I get the feeling that Stephenson's writing process goes something like this:

Hey, I found a really cool idea here. I wonder what I can do about it....

He then writes about 200 pages of really awesome, meticulous world-building, with innovative ideas about, in the case of this book, the possibly uses of nanotechnology and its eventual social ramifications, and then goes, Oh, damn, I'm writing a story, and high-tails it to the end of the book, leaving the reader a little wind-blown and confused. It happened in Snow Crash, where he was playing with the origins of language and the fundamental functioning of the human mind. It happened in Cryptonomicon, where he dove into the murky waters of cryptography and brought up brilliant gems, and it happened here, too.

The Diamond Age is, fundamentally, about what would happen, or what might happen, if we really got nanotechnology working properly. How would society adapt if, suddenly, government became obsolete? With the Feed and the Matter Compilers able to create anything out of nothing, the entire economic and political underpinnings of the planet came undone, and people banded together into phyles. Like-minded individuals bonded with each other through shared values and morality, united only by a commonly upheld treaty which, in turn, rested on the new economy that nanotechnology allowed.

Within one of the phyles, the Neo-Victorians, one of the more highly-placed Lords realized what was wrong with the world. The problem wasn't the corruption of values of which the old always accuse the young - indeed it was that those values were passed on too well. Children did not elect to join their phyles, they were indoctrinated into them from birth, which made them, well, boring.

And so Lord Finkle-McGraw commissioned a great work - The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to guide his granddaughter to a more interesting life. And had that been all that happened, the story would have been short. But two other copes of the Primer were made - one for the daughter of the book's designer, and another that fell into the hands of Nell, a young girl born into poverty and otherwise destined to lead a life of misery and sorrow.

The Primer is a smart book, fully interactive, able to teach reading, science, history and martial arts, among other things. And what it teaches little Nell is how to be great.

All of this is quite awesome - there's a great hunt for the Primer, plans within plans and all that. And then, suddenly, a new plot about a technology to supplant the Feed and some kind of Chinese revolution and the whole book runs off the rails.

I know a lot of people love Neal Stephenson, and I can understand why. He's an incomparably imaginative man, who is able to find ways to express ideas that some of us couldn't even imagine. He's an heir to the world of that William Gibson and his contemporaries pioneered. He creates captivating worlds and characters and problems without simple solutions.

He just keeps bollixing up the endings. Seriously, it's like a whole different story kicks in around page 250. I'm willing to read more of his works, though, in the hope that he's getting his act together....

If Snow Crash was so good that cyberpunk went in to a coma, The Diamond Age effectively pulled the plug.

Much like seemingly everyone else I loved the first part of this book and felt that the second part didn't quite live up to the same extremely high standard.

Aside from the literary death of cyberpunk when Bud (a character that I'm sure we've all read about many times before but still want to know his story in this instance) is the victim of Confuscian capital punishment and the data transfer implications of sexual activity this novel is really quite incomparable to Snow Crash.

Stephenson creates an incredibly believable world filled with interesting little details and intriguing characters (most of whom do not make it through a few pages in the entire novel) and tells a story of social change using the orphan Nell as the basis and catalyst. The mention of Nell is very important here as it is her intertwined narratives that leave you flipping page after page, breathlessly devouring a pretty hefty book.

It is only as you enter part the second that things start to slow down, make less sense, have a tendency to confuse and most irritatingly take huge jumps forward in time. This last aspect has the combined effect of a Rocky montage sequence or even more disconcertingly the final episode of an unexpectedly cancelled tv series trying to answer all of the questions from their mythology that they initially thought they'd have 5 years to dripfeed you. In an ideal world the Baroque Cycle has allowed Stephenson to tell his stories in a better (if long winded) style and potentially amazing novels will no longer be ruined by trying to squeeze them in to a paltry 500 pages.

n  n
Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.

On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.

While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and became a father. As such these stories became imprinted on my memory as the soundtrack to the happiest period in my life (so far).

Not long after starting my Locus Quest, I crossed paths with a fascinating purple brick of a book, by the name of n  Anathemn. We hit it off – spent many happy hours together – and I sealed our love affair by naming a kitten after n  Anathemn’s protagonist, Erasmas.

Then along came n  Cryptonomiconn – a different kind of beast. Initially, I was less convinced; where is the sci-fi element? But that fat historical war novel grew on me slowly (and as it was so long it had plenty of time to work its magic) so I found myself a fan by the end.

Third (but by no means final) Stephenson to step up to the plate is the steampunk-nanotech extraordinaire, n  n    The Diamond Agen  n. Weighing in at a dinky 500 pages compared to its heavyweight kin, n  n    The Diamond Agen  n hits the ground running and had me grinning from the get-go.

There’s no point bushing-around-the-beat, it’s time to put-my-table-on-the-cards and wear-my-sleeve-on-my-heart: I loved this book! As with n  Anathemn, this book deserves a sixth star from me. It makes me want to downgrade other books to 4-star just to make it stand out further.

n  Anathemn is a book with substance – the kind of girl your grandmother calls a ‘keeper’.
n  n    The Diamond Agen  n is a book with flair – the kind of girl your grandmother calls a ‘bad influence’.
What your Grandmother isn’t telling you, is that sometimes ‘bad influences’ grow up to be ‘keepers’. The same soul runs through these books, but n  Anathemn is just a little older and wiser – n  n    The Diamond Agen  n more naive and impulsive.

