After thinking about this book at length, I find myself wholly unable to rate 5 stars. The story is not sitting as well with me as Snowcrash yet I doubt few books ever will. I am comparing Stephenson to Stephenson, which is unfair. I have not been affected by this book as strongly as I feel I should have been. The entire work is an obvious labor on Stephenson's part but I am greedy and I want what even this amazing book does not provide. Namely, I want a greater connection to the characters.

Stephenson crafts worlds unlike any other. I possibly should be punished for saying so, but I feel this helped the story only slightly more than hurt it. I often found myself lost in the melee of details and characteristics. The story was not difficult to follow but at no time was it overly simple. I continue to be incredibly grateful for every book I read that requires me to think. I try not to assume that thought always follows reading. Just take a look at some of the popular books of these times. Sadly, more and more people seem to want to become lost, lost without thought. This is not a book for those types of people and Stephenson is not a writer of dumbed down literature.

Yet, back to my point. The characters felt made of less substance than the setting, which was original and entertaining but I just wanted that slight extra. I was cheering for the characters but not overly much, at least not until the end.

And just to round out my thoughts, I absolutely loved the idea of nanomites everywhere, in everything, in everyone, fighting little invisible wars, and their dead dust everywhere. I find science fiction that shrinks so much more interesting than science fiction that expands.

I also love that I am comfortable with placing this book on my cyberpunk and steampunk shelves, which may be a first.

I did not particularly like Hackworth or the Drummers, those folks being uber creepy, though maybe those feelings were meant to be felt. I loved the idea of the Primer and was happy with the ending. 4 1/2 stars and I am excited to dive into another by Stephenson. I am trying to decide if I should test out another slimmer and supposedly simpler story before opening one of his grander works but it may just be what I have next on hand. All I know for certain is that I will eventually read every one of his books, as Stephenson's style and mind are unlike anyone else's I have read.

This is the third Neal Stephenson book I’ve read, the first two being Zodiac then Snow Crash. I seem to end up somewhat lukewarm on his work, but I liked this the best of the three. It held my interest better and I enjoyed the story more, or at least parts of it.

The story has a lot going on, but the part that interested me the most was the Primer, a sort of computerized, interactive book that bonds with whichever young girl it’s given to and adjusts its stories to be relevant for that girl, changing its difficulty level to be suitable for her age as she grows up, and even teaching her how to read if needed. An illegally-made copy of the book falls into the hands of Nell, a young girl in an abusive situation, and has a major impact on her life. There’s a lot more to the story than that, but it would be hard to explain the other parts without spoilers and most of them tie to the primer in one way or another.

The parts featuring Nell were my favorite, both the “real” Nell and the fictional Nell inside the primer. I was also interested in Hackworth’s story in the first half, but then things got a bit too strange for me. The political stuff with the tribes as well as some other parts of the story didn’t hold my interest well, even though I often enjoy political parts when they’re prominent in other books. I guess the way it was written here just didn’t connect with me.

I often felt like events were too coincidental, and sometimes characters made choices for no logical reason that I could discern and/or intuitive leaps that seemed unrealistic. However, it’s possible that this was at least partly only my perception rather than reality. I found myself paying less attention to the details than I usually do when I read. Sometimes the author went off on detailed tangents that were just not at all interesting to me yet contained important plot elements, and I had trouble staying focused in those parts so I may have missed connections that I would otherwise have caught.

I’m rating this at 3.5 stars because there were times, usually during Nell’s POV, when I was riveted by the story. I’m rounding down to 3 on Goodreads because I definitely didn’t enjoy this on a 4-star level.

Neal Stephenson envisions a far future where nanotechnology makes almost anything possible, as opposed to the very near future of Snow Crash, allows it to stand the test of time without ever feeling dated. As great as Snow Crash is, like a lot of cyberpunk novels, many of the concepts have already come to fruition in reality, making it slightly less mind-blowing than reading it upon its first publication in 1992. I don't think we'll have to worry about that with The Diamond Age anytime soon.

Besides the innovative uses of nanotechnology, there is a captivating story here about a little girl named Nell, destined to become just another "thete," or street urchin, lost among the throngs of people in Shanghai. That is, until she happens across 'The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer,' an extremely rare, interactive book of the most advanced order, making the finest use of nanotech imaginable, and designed to give the best possible education to a young girl. How one small chance occurrence can change a child's entire fate is the main focus of The Diamond Age. It explores such high-concept themes as 'determinism vs. free will' and 'what it is to be human,' with some very clever usage of Turing machines to demonstrate these concepts.

