Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell, is a true doorstopper, clocking in at the better part of 1,000 pages. This would be of note for most novelists, but the hefty page count is business as usual for Stephenson, bestselling author of acclaimed and sweeping works of science fiction and fantasy. It’s been argued that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter these days, but Stephenson rightly points out that there is a hunger for immersive stories that require a big-time investment, hence the success of TV series like Game of Thrones and the continued market for hefty books like his own. That length feels particularly necessary here, since Stephenson’s protagonist, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast, lives more than a few lives by the book’s end. And that’s all after he dies in the opening chapters.

Longtime fans will remember Dodge from a previous novel, Reamde (2011), and though Stephenson says this book is “technically” a sequel, it’s a very different type of book. Where Reamde was more of a technothriller, Fall skews towards epic fantasy, complete with gods, magic, and quests.

To get there, one must start with Dodge’s death. After going under anesthesia for a routine medical procedure, something goes terribly wrong and Dodge dies. Heartbroken and reeling from his unexpected loss, his family and friends are forced to deal with a stunning complication. As a younger man, Dodge drew up a will saying he wished to have his brain uploaded into a computer, with the eventual goal of rebooting him, so to speak.

A laughable directive from most people, but Dodge was a billionaire, and given the advancements in the necessary technology made by the mysterious tech entrepreneur Elmo Shepherd, it’s enough to get Dodge’s brain in the cloud. And once he gets successfully turned on, more and more people want their brains scanned when they die. Depending on the state of technology when they were scanned, they may have vague ideas of who they were in life, different abilities. Given that it’s all happening online, the still-living can tune in and watch, and the show is something to see.

To get too specific would be to give too much away, so suffice it to say that the afterlife, here called “Bitworld,” takes more from ancient mythology and Paradise Lost than it does from science fiction. Like Dodge, Stephenson is inspired by Greek mythology, which posits that after someone dies, they drink the waters of Lethe and forget who they were. Stephenson thought that cosmology posed a great question for a story: What would happen if we developed a path to eternal life, but when we got there we didn’t remember ourselves?

Given that creation stories are ubiquitous across cultures, Stephenson had an inkling that they would be recreated in a digital afterlife. When Dodge is first flipped on, he is all alone, helpless and a blank slate, until he learns how to create a world around himself. As more and more people join him, they have their own ideas of what Bitworld should be, and their ideas don’t always mesh with Dodge’s. “The mythologies people bring with them into Bitworld, that are buried in their consciousness, aren’t just old religions,” says Stephenson. “It’s pop culture, it’s their favorite books and movies, and they recapitulate tropes and stories that feel familiar and right to them.”

As the novel progresses and the timeline in Bitworld takes over and turns to the fantastical, the timeline in the real world is all too recognizable. The online landscape has gone haywire to the extent that no one can agree on facts as basic as the existence of a city in Utah, a state of affairs he points out is not that unusual if you look at the entirety of human existence. And yet there is still hope to be had there, as the novel imagines what would happen if we no longer had to agonize over death. It seems unimaginable now, but as Stephenson points out, change happens fast. One day you’re picking up leaves on the way to the doctor’s office, the next day you’re dead, and the day after that you’re a god.

Chelsea Ennen is an editorial assistant at Kirkus Reviews.