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The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)

Spectra

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Average customer rating: 4 stars

Kindle version MUST be edited

I am positive that this book is a masterwork of science fiction that readers have come to expect from Stephenson, but I must submit this one star review in the hope that the Kindle version of the book gets some desperately needed attention from an editor. There are so many typographical errors in this book that, having read roughly halfway through, I have gotten fed up to the point of having put my Kindle down mid-sentence on more than one occasion. These are mostly scanning errors - the words "man," "men" and "mat" appear so often in the place of "than," "then" and "that," that I have begun to make the corrections automatically as I read. Is it really so much to ask that someone go through and bring this product to the level that one would expect from a printed book? Sorry I couldn't review this book for its obvious merits as a great work of storytelling, but I just can't get over how horrible it is to read this unfinished garbage on the Kindle.

Endless spelling mistakes..

There is no need for me to add to the excellent literary reviews of this fine work by Neal Stephenson; quality to which we have become accustomed. My gripe is with Penguin who, unless there is some repetitive downloading glitch with this particular file, have permitted this book onto the virtual store shelf with an unacceptable number of spelling mistakes. The editor responsible clearly did not read the proof at all. This makes for somewhat irritating reading which a tale of this calibre does not deserve. Shame on you, Penguin!

The science fiction novel of the 21st century

If Nineteen Eighty Four told the story of the 20th century, The Diamond Age tells the story of the 21st. For many of us, unfortunately, the story was written and published before its time, making it difficult to grasp the depth of its message. It's only after returning to it three to four times, and later reading it randomly and piecemeal, that I can now say I fully realize what the story is about. It is not about nanotechnology.

In the late 21st century, decades after the events of Snow Crash depicting the collapse of the sovereignty of the United States, the Anglo-American elite has reformed its society under a corporate monarchy, and lives in enormous gated communities, claves, where they hide away women and children while the men commute into the wasteland of sovereignty to engage in commerce with other societies. This commercial system is known as the Common Economic Protocol, a system of multilateral law that preserves the peace amongst the migrating societies and tribes of the world.

Nanotechnology is the source of the Victorians' wealth, but it is also what makes possible the existence of a large, dangerous underclass of tribe-less "thetes" who survive on free handouts and the occasional criminal act. Nanotechnology has reduced the cost of commodities to nothing, and in so doing has completely eliminated material poverty. However, and this is the fundamental point of the story, spiritual, cultural and social poverty still exists.

Our heroine Nell is born a thete, having the curse of a morally unscrupulous single mother. By her good fortune she is bonded with a secret project aimed at educating the next generation of Victorian leadership, the primer. As the story progresses, the primer teaches her to become a bona fide warlord, and the finale so many decry as unresolved is nothing less glorious and world-shattering than her ascent through blood and fire as the queen of an entirely new synthetic nation, while the last remaining sovereign nation-state, China, collapses into anarchy. With the collapse of China, the transformation from the Westphalian world of sovereign states to the Common Economic Protocol world of anarcho-capitalism is completed, and a centuries-long chapter of human history is closed.

Stephenson's principal subject throughout the story is security, from protecting little thete girls from bullies or her own parents, to the peculiar threats posed by nanotech terrorism and the necessary counter-measures, and the ultimate threat, a drug-like, slave-like assimilation by a blissful human hive mind. Tribeless men are defenseless against such a monster, but any society with sufficient organization can protect its members from it. The question remains, why should someone come to your aid? In a world of shattered nations, ethnicity and culture count for a lot, but Stephenson also explores tribes who share common professions, guilds of sorts, and a Reformed Distributed Republic which relies on a life-threatening trust building exercise (the equivalent of falling backwards into someone's arms with the risk of death should they not perform their role) as a substitute for more fundamental bonds. Cultural greatness ultimately matters most, and when software and the material world have merged, this means the future leaders need a thorough education in computer science as much as they need to know mathematics.

It is a strange world, a frightening world, but in many ways a more beautiful one and a freer one. I expect we will soon be living in it.

The ending was disappointing

I only read the one star reviews, and this is a response to them. For the most part I completely agree that the ending fell apart. It would have been more interesting to focus on Hackworth than Nell, or even Dr. X. Nevertheless, The ideas and concepts in the book were so fantastic and other-worldly; the conglomerate mind of the Drummers-- which was indeed a little nonsensical and perhaps gratuitous-- was really far out. I absolutely loved most of the book, and while it did have some flaws, there are few science fiction books that are as fresh and interesting as this one.

the virtualisation of culture

This book generated many ideas, and left me with much to think about.

However I found the end very unsatisfactory, with none of the ideas brought to a satisfactory conclusion, all of the themes left undeveloped, and with the sense that the author had written himself into a dead end.

The virtualisation of culture seems to me to be a real step that history will take: the ambiguity of the relationship between culture and land almost certainly a battle that will be fought out.

The book is played out against this backdrop, and the heroine appeared for most of the book to hold the authors endgame in this regard: he sacrificed this at the very end for a search for family and identity.

These two things are not unrelated, but the former should have held precedence, and was left unresolved.