Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

Acknowledgments

Eric Fahlman and Casey Little of Fahlman Olson & Little, PLLC are gratefully acknowledged for their patient and cheerful efforts to bring me up to speed on all matters related to wills, health care directives, per stirpes, and the bureaucracy of death in general.

Anyone who has read David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality will notice that Fall owes an intellectual debt to it. Anyone who hasn’t, but who found Fall interesting, is urged to do so.

Another source of ideas was a series of conversations over the years with Steve A. Wiggins, author most recently of Holy Horror: the Bible and Fear in Movies and of the blog Sects and Violence in the Ancient World. His area of specialization is the ancient city of Ugarit, which to make a long story short was an interesting place from a religious standpoint, sitting in the Venn diagram intersection of what we think of as Semitic and what we think of as Greek ideas about god(s), and in an interesting transitional phase between poly- and monotheism.

Some of the ideas mentioned in the Moab section of the book, under the heading of the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking, have been floating around for decades; Matt Blaze first mentioned them in my hearing under the name of the Encyclopedia Disinformatica, during the mid-1990s, at the Hackers Conference.

The term “Meatspace,” frequently used in this novel, appears to have been coined by Doug Barnes in 1993.

Finally, there have been various big-picture conversations over the years with George Dyson and Jaron Lanier that undoubtedly influenced this book.