A review by courtney_mcallister
The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter
4.0
The Fortunate Fall is a weird book, but it's wonderfully weird. Carter manages to create a cyberpunk dystopian setting that doesn't overshadow the intense psychological drama that drives the novel towards its devastating conclusion. Even though Maya has a skull full of sockets and chips, she is intensely, almost unbearably, relatable.
From the very first chapter, I was swept up in the torrent of Carter's prose. She immerses the reader into this world in medias res and never really pauses for breath. The only section with pacing issues is in the last third, where a verbose, philosophical/political treatise gets a bit tiring. Otherwise, Carter keeps things compact and tense. In fact, the logistics of the world, and how it came to exist, are not fully explained. We get snippets of backstory, but since Maya's own past is mysteriously barricaded by her suppressor chip, her perspective doesn't gravitate towards historicity.
My favorite aspect of The Fortunate Fall is the inter-relationship between telepresence (multi-sensory voyeurism enabled by living cameras like Maya) and literature itself. Carter doesn't get didactic, but there's a compelling meta discourse embedded in the parallel between the reader's absorption of Maya's narrative and the mass consumption of that perspective that occurs through telepresence. The Fortunate Fall is not a happy, comforting book, but it is rich, multifaceted, and fantastically troubling.
From the very first chapter, I was swept up in the torrent of Carter's prose. She immerses the reader into this world in medias res and never really pauses for breath. The only section with pacing issues is in the last third, where a verbose, philosophical/political treatise gets a bit tiring. Otherwise, Carter keeps things compact and tense. In fact, the logistics of the world, and how it came to exist, are not fully explained. We get snippets of backstory, but since Maya's own past is mysteriously barricaded by her suppressor chip, her perspective doesn't gravitate towards historicity.
My favorite aspect of The Fortunate Fall is the inter-relationship between telepresence (multi-sensory voyeurism enabled by living cameras like Maya) and literature itself. Carter doesn't get didactic, but there's a compelling meta discourse embedded in the parallel between the reader's absorption of Maya's narrative and the mass consumption of that perspective that occurs through telepresence. The Fortunate Fall is not a happy, comforting book, but it is rich, multifaceted, and fantastically troubling.