Great news, another 900-page slab from Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Anathem) has landed on the bookstore shelves. Any new book by Stephenson is always an event. And with Stephenson, unlike other authors, you know that the book’s not that’s big because it’s been padded with blah.

At the meta level Fall, or Dodge in Hell is reported to be a sci-fi / fantasy mash-up, which I have no problem with, but even today such books do have a tendency to raise the hackles of defensive reviewers on ‘both sides’ of fandom. More mainstream readers may hanker for an abridged version, in these busy days. But, skimming the reviews, it seems that those who like it find it an enjoyable romp and not a slog despite the length.

From what I can gather from the initial reviews, by lightly skimming the plot mentions… a Seattle-based multi-billionare dies and is cryogenically frozen. He later ‘wakes’ to find the freezing paid off and he’s been uploaded to a digi-world of eternal digi-life. But, rather than a glittering post-human techno-topia that’s ‘The Present Re-made, Shinier and Sexier’… he apparently finds that the new world inevitably falls out along ingrained mythic high-fantasy lines, akin to Tolkien and Milton.

There are several covers for the book. The main one makes it look like one of those generic serial-killer horror books, and has a clipart crow and humdrum typography to boot. What were the publishers thinking of, there, as a cover for such a major author? But the ebook has an absolutely superb cover, one of the best I’ve seen in the last few years…

I very rarely “read in ebook and also skim”, and I certainly wouldn’t for a fine book like Stephenson’s earlier Anathem. But given the length here, and ‘virtual world’ themes that I don’t personally find all that alluring, I’m thinking that skimming may be a preferable alternative to what is going to be a very long audiobook.