Wow I really loved this. I did get distracted by summer weather and other books etc etc. But when I did back to it I loved it. It is whimsical as hell and just fun to read. Princess Nell and her Mouse Army and the Victorians were really enjoyable to hang out with. Nothing like anything I've read before.

5 ulduz verməməyə "duxum" çatmır. Ümumən, Neal Stephenson'u şərh eləmək ən çətin işlərdəndi. Oxumaq qəlizdi. Qavramaq qəlizdi. Həzm etmək qəlizdi. Əldə olunanı ötürməksə ondan da qəlizdi. Neal Stephenson nadir təcrübələrdəndi və sci-fi oxumaqdan səm vuran oxucunun girməli olduğu bir təcrübədi.

I gulped down the 500 pages in four days, and it was not an easy read. I admit ruefully that Stephenson's vocabulary is better than mine. I feel like this book demands analysis, and I don't know enough to provide it. All I could do is count heads and make remarks about the colour and gender and fate of each major character. Which, OK, is worth doing, but it's 3:42am and I've been reading since about 8pm, so forgive me if I don't open it up again just now.

I want a primer.

I also want more about Dr X and Lord Finkle-McGraw. And I want to know more about what happened to Judge Fang and his assistants, although I'll admit that this (unlike Dr X and Lord Finkle-McGraw?) is outside the scope of the story. Unless I'm being stupid and this is something I'm meant to figure out for myself.

There are things in here that you won't get unless you know stuff about science, about computer science (the entire Handbook subplot from Castle Turing to the end is a potted history of computing,) about linguistics, for that matter. This is not a book for someone who can't figure out that 'ractive' is etymologically derived from 'interactive'. And it's driving me a little crazy that I can't work out the root of 'thete'. I only got 'phyle' = phylum right this second.

And I want a chevaline. Like, even more than I want a pony, though not as much as I want a primer.

I read this the first time when I was a young, impressionable, repressed, closeted Mormon boy. (Oh, god, so many of my reviews seem to start this way.) Stephenson's vision of a future shocked and titillated me, and years later I still found it returning to haunt me. Yet I don't think I ever truly understood the story, and certainly not the ending.

Now I think I do. In a future where synthetically assembled diamond is as ubiquitous as glass, where almost anything can be designed and created atom by atom, where the poor are wretchedly poor and the rich are bored and stodgy, and where cultures have come massively adrift from their geographical moorings but have grown ever more rigid and and closed off from each other, one young girl from the ghetto is handed a dangerous, subversive, life-changing book called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. This book is that book. It is also the story of that girl's journey from childhood to maturity, of an audacious theft and a bungled robbery--both with world-changing consequences--and of a young interactive actress's growing relationship with a child she had never seen.

This is a more mature work than Stephenson's earlier n  Snow Crashn. I can't wait to continue on and read the books that made him really famous.

If 'Snow Crash' was the definitive cyberpunk book, then 'The Diamond Age or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' is the last word on that particular genre. It's nominally set in the same world as the earlier book and shares some of the geo-political background. Nation states are an outdated concept, and now people are grouped into phyles by a common culture or other affiliation. Three major world views are uneasy neighbours - the neo Victorians of New Atlantis with their mannered stoicism and carefully managed hypocrisy sit alongside the Confucianism of the Han Chinese and the Nipponese.

The plot centres around a peculiar book commissioned by Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle McGraw as a present for his grand-daughter, designed and built by the nano engineer John Percival Hackworth who steals a copy of book for his own daughter, which as a result of a street robbery then falls into the hands of Nell, a young girl living in wretched circumstances in the leased territory of a future Shanghai. The book has been designed as a fully interactive education for a young lady from the age of five or six through to adolescence as a subversive alternative to the stifling conformity of the Neo Victorian system. Nell's education over the course of many years, including insights into subjects starting with self defence, history, nano engineering and finally the limits of artificial intelligence (or pseudo intelligence as Hackworth defines it) of Turing machines, has far reaching and startling consequences.

I particularly enjoyed the segments of the book told from the viewpoint of the protagonist of the Primer - Princess Nell and her companions Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit and Purple who are based on the few toys owned by the Nell of the real world. The self defence taught by Dojo the mouse and Princess Nell's slow unravelling of the relentless logic of Castle Turing are the high points.

