RSSStore Is Open, visit the Gallery
- ISBN: 978-0553380965
- Title: The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
- Author: Stephenson, Neal
- Publisher: Bantam Spectra, New York
- Year: 1995
- Pages: 499
- Purchase Link
The Diamond Age is a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, set as a logical progression from a capitalist-anarchist society outlined in his previous novel, Snow Crash
I rate it highly as a formative work for my own writing, higher than Snow Crash, for it deals with a wider range of social structures, more advanced technological evolutions, and follows a more downtrodden and personable protagonist.
Whereas the global political structure in Snow Crash was dominated by sovereign business franchises, in The Diamond Age, power structures have evolved into “phyles” or tribes, distinguished by ethics, culture, political views, and ethnic backgrounds. These phyles are loosely sintered by the Common Economic Protocol, a series of regulations ensuring individual economic rights.
The four most powerful phyles are the Han, consisting of the Han Chinese, The Neo-Victorian New Atlantis phyle, an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon culture, Nippon, consisting of the Japanese, and Hindustan, a less clearly defined phyle of Hindu Indians in a riotously diverse coalition of microtribes.
Although these phyles posses geographic strongholds, many regions around the globe are splintered into enclaves possessing all these and more phyles, especially the great cities of London, New York, Shanghai, etc…
These regions, in particular, have been greatly modified by the technologies of what is described as The Diamond Age, an epoch on the level of the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. Due to strides in nanotechnology, society is reconstructed on a molecular level. Diamond is constructed as a cheap resource, nanorobots “grow” massive infrastructure, and wars are fought on the wind, with unseen manufactured molecules delving into the body, wreaking havoc.
The main protagonist of the novel, Nell, is a thete girl (without a tribe), living in the Leased Territories, a lowland slum belt on the artificial, diamondoid island of New Chusan, located offshore from the mouth of the Yangtze River, northwest of Shanghai.
She is of the lowest class in society, as reflected in her lack of education, and the frequent physical and emotional abuse inflicted by her mother, Tequila, and Tequila’s frequently changing boyfriends.
Nell’s life is forever changed by a gift from her older brother, Harv. Harv robs a Neo-Victorian carrying a very special piece of technology, called “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.” It is an advanced nanocomputer in the shape and function of a book, intended as an educational device for a young Neo-Victorian girl of high social status.
The book bonds with Nell, and educates her into a subversive and highly intelligent individual, capable of transcending her plight. She comes to love the book, and eventually discovers that there is a person behind the book, a “ractor,” Miranda, who has effectively raised Nell through her childhood, unseen, but giving voice and emotion to the characters in her evolving book. Though the two are incapable of meeting through the book, they devote themselves on a quest to find one another.
However, the book itself is part of a larger plot, in which the engineer of the technology, John Percival Hackworth, must extricate himself from the misdeed of stealing a copy of the technology for his own daughter, while exposing the technology to elements of the Celestial Kingdom, a phyle expounding eastern culture while eschewing the west.
Hackworth becomes the center focus of a struggle between eastern and western ideologies, personified by warring phyles, while Nell, in her search of the ractor Miranda, becomes the unwitting figurehead of a middle way.
Found this page useful? Check out my new book, My Travels with Eos, or visit my gallery for prints
Leave a Comment: (