The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

In a post-national world of primarily economic tribes, a young tribeless girl named Nell receives a stolen book as a gift. This book, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is in fact a dazzling work of nanotechnology which guides Nell's education as she lives through a period of upheaval in China and its artificial neighbour, the manufactured islands of New Chusan. The book was created by an engineer named John Hackworth, and as Nell's star rises so his falters, setting him on a ponderous quest to find a man called the Alchemist.

Like many of Neal Stephenson's books, The Diamond Age - which I got as an audio book, read by Jennifer Wiltsie, is less a single narrative and more a collection of stories building towards a conceptual conclusion. It is as much about the nanotechnology of their world and the potential revolution embodied in the development of a 'seed' which would permit unmonitored nanotechnological use as it is about Nell and John, and much more about the potential political ramifications of such technologies than their technical specifics. It has many more discussions of cultural and philosophical mores than of emotions, and in many places reads more like a history than a novel. Consequently, it is always more interesting than involving.

As with Snow Crash, I was struck by the 90sness of Stephenson's cultural portrayals, in particular a China more regressing into the 19th century than emerging from Communism, and a slightly piecemeal depiction of Confucianism. I don't think it can be called racism, especially given that the same regressive tendency is depicted in the Anglo-American Neo-Victorians; it is more that Stephenson appears to see a return to pre-information age social structures as a natural consequence of the collapse of the technologies which made them obsolete.

Wiltsie's reading is good. Many audiobook readings suffer from a coolness necessitated by maintaining a clear reading voice, but the nature of this book means that wild emotionality would be out of place anyway. For me, the decision to pronounce primer as 'primmer' was distracting, but that's personal.