If the book has any failings, it is the rather abrupt and rushed ending which leaves many things open and unresolved, although in retrospect the consequences of a world profoundly changed are thought provoking indeed.

I have a lot of very contradictory feelings after reading this book. It definitely goes beyond my comfort zone and what I usually read. There's also this beauty of a complicated puzzle in it. However, I have a big problem to say if I really liked it and how to rate it.

Well, beauty. Maybe it's because I haven't read too many science fiction books (although I have serious doubts whether this book can be just simply included in this genre) but this book seems special to me. And in a way beautiful in its uniqueness. This uniqueness definitely appeals to me and I am able to appreciate it somewhat regardless of other elements of this book.

The author has created a completely unique and complex world that is hooked up to what we know from the present and the past. The past mixes with the present and the future. The whole world is very well-thought and multidimensional. Victorian morality mixes so subtly with nanotechnology that you don't see any inconsistencies. And when you think you are beginning to understand this world, the author adds something new.

The author went so far that he even created a unique language in which this novel is written. This is fantastic but at the same time makes you read the book rather slowly. This is not an easy and quick read. At the beginning you have to get used to the specific language. And even later, reading tired me, it required a lot of concentration. This is not a book to read on the bus. I appreciate the beauty of this language but I also admit that it took me a long time to read this book.

Unfortunately, I can't help feeling that the purpose of this whole book is to show a unique world that was created in the author's head. The story is rather sparse and, if you think about it, is not very developed for such a long book. It is also totally aimed to showing the complicated world and the mechanics of its operation. The characters and the plot are of secondary importance. It doesn't work with everyone.

I admit that I prefer books full of twists and turns, elaborate storyline and interesting characters. Even so, I'm glad I read this book. I still can't say if I really liked it though. I didn't feel connected with the characters and it was difficult for me to follow the story without skipping pages. Maybe it takes some time for me to be able to fully describe my feelings, I need to catch some distance.

Welcome to Stephensonland! Wait, sir? Sir? Yes you. I'm afraid you'll have to check your need for believable characters with me. Here's a numerical token you can use to reclaim it at the end of the day. Oh, and hold on. Is that an expectation of coherent plotting in your back pocket? I'm afraid those are also disallowed in Stephensonland. It'll be perfectly safe here behind the counter. Now, here's your complementary CS patch. That's right, it's very similar, except instead of nicotine, this will imbue you with knowledge equivalent to a bachelor's degree in computer science. Certain parts of your experience will be much funnier if you wear it, while others will be unspeakably boring if you don't. Ok, you're all set. You're going to have a great time.

Sometimes I feel like part of the joy of reading Neal Stephenson is the point at which you realize all the characters are a bit robotic and the absurdly numerous plot lines will never be resolved and the book occasionally reads like a particularly entertaining text book and that none of these things are stopping you from loving every word. This book ties together a pretty conventional cyberpunk-ish near-future street world with a Victorian world of manners and concomitant awkwardness with Confuscianism with fairy tales with crazy underwater tube-dwelling hypnotized sex fiends in ways that seem almost plausible! Also, mechanical horses and Stetson hats! Yes!

It amuses me that in addition to being a CS nerd Stephenson likes a bit of a mysticism. Human brains can magically find patterns in data that computers cannot? Really, Neal? I seem to recall Anathem was a bit like this as well, and that book was even dorkier

The Diamond Age: Nanotech, Neo-Victorians, Princess Nell’s Primer, and the Fists of Righteous Harmony – all we need now is the kitchen sink
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
I am a huge Neal Stephenson fan based on his novels Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, two of my favorite books. He is frequently a brilliant writer, unafraid to introduce new ideas and infodumps in the most unexpected and entertaining ways. His sense of humor is more subtle and clever than most, and his world-building abilities are top-notch. However, he has a serious problem with endings, particularly in The Diamond Age.

This also happened in Snow Crash, where an amazing opening led to a fairly fascinating middle portion and then a dissolved into a flurry of confusing action and events that brought things to a less-than-perfect close. It makes it very hard on fans, who really WANT to like everything he writes.

In the Diamond Age, Stephenson creates an amazingly nuanced, detailed future that seems to have surpassed cyberpunk thanks to the transformative powers of nanotechnology. Since most goods and food can be produced for almost no cost by matter compilers, the global economy has been completely demolished and rebuilt, with our older nations replaced by phyles (or tribes) of people connected by shared values, interests, ethnicity, religious beliefs, etc. The major phyles include the Han Chinese Celestial Kingdom, the Neo-Victorian New Atlantis, the Nipponese, and Indian Hindustan. These phyles form their own separate enclaves in the chaotic remains of our former nations, and operate under the Common Economic Protocol (CEP, a set of rules to manage social interactions).

