| Title: | The Diamond Age or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer | |
| Author: | Neal Stephenson | |
| Rating: |  |
This is the second Stephenson book I've read this year, and I enjoyed it. My thanks to the people who recommended it to me when I asked about other Stephenson I should read.
The book takes place in the future, when nanotechnology has come to full fruition, and the ability to create just about anything from individual atoms (via a program and a device called a "matter compiler") is commonplace. The story revolves around several major characters, their actions, and their interactions. It has elements of hard science fiction, politics, and fantasy within it, and it's a pretty good mix.
We meet Nell - probably the most major of all the characters - as a child, when she is given an electronic book. This book wasn't made or intended for her, but it works for her just as well as it would have in it's intended recipient's hands, and she begins to learn from it. More specifically she learns all kinds of things about how to take care of herself on all levels, which is the book's designed in purpose. Other characters include the designer of Nell's book, the person providing the voice acting as she's reading the book, and several political figures who are pulling strings in various places.
The story changes point of view to these various characters, and includes passages from the primer, which mirror Nell's reality in more ways than she knows.
Most of the book is hard SF, and I found it well written. I hit one blunder in the science that I think Stephenson should have avoided, but it wasn't related to the plot in any way. (Stephenson's books are detail rich and thus he can get something wrong on a side track and it doesn't matter in the end.)
The largest problems with this book are the ambiguous ending, and the descent into fantasy. The ending is probably fine, but thanks to other complications in my life I read this book over a much longer time period than I usually would have, and possibly as a result the ending didn't hold up well. There are many threads to keep track of but they aren't all wound up nicely by the time the last page is turned. Many questions I would like to have seen answered weren't, and the various political implications are still opaque to me. But the descent into fantasy is where I had the most trouble, and I think it's not the only time Stephenson has done this sort of thing.
A few years back I read Snow Crash and had a similar complaint. In both books Stephenson creates complex, believable worlds full of interesting things and characters, and then adds in an element of the supernatural that I find distracting. In The Diamond Age it's more subtle, but it is present. It amounts to a mystical way to bypass the security measures protecting network data by use of the combined intellect of a large group of people. I am deliberately leaving that description vague so as not to ruin the book for others. In any event, I would have been been happier if he'd stayed in the hard SF genre and resolved the issues in less spiritual ways.
Even with those flaws, though, I found The Diamond Age to be a good read, with an interesting view of the future, good characters, and a plot that keeps moving. As with Zodiac, Stephenson's writing is light and easy, though his vocabulary is larger here and every so often I wanted a dictionary handy. If you like SF - and particularly if cyberpunk has a place in your heart - you will probably enjoy it.
