Read courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, Tor Books. It’s out in August 2024 (and also was published in 1996, if you can somehow get your hands on an original copy).

This book is amazing and the fact that Tor is reprinting it and I therefore found out about is a very, very good thing.

“The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post Police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be – all this you know.”
As first sentences go, that’s breathtaking.

It seems from Jo Walton’s introduction to this edition that the people who read The Fortunate Fall when it first came out all loved it… but that ‘all’ was super limited, for whatever reason. And that’s just an absolute tragedy, because this book should absolutely be seen as a classic and it should get read by everyone and it should be discussed in all the conversations that are had about gender, sexuality, AI interactions, the use and purpose of the media, human/animal interactions, medical ethics… and probably a whole bunch of other issues that I missed.

It was originally published in 1996, and certainly some of the technology feels a little dated; the idea of a dryROM is amusing, and moistdisks are fascinating and gross. But honestly (as Walton points out) it also feels incredibly NOW. The main character, Maya, is a ‘camera’; when she’s broadcasting, people can tune in and see what she sees, hear what she hears – and experience her memories and reactions as well. This is mediated by a screener, who basically works to help amplify or minimise parts of the experience, as well as doing the tech work behind the scenes. For all that it’s from the very early period of the internet, this aspect feels prescient in terms of using social media, the difficult lines between personal and big-business media, and a whole host of other things that, again, are being thought about and talked about now. Not to mention the question of how much we actually know someone from their public-facing presentation.

And really? this isn’t even the most meaty part of the story. There’s the relationship between Maya and Keishi; that could have been the whole book. There’s Pavel Voskresenye and his experiences with genocide, being experimented on, surveillance – which could also have been a whole book by itself. And the whale. It’s honestly hard to talk about everything that is packed into this book: and it’s not very long! The paperback is 300 pages! How does Reed manage to fit so much in, and still make me understand everything that’s going on, and bring it all together such that I know it doesn’t need a sequel, and I know Maya in particular more than she would be happy with – and it’s only 300 pages in length??

I want to shove this into the hands of basically everyone I know. And then, like Walton says in her introduction, we can all talk about the ending.