Decades into our future, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful Neo-Victorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called a young lady's illustrated primer, designed to raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. Unfortunately, for Hackworth, he loses his smuggled copy to a gang of street urchins in a mugging. One of the young thugs presents the primer to his little sister, Nell and suddenly her life - ...
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Decades into our future, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful Neo-Victorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called a young lady's illustrated primer, designed to raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. Unfortunately, for Hackworth, he loses his smuggled copy to a gang of street urchins in a mugging. One of the young thugs presents the primer to his little sister, Nell and suddenly her life - and perhaps the whole future of humanity - is about to be decoded and reprogrammed... vividly imagined, stunningly prophetic, and epic in scope, The Diamond Age is a major novel from one of the most visionary writers of our time.
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I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age." I've tried to get into cyberpunk before, and stumbled over jargon and scattered narratives. I was very pleased to find that all the slang or jargon that Stephenson wants to introduce you to is done within the first few pages, and he is a much more calm storyteller than many of his colleagues in the genre.
It's after you've gotten comfortable that he releases the deluge; there are so many themes and questions in this book that I'm going to have to read this again to begin to get a handle on all of the ideas he tosses around.
The chief, most obvious one is basically: how do you educate a young mind to think for itself and avoid mindless indoctrination without accidentally indoctrinating said young mind? That is where the book's subtitle (or the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer) comes in. Commissioned by an aristocrat for his granddaughter in the hopes that it will teach her independent thought and a flexible mind, a copy ultimately falls into the hands of the daughter of the engineer who executes the design of the primer, and another one ends up in the possession of Nell, a poor child living in an abusive home. Nell is our chief protagonist, and it is her trajectory that is followed most closely throughout the novel.
The primer is an advanced tool, involving actors ('ractors, from "interactors") to act out the situations put forth by the technology of the book, but the three girls all turn out quite differently. The novel has some ideas as to why, and this is where I found the interesting meat of the story, though there is so much more to find that different people will be sure to find other themes on which to chew.
I will definitely read this book again in order to see what else I can discover.
Easily one of Stephenson's best, one of my personal favorites. A richly detailed world, a huge cast of wonderful characters.
splene
Jul 26, 2007
better character development than Snow Crash
I liked the characters much better than in Snow Crash. I think Stephenson does a good job of capturing the setting (mental and physical) of Shanghai as a non-Asian, but also providing a vivid future portrait. I found some plot threads remained somewhat inadequately explained compared to others, but it is such a densely layered story that it probably is unavoidable.
Bytez
May 29, 2007
A Neo-Victorian Hackers Quest
Those familiar with Neal Stephenson's other books will of course gobble this novel up, for although it lacks the pace of Snow Crash it give us a glimpse of the a possible future that is tantalizingly seductive
Those not familiar however will be taken on a whirlwind adventure, exploring a future where nations no longer exist and humanity is split up into tribes (or phyles) and united by technology, where a book infused with nanotechnology can become a magical item to a young girl and change her life forever, and where a Victorian nanoprogrammer can be lost for years in a collective mind under the sea.