You can easily find a list of major characters in this book – Nell, the Hackworths, the Finkle-McGraws, Judge Fang, Miranda – but odds-on they wont mention the star of the show: The Primer. Oh, the Primer! Oh, sweet bejesus, the Primer! I wish I had a Primer as a child. I wish I had a Primer now, to give to my son. The Primer is perfect. It’s like a fully formed idea you were already aware of, that hadn’t been articulated yet. It was on the tip of my tongue – now I know what it’s called: the Primer! The Primer is perfect. It is what everyone who’s banged their head on the desk through educational software wishes it was, and then some.

I could read a whole encyclopaedia about Nell’s lessons with the Primer – then go back in time, finish my AI design degree and devote my life to making the Primer a reality. Everything else in this book is window dressing (fascinating, imaginative, playful, funny, adventurous and evocative window dressing, for sure).

A lot of people get frustrated by the second half of the book and the ending. I am apparently in the minority. When Nell’s Mouse Army come to rescue her I wanted to jump up and down on the bed. I told my wife about it in rushed, excited, babbling sentences which made her stare at me funny and pat me on the head.

And the drummers? Yes – the drummers are silly. But so was Bud’s skull gun back at the start. Remember how I said this book was playful and funny in places? Yeah – the drummers are part of that. Drummer orgy?! It’s a nice counterpoint to the Vicky ethos.

Buzzzz. Buzzzz. Buuzzzzzzzz!
What’s that noise?
n  n    The Diamond Agen  n pushing my buttons.

Locus Sci-Fi and Hugo joint winner from ’96.
BUZZZZZZZ!

I'm abandoning this book at 50% - one star because I think I deserve the credit for slogging through it, though.

Up to about halfway through, I was in love with this book, but then Hackworth goes to the Drummers and we skip 10 years, and my thoughts are like this: if you as a writer didn't care about those 10 years enough to write about them, why do I care enough to read them? Worse, science fiction is already more concerned with the ideas than the characters, but when the writer is consciously trying to mimic the further-removed-from-reality discourses of Victorian-era writing, we wind up so distanced from character that honestly? I powered through the last 100 pages more out of feeling of obligation than honest interest in the novel. Then there's the ending. The last 50 pages or so make zero sense given the rest of the novel, and the ending itself seems more like just a stop rather than an ending.
So, if you're considering this novel because you loved "Snow Crash" (which was mindblowingly good), skip it, instead. The last 250 pages don't deliver on the fantastic promise that the first 250 showed.

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a place in the future? The crowded, multi-factioned, multi-leveled city of Shanghai and nearby Pudong made me miss my hometown terribly. Stephenson's descriptions of brightly lit Nanjing Road and small, dim, alleys of hawkers was so spot on. The mix of high technology, the sophisticated neo-Victorians, and the Confuscians made a confusing but ultimately satisfying story.

I came to The Diamond Age with a vague idea of what the book was about. Like previous steampunk books I read, there was a combination of neo-Victorian sensibilities, technologies different than what we're used to, and a huge disparity between classes. While that may be what gets the book labeled as 'steampunk' by some people ,it surpasses that label and has so much more.

It has cyber-punk technologies. It has dystopian characteristics. It's part adventure story, part riddle, part allegory, part detective story, and best of all, it feels epic without losing its main characters in too wide of a scope.

Reading Stephenson is always hard for me but I always enjoy it. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that his books are not easy to skim through. Go too quickly in The Diamond Age and you end up in an underwater rave wondering what the heck just happened.

The book was definitely worth reading for any fan of the author. It certainly is my favorite book of his so far. My only complaint was that Nell was too perfect. While it could be said that it the Primer had something to do with that, if I take a step back and look at the character, her lack of faults is unbelievable.

Other than that one little complaint, I loved every part of the book from the heart-wrenching stories in the Primer to the action-packed lead up to the Mouse Army. I also liked all the mentions of tea.

Protip: Fountain pens were mentioned at least nine times in this book!

This began with a lot of promise: more wit and humanity than I found in Stephenson’s famous debut Snow Crash, all in support of a fascinating portrait of a nanotech-driven future. And then it devolved into near-nonsense, as Stephenson seemed to have lost the ability to craft a compelling, logical narrative.

I admire his ambition, and I understand why he’s such an influential and popular SFF writer, but I am left scratching my head at the end of this lengthy read.

“Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?'
Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.”



Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer was intriguing and entertaining. The primer reminded me of the encyclopedia that gives its name to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there's a lot more going on in this nearish-future steam punkesque adventure. I'm positive I didn't get everything, but I read it twice and it was fun both times. 4.25 stars

Okay, here's what this Stephenson guy did with his novel. He got together a focus group of 25 unpaid, thirteen year old boys and made them puke out as many buzz words in 10 minutes that they could about science fiction. The buzz words had to be something that would palliate the hyperactive endocrine glands of 13 year old males. Stephenson then roiled together this mess with a rag mop and wrung it into a bucket called The Diamond Age: Or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

To give you a thin sample of this overreaching heterogeneous brew, I took from pages 461-487 (2 random consecutive chapters) all the words that would intrigue young science fiction fans in the year 1995. This book nails the pimple-faced, horny, just-starting-to-get-facial-hair demographic. I'll have more to say about this list. In mostly chronological order, and exactly quoted from the text:

THINGS
Faery King
Scriptorium
Enchanted Armies
King Coyote
Princess Nell
The Book of the Book
Mermaids
Djinn
Khan
Royal blood
Carved onyx
Shock waves
Tidal waves
Poison dart
Rebellion
Disco
Lying in a puddle of his own urine
Revolution Constable
Hoplite Army
Torture
Nightgown
Nudity
Girl with a whip
Matter Compiler
Aboriginal Shaman
Sword
Knife
Prodigious amount of blood
Elevator surfing
Dojo
Booby traps
Dr. X
Shinto temples
Barbarians
Divine Wind
Nunchuks
A mouse army
Cowboy boots
Carl Hollywood
Fire axe
Zulu warriors
Skull gun
Fists of Righteous Harmony
200-story building
Radar scope
Bayonette
Vomit
Night vision
Identical twins

PEOPLE/PLACES
Nipponese
Hindustani
New Chusan
New Atlantian
Celestial Kingdom
Coastal Republic
Israel
Bosnia
Outer Tribes
Urban Homeboys
Neo Victorian
Boers
Economic Zone
Disenchanted Land
Land Beyond

WORDS
mediatronic
phyles
memes
nanoblades
nanotech

There it is folks. A taste of only 17 pages in The Diamond Age. The other 483 pages are almost exactly the same, but with additional pimply-faced and creative buzz words. At some point there is a 'rainbow' and a 'pony' and 'Carmen SanDiego,' and in several places there is a 'unicorn,' and characters named 'Duck, Dinosaur, Peter Rabbit, and Purple' so even young girls may find some traction herein.

I am not an objective critic of science fiction because I don't read enough of it. I know it's not supposed to be real. I got it. But I want to dabble in the genre to be a more well rounded reader, and this book won the 1996 Hugo & Locus Awards. So, bringing no prejudice into this book except an award winning expectation, I was greatly disappointed. Just by the list above you can see the author was all over the place, like birdshot, with his themes. He's forward in time; he's backwards in time; he's science; he's fantasy; he's grounded in 1995 technology with some small steps to near future, coincident with great leaps into distant future; he's mystery, drama, fable; he references too many cultural items from the late 1980's and 90's, like dreadlocks, and homeboys and "bitchin' dude." He suddenly introduces a whole new technology with no backstory in order to press through a few lines of text. If Stephenson needs to invent a word to impute something that sounds tech-y, there's numerous prefix + suffix mash-ups he can turn to (nano, micro, mega, giga + blade, gun, saw, tube, villi)--so that it's possible to create "Nanotechagigaswordebladetubule." There's a slow, building progression toward a denouement for the several separate threadlines, but toward the end it's rushed, short, and unfulfilling.

And please, how many times in 100,000 appear the words: anfractuous, ramifying, and fractal? 15. Really? Not buying it. Good words, but way overused.

I wish there was a scatter plot of science fiction genres along an x-y axis, because for my next science fiction book, I'd move a couple values to the right, and up one.

1.5 stars rounded up. I credit the second star merely because Stephenson had a form and stuck to it throughout. He never wavered. The narrative is way too schizoid for me, but it is a distinct style with a very mature--despite being teenybop--vocabulary.

New words: afflatus, lacuna, farrago, cyalume, besprent, sinter, decussate, demesne, fléchette, neap tide.

First half of the book gets 4 stars; the second half gets 2 stars. Average = 3 stars.

I really liked the first half of the book. His description of technology is wonderful, and the relationship between Nell and the Primer are quite captivating. Much to my dismay, the book fell apart at the end. Characters are disposed quite expediently, conflict is introduced with little or no explanation, very illogical events occur, and then the book stops. If I could give different ratings to both half of the books, I would.

The whole book is laced with tangents which I found to be rather dull. I cared very little for Hackworth's mission after he created the Primer. I cared very little for what Dr. X was attempting to do with the Primer. In the first half of the book, Nell captures most of the focus, which makes these other aspects simply minor annoyances.

In the end, I found the book to be enjoyable. Although, if I knew then what I know now, I would have stopped reading as soon as the book started to go downhill. My opinion of Stephenson would have been much higher, and I would have saved myself some time and effort of finishing.

https://poseidons99.wordpress.com/201...

A beautifully built world with compelling characters but no real end. It wraps up abruptly with only lightly sketched details to tie up plot lines. Frustrating to read through hundreds of pages of a long book, much in Victorian cadence, to not have a satisfying conclusion.