The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)
by Neal Stephenson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Neal StephensonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-05-02
ISBN: 0553380966
Number of pages: 499
Publisher: Spectra
Book Reviews of The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)
Book Review: It coulda been a contender
Summary: 3 Stars
Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" is divided into equal-length "Part the First" and "Part the Second," which require two opposing ratings:
Part the First -- 5 stars, for a brilliantly-imagined and peopled alternate world
Part the Second -- 1 star, for a shallow, badly-acted, pulp-SF collection of cliches
In the Part the First, we learn how a near-magical, interactive Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is stolen from its rightful owner -- the brilliant nanotech artifexer John Hackworth, from a neo-Victorian community situated on an offshore island near Shanghai -- and ends up lifting its unintended recipient, the underprivileged girl Nell, out of her dismally violent family life. Here, Stephenson weaves the same magic as Lewis Carroll did in Alice in Wonderland, incorporating a biting, subversive children's story into an engrossing adult book. Stephenson artfully limns the social conventions of both western and Chinese cultures, capturing elaborately witty dialogues, devious social strategies and intricate psychological perspectives with near-perfect fidelity. His 22nd century world is a completely convincing, multi-threaded, total-immersion experience, which nearly compels the reader to keep turning the pages.
But in Part the Second, it all goes wrong. A fundamental premise of good science fiction is that there should be a single factor requiring suspension of disbelief; the rest of the fictional milieu should be solidly anchored on ground familiar to contemporary readers. In "The Diamond Age," the nanotech matter compilers, working from atomic feeds, are the "suspension of disbelief" item. Though violating every principle of energy conservation, once accepted, they conduct the reader into a beautifully articulated, internally consistent set of consequences for the boldly-sketched characters.
Unfortunately, from the first pages of Part the Second, the veiled sexuality of John Hackworth's neo-Victorian world is suddenly exchanged for crude biology-text descriptions of sexual excretions. These occur in the realm of the Drummers: semi-sentient, merged-minded humans living in underwater dirt-dauber nests, who spend their time in darkened caverns either fornicating or pounding on the walls. This ham-handed lurch into a bizarre netherworld is unerotic, tasteless, and incidentally disqualifies many teenaged readers who might benefit from the book's arcane vocabulary and bold neologisms. But worse, it's a blunder. As a plot device, the Drummers are silly, absurd; they fatally puncture Stephenson's carefully-crafted illusion, letting the air out of his 22nd century fable. But they are hardly the only defect of Part the Second.
In Part the First, brief excerpts quoted from the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer provide a window into the unconventional education which young Nell is receiving. However, in Part the Second, probably thirty pages are devoted to a discursive, repetitive shaggy-dog story involving logical mechanisms. Young Nell, improbably transformed into a computer geek, debugs a dozen different versions of the same Turing machine. This lengthy lacuna apparently sets up the geek-insider joke of crowning her as "Princess Nell, Duchess of Turing." The snarky title of nobility is so devoid of significance that it is never mentioned again.
As the conclusion approaches, all semblance of social artifice, conversational subtlety and psychological insight is dumped overboard. It almost seems that Stephenson either lost interest, or was racing the clock to meet a publisher's deadline. In any case, the lovingly-detailed characters from the early part of the book gradually shed their human qualities, in a manner which parallels that of Nell's four childhood pets. In a convention obviously borrowed from the cartoon strip Calvin & Hobbes, her wise, didactic "night friends" revert into mute stuffed animals in the daytime. Similarly, by the end of the book, the major characters have degenerated from complex, thoughtful human beings into plastic super-hero action figures. In the chaotic conclusion, all that holds the reader's interest is whether they will collide with each other, trip over the props, or whether the whole stage setting will explode, providing the ultimate copout ending for a lazy author (and this is very nearly what happens).
In particular, the long-foreshadowed encounter between Nell and her beloved Primer narrator and surrogate mother, Miranda, is disposed of (on the penultimate page) in six slapdash paragraphs, without a word being exchanged. It actually angered me: I waded through 500 pages, for THIS as a payoff? What a ripoff! What an insult!
After all the pointless sound and fury of its botched anticlimax, "The Diamond Age" can be seen clearly as a damaged jewel: a priceless diamond that was ruined on the grinding wheel by a master cutter who let his attention slip. Probably the best hope, should it adapted for film, is that a sensitive screenwriter can be found to excise the obscene graffiti, puerile indulgences, and malicious vandalism strewn through the latter part of the book by its own misguided or demotivated author.
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Summary of The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)
In Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson took science fiction to dazzling new levels. Now, in The Diamond Age, he delivers another stunning tale. Set in twenty-first century Shanghai, it is the story of what happens when a state-of-the-art interactive device falls in the hands of a street urchin named Nell. Her life?and the entire future of humanity?is about to be decoded and reprogrammed?John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually a super computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord Finkle-McGraw's daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling neo-Victorian society. But Hackworth loses the primer before he can give it to Fiona, and now the "book" has fallen into the hands of young Nell, an underprivileged girl whose life is about to change.
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