Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

What a different and interesting tale. It spans decades in the lives (and post-deaths) of the characters who developed a method for digitizing the brain and then booting up that brain as a "process" in a virtual world. The inhabitants there don't quite remember their lives before, for the most part. Dodge is the first person to undergo this, and as such he creates the new world to be similar to gaming worlds he designed in life. A competitor who wanted to be the first to accomplish this forces his way into being involved, and wants to take over the project. Decades go by and ultimately this competitor dies and his brain pattern is uploaded into a now formed and populated virtual world. He has the ability to take over the world and becomes a vicious ruler who expels Dodge and his original "Pantheon" into a separate part of the world. But they discover how to get back by using teleportation through the underlying "chaos" of the world, and a mythic quest begins to unseat the usurper. The latter part of the book concerns itself mostly with the quest and not with the real world. Ultimately Dodge and his friends succeed and the people of the virtual world can live in peace, with few realizing that there is "another plane of existence" that they came from. For the most part a 3-star book but I'm giving it 4 for being unusual & not a run-of-the-mill novel.