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A review by mburnamfink
The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
5.0
With The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson relentlessly imagines a world both strange and familiar, full of advanced technology and retrograde cultures, and gives fascinating responses to the twinned questions "What does it mean to raise a child?" and "What does it take to sustain a culture?"
In the near future, nanotechnology has become the infrastructure that sustains the world. Atoms and small molecules are individually arranged in every useful configuration, from processed food for the poor to subcellular 'mites which interface with the human nervous system and wages terrible wars in the open air. Nations, foremost the United States, shattered to pieces under the technological onslaught, leaving only the new artificial tribes or phyles, bound together by ideology and the bloody legalism of the Common Economic Protocol. The foremost phyle are the Neo-Victorians, who wield expert engineering, financial resources, and cultural discipline like knives from their artificial island enclaves.
The story centers around Nell, a poor and abused girl living in the shadow of Atlantis/Shanghai, who comes into contact with The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, an intelligent children's book created by a subversive Neo-Victorian Noble who wants to make his granddaughter's life 'interesting'. While Nell and the Primer are the heart, the story loops through all kinds of fascinating characters: Hackworth, the designer of the Primer and potential catalyst for another technological revolution; Miranda, a young actress who winds up raising Nell; Judge Fang, a Confucian from New York who consults the Venerable Colonel Sanders before important rulings; Carl Hollywood, a rancher turned theater producer; and any number of stranger cultures, cults, and sects. Cryptographic anarchists, psychedelic human computer clusters, software khans bound together by death-defying rites, augmented reality theater impresarios....
Stephenson makes two absolutely critical observations. To paraphrase, the first is that when it is possible to do anything, the only important question is what is worth doing. The second is that there are only two industries, the making of things and the entertaining of people. The stories that we tell ourselves and each other are key to understanding The Diamond Age and Stephenson's vision of culture. This is a weighty and thoughtful book, and it's all too easy to make the superficial mistake the Stephenson agrees with the Neo-Victorians, rather than finding them interesting. While their discipline and skill at emotional repression lets them dominate the world, they also import their most creative and innovative citizens, and fail to teach the structure of their culture to their children as opposed to the form. Nell's story, and her successes, is an indictment of the Neo-Victorians in general.
That said, there are some parts of this book which are a little troubling. Lots of the book's authorial statement is a slam at the degeneracy of 20th century politically correct morally relativist culture, which is similar to a bit in Cryptonomicon that totally misreads English Department culture. Stephenson may be a storyteller, but his home phyle is very much engineering. Second, The Diamond Age, is orientalist as all hell, with a kind of fortune cookie Confucianism put up as the best alternative to the hyper-Western style of the Neo-Victorians. Asian characters don't get a lot of their own story, even as they're the main victims and perpetrator of the violence at the end. And third, there are some Issues With Women (capital letters needed). Nell suffers a lot of harm and rises above it, while Miranda submerges her career and life in favor of a new kind of motherhood. I can't describe it precisely, but again and again women are sacrificed as the object of someone else's needs or desires. Sometimes literally, as with the Drummer's biomediated computation that ends in spontaneous human combustion.
And of course this wouldn't be Stephenson without some stylistic quirks, like the lack of a proper ending or lengthy digression on computer science. For all those complaints, in sheer force of imagination, in extrapolation from a wholly new technological premise with nanotechnology, and in the richness of its characters and setting, The Diamond Age is a triumph, and one of the best books of the 90s.
In the near future, nanotechnology has become the infrastructure that sustains the world. Atoms and small molecules are individually arranged in every useful configuration, from processed food for the poor to subcellular 'mites which interface with the human nervous system and wages terrible wars in the open air. Nations, foremost the United States, shattered to pieces under the technological onslaught, leaving only the new artificial tribes or phyles, bound together by ideology and the bloody legalism of the Common Economic Protocol. The foremost phyle are the Neo-Victorians, who wield expert engineering, financial resources, and cultural discipline like knives from their artificial island enclaves.
The story centers around Nell, a poor and abused girl living in the shadow of Atlantis/Shanghai, who comes into contact with The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, an intelligent children's book created by a subversive Neo-Victorian Noble who wants to make his granddaughter's life 'interesting'. While Nell and the Primer are the heart, the story loops through all kinds of fascinating characters: Hackworth, the designer of the Primer and potential catalyst for another technological revolution; Miranda, a young actress who winds up raising Nell; Judge Fang, a Confucian from New York who consults the Venerable Colonel Sanders before important rulings; Carl Hollywood, a rancher turned theater producer; and any number of stranger cultures, cults, and sects. Cryptographic anarchists, psychedelic human computer clusters, software khans bound together by death-defying rites, augmented reality theater impresarios....
Stephenson makes two absolutely critical observations. To paraphrase, the first is that when it is possible to do anything, the only important question is what is worth doing. The second is that there are only two industries, the making of things and the entertaining of people. The stories that we tell ourselves and each other are key to understanding The Diamond Age and Stephenson's vision of culture. This is a weighty and thoughtful book, and it's all too easy to make the superficial mistake the Stephenson agrees with the Neo-Victorians, rather than finding them interesting. While their discipline and skill at emotional repression lets them dominate the world, they also import their most creative and innovative citizens, and fail to teach the structure of their culture to their children as opposed to the form. Nell's story, and her successes, is an indictment of the Neo-Victorians in general.
That said, there are some parts of this book which are a little troubling. Lots of the book's authorial statement is a slam at the degeneracy of 20th century politically correct morally relativist culture, which is similar to a bit in Cryptonomicon that totally misreads English Department culture. Stephenson may be a storyteller, but his home phyle is very much engineering. Second, The Diamond Age, is orientalist as all hell, with a kind of fortune cookie Confucianism put up as the best alternative to the hyper-Western style of the Neo-Victorians. Asian characters don't get a lot of their own story, even as they're the main victims and perpetrator of the violence at the end. And third, there are some Issues With Women (capital letters needed). Nell suffers a lot of harm and rises above it, while Miranda submerges her career and life in favor of a new kind of motherhood. I can't describe it precisely, but again and again women are sacrificed as the object of someone else's needs or desires. Sometimes literally, as with the Drummer's biomediated computation that ends in spontaneous human combustion.
And of course this wouldn't be Stephenson without some stylistic quirks, like the lack of a proper ending or lengthy digression on computer science. For all those complaints, in sheer force of imagination, in extrapolation from a wholly new technological premise with nanotechnology, and in the richness of its characters and setting, The Diamond Age is a triumph, and one of the best books of the 90s.