ish chapters of the inner lives of boring, fairly standard characters. I’m realizing that while Chuck Wendig seems decent at moving things forward and telling a basic story, there’s nothing to recommend about his characters or his plot beats. Overall he seems pretty hacky, in that nothing and no one is particularly unique or interesting, and things proceed in fairly standard ways.