The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

In the near future, widespread deployment of full-strength encryption has eliminated the government's ability to tax--and governments have ceased to exist. Instead, affiliations have sprung up--along racial, philosophical, and interest-based lines. The 'Feed' provides a subsistance living for everyone, but strong rights-management puts a premium on those who can imagine and create new things. As a reaction to the permissive ways of the 20th century, new Victorianism rules over much of the western world--and a reborn Middle Kingdom controls China. When a neo-Victorian Equity Lord hires John Hackwood to create something unique for his granddaughter--something that will challenge her despite the stuffy environment her parents insist upon, Hackwood decides on a hack--he'll make an unauthorized copy for his own daughter, letting her have the same opportunities normally only available to one of society's elite. But his duplicate, the YOUNG LADY'S ILLUSTRATED PRIMER, falls into the hands of an impoverished girl--Nell. The YOUNG LADY'S ILLUSTRATED PRIMER is a book, but advanced nanotechnology means that the book can talk, can interact and create new stories to meet the reader's need, can defend itself, can teach, and can create a virtually infinite number of sub-books within itself. It is the complete education--and provides a challenge to Nell. She needs to find the twelve keys that will open the castle and free her brother. The result is certain to be sad, but Nell sets off on her quest, spending her childhood and young adulthood with the book, both creating and being created by it. Author Neal Stephenson creates a fascinating near-future universe. The neo-Victorian reaction Stephenson sees is certainly a far cry from the ugly and fearful one in America today, but Stephenson's vision does provide some hope. In 1995 when the book was first published, nano-technology was much less known than today but Stephenson's understanding still seems valid. The philosophical war between the 'feed' and the 'seed' remains a backdrop to the story, but it's a fascinating topic. So is Stephenson's vision of China's future--a decade after THE DIAMOND AGE was written, it is increasingly obvious that China is an awakening giant, as Stephenson had projected. By combining powerful technology insights, intriguing characters, philosophical conflict, and social dynamics, Stephenson delivers a truly fascinating book. THE DIAMOND AGE remains fresh and relevant more than a decade after it was written.

This novel is one of the most outstandingly original works of science fiction that I have had the good fortune to read. Stephenson's futurescape, while not entirely believable (what Sci Fi future can make that claim, anyway?) is fresh and richly described.Most enjoyable about this book is Stephenson's stark contrast of his setting - a completely technologically dependent future - with the predominant cultures he presents. His depiction of the struggles and compromises between this future and the antiquated Victorian (newly revived) and Mandarin (staunchly preserved) cultures is, to my mind, the highlight of the book.Like many of the other reviewers, my interest in Science Fiction was revived by The Diamond Age. The strains of fantasy in the form of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer as well as the characteristic feature technology (nanotech) appealed to my Inner Geek while the sociological and philosophical aspects spoke to the Intellectual Adult Reader in me.The Diamond Age is highly engaging thought-fuel. I recommend it to anyone who loves or once loved Science Fiction.

For months now I have been slogging through volumes of mediocre science fiction/fantasy, watching and waiting for that one, elusive, world class work. This is it. While the plot revealed itself slowly through the first half of this book, it remained engaging, and by the time I roared to the finish I was actively grieving the completion of the "read". "More! More!", I was screaming. This incredibly entertaining, future view of the world with competing phyles and nanotech warriors so abundent that they swirl through the air like pollen has placed this book near the very top of my all-time best books list. And for all the techno-babble and cyber-backdrop, what most carried the book forward was that Stephenson brilliantly developed the main characters. I really cared what happened to Nell, Miranda, Hackworth, etc. Their victories were my victories, their failures saddened me. Take "Snow Crash" and give it more depth, refinement, meaning, and maturity. Then you'll have this satisfying book in your hands. Tim Powers, move over, Neal Stephenson has just become my favorite author!

A dense, difficult, and absolutely brilliant book if you can stay with it long enough to put the author's multitudinous threads together. The central character, Nell, one of the most sympathetic and triumphant characters in recent fiction, is a street child into whose hands falls a "young ladies' primer," a highly interactive computer/book designed to provide a basic education for a neo-Victorian girl. The central question of the novel: can it give Nell the tools to survive in a brutally violent world?One clue to help the patient reader: the Grimmsian darkness of the fantasy world inside the book is intended to mirror Nell's real world, and grows in complexity as Nell herself grows up. Of course, being a Stephenson plot, everything is more than it seems. For one thing, the book requires an actor to fill in the storybook continuity, and this actor becomes Nell's surrogate mother. Her efforts to find Nell constitute one of several subplots that converge to a breathtaking climax. Another clue lies in Stephenson's past as a computer programmer. It helps going into the book to know what a Turing machine is and why it's important, for example. Stephenson peppers the reader with allusions, allegory, and in-jokes (readers of his previous novel Snow Crash will recognize one of that novel's heroines in an ironically funny side character) which can be frustrating for a reader smart enough to recognize them but without the background to grasp their significance. I won't spoil it for the reader, but Nell's epiphany, toward the end of the book, when her primer and her real world come together in an utterly harrowing fashion, comes suddenly in a scene which brought me literally out of my chair cheering. It is the intensity of this scene which makes the succeeding chapters, where Stephenson provides closure for the remaining plot threads, have an anticlimactic feeling over which some other reviewers have grumbled. In short, the book makes the reader work, but the reward is commensurate with the effort. Ideas and people in it will reverberate in your head for months.

In the genre of literature that is well over a decade into its Renaissance, this is an important book among important books -- an importance that by definition will not confined to the boundaries of the science fiction world. With The Diamond Age, Or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, a remarkably mature Neal Stephenson offers us a vision of our own future, one all too recognizable and believable. Technology and culture collide, race ceases to matter as a means of predicting (or affecting) human behavior, nanotechnology redefines the word "make," while reshaping our daily lives, and the world's peoples, no longer able to distinguish each other by skin color, group themselves into phyles based on shared cultural and moral values, historical tradition, and dress. It's an around-the-corner mid-twenty-first century greater Shanghai. A young thete girl named Nell is destined to become one of the shapers of an even newer, wondrous future when a fantastically sophisticated "primer," a powerful computer in the shape of a book designed to educate young Victorian ladies -- as well as encourage subversion -- unintentionally falls into her hands. The Primer was designed by nanotech engineer John Hackworth (Stephenson's penchant for a nom de pun for his protagonist is slaked once again), an intuitive genius unaware of the extent of his own talents. Nell's life, and the entire world, will never be the same. A hauntingly beautiful book, The Diamond Age exhibits a respectable understanding of Chinese culture, demonstrates in a most original fashion the indispensablity of an ever-present mother in raising a psychologically healthy child (as well as the crucial importance of psychologically healthy children to the future of mankind), and provides insight into questions of law and justice in cultural as well as advanced technological contexts. All of these themes are cradled within a masterfully woven plot, elevated by a brilliant, yet subtle sense of humor. Trascending the argument about how much books like William Gibson's Neuromancer and Nancy Kress' Beggars in Spain either predicted or shaped the near-future they described, The Diamond Age not only shows us, but prepares us for what is in store. Fans of Stephenson's previous novel, Snow Crash, will be both shocked and delighted. A must-read for sci-fi lovers, newcomers to the genre, and armchair social/moral theorists