Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age"

A Surpassingly Strange and Surprisingly Believable Future

Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age or A Young Lady's Illustrated PrimerNew York: Bantam Books, 1995.
Review by Christopher Hunt

Almost a decade ago, when most of us were still mesmerized by William Gibson's dazzling vision of cyberspace, a far stranger view of the future could be found in a relatively unknown book called Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. Written by K. Eric Drexler, a professor of engineering at Stanford University, Engines of Creation describes a technology which can literally turn lead into gold. A technology which can harness the power of all of today's computers in a single palm-sized notebook. A technology that would change the world in ways we can't even begin to imagine.

Unlike Gibson's Neuromancer, Drexler's book wasn't a work of fiction, it was hard science and it was largely ignored -- even by scientists and engineers.

Until now.

As nanotechnology moves off the library shelves and into the forefront of scientific debate, the first novel to really explore the ramifications of this provocative and spectacular future technology has arrived -- Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. A brilliantly imagined, complex novel that is as educational as it is entertaining, Diamond Age makes Stephenson's acclaimed previous novel, Snow Crash, look like a clever cartoon for adolescents. If Stephenson vaulted onto the literary stage with Snow Crash, as the Los Angeles Reader proclaimed, then with Diamond Age, he has surely established himself as a literary master.

Where Snow Crash was perhaps the last of the great cyberpunk novels, Diamond Age establishes a whole new genre. More assured, more deftly realized, and far better for the brain than Snow Crash, Diamond Age takes the reader into a world surpassingly strange and surprisingly believable. A world without borders where people identify themselves not with now-defunct nation states but with cults, religious groups, political organizations, cultural organizations, corporations, tribes, ethnic groups, and other like-minded groups of individuals. A world where buildings grow themselves, theme parks arise from the waves like lost Atlantis, and where a little thete girl accidentally comes into possession of the most miraculous piece of technology in this miraculous world -- The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

A state-of-the-art interactive device designed for the granddaughter of an eccentric duke, the Primer is a unique combination of storybook, school, and subversion. Illegally copied by its creator, neo-Victorian, John Percival Hackworth, who wants to give a copy to his own daughter, the Primer is stolen and ends up in the hands of Nell, a young member of the tribeless underclass known as thetes.

One of the features of the Primer is its ability to tailor itself to its user, integrating its lessons with events in the real world. With the aid of the Primer, Nell soon begins to rise from her lowly station, traveling through an imaginary world on a quest that ultimately places in her hands the keys to the future. Hackworth, meanwhile, embarks on a quest of his own, searching for a shadowy figure known only as the Alchemist.

As he did in Snow Crash, Stephenson weaves an intricate web of eclectic characters and wickedly inventive sub-plots that keeps the reader ensnared to the very end. An end that, sadly, is flawed by an overdone effort to integrate and resolve the novel's many bizarre elements. The result is an unsatisfying fairy-tale ending. The dazzling world through which the reader has traveled seems suddenly irrelevant. It's almost as if Stephenson's super-charged imagination short-circuited as he struggled through the final chapters.

But he almost made it. And the trip he takes us on is well worth the effort, even if the destination isn't.