Though it may seem at first to be a post-scarcity society, this is actually far from true. With basic goods and sustenance free for the asking, many of the traditional jobs have been rendered obsolete, so that much of the world is idle or underemployed. Many cities have significant crime that only membership in a strong tribe can protect people from. That means that the tribeless (‘thetes’) are vulnerable to all types of hardships.

The story focuses on a large cast of characters:

Nell - The central protagonist who is born tribeless to a poor and neglectful mother. By accident she happens upon a copy of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an electronic book designed to educate young girls in become productive members of society that at the same time question the status quo.

John Percival Hackworth – A neo-Victorian nanotech engineer who is commissioned to design the Primer for a Neo-Victorian equity lord who wishes to give it to his granddaughter. Secretly he creates an illicit copy that he intends to give to his own daughter Fiona, but when he is robbed by Nell’s brother, it falls into the hands of Nell. When his crime is exposed, he is forced into becoming a double-agent against the Neo-Victorians by Dr. X of the Celestial Kingdom.

Judge Fang – A Confucian judge who allows Nell to keep her stolen copy of the Primer. Eventually he begins to question his allegiance to the Coastal Republic and elects to defect to the Celestial Kingdom. He is also involved with a covert plan to distribute Primers to a huge number of young Chinese female orphans.

Dr. X – A black-market technology specialist and hacker who aids Hackworth in creating the illicit copy for his daughter. When Hackworth gets exposed, he blackmails Hackworth into helping the Celestial Kingdom develop a new and revolutionary type of nanotech called the Seed.

The stage is set brilliantly for the first half of the book, interspersed with numerous episodes of Nell’s virtual experiences with the Primer, including increasingly complicated challenges involving Turing machines and learning binary and programming. There are so many tantalizing clues placed throughout the early chapters of the book, but instead of exploring and developing these diverse story and character arcs in a measured pace throughout the book, the novel suddenly shifts into high gear in the final hundred pages or so in desperate rush to tie-up all the storylines.

There is a jumbled and confusing battle in The Celestial Kingdom and The Coastal Republic, with the Fists of Righteous Harmony (essentially a retelling of the Boxer Rebellion) seeking to cut off the nanofeed coming from the Neo-Victorians and Nipponese and replace it with the new Seed technology. Hackworth’s ten year exile after being turned double-agent by Dr. X is revealed to have some obscure connection to a group-mind called the Drummers and a shadowy group called CryptNet.

Sadly I found myself thoroughly confused for the last third of the book, and had to read through the Wikipedia entry to get some clarity on what happened. That is always a bad sign. While Stephenson has had trouble with reaching satisfying conclusions in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, I felt that he pulled it off brilliantly in Crytonomicom, which is almost 1,000 pages long. Does that mean he needs that many pages to sort things out? Anathem is another complicated and dense door-stopper with some big proponents and detractors, and I have yet to tackle it, though I now have the audiobook version. Reamde is yet another massive story, and seems to have created less of a splash than his other books despite its size. For that matter, his Baroque Cycle sounds even more impenetrable and confusing.

So why is Neal Stephenson my favorite author? Simply because he comes up with ideas, characters and info-dumps like nobody else inside or outside SF (in fact, Cryptonomicon really isn’t SF at all), and creates stories so memorable and clever that I’m willing to forgive some of the problems. I just found out he’ll be coming out with a new novel called Seveneves in May 2015, about generational starships designed to save humanity from catastrophe on Earth. It sounds a bit more well-tread territory than his usual genre-defying novels, but I hope he can hit a home run this time around!

You know what this book most reminded me of? That mildly drunk guy at a party who seems kind of interesting and charismatic, even though he can't keep his chain of thought straight, but who turns out to be a total asshole after he realizes he's not getting laid.

Initially, I wasn't tempted by "The Diamond Age," but the subtitle drew me in. A book advising young women? Interesting. However, given a choice between this book and the classic young women's story, Little Women, I think I'll go with Little Women. At least (trigger warning)  none of the girls are raped.

The Diamond Age, Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer was an interesting, convoluted, frustrating book packed with ideas, characters and too little plot. I suspect Stephenson of being in love with his ideas and would suggest a firmer hand on the editorial wheel. Far too many details on nanobots, too few details on characters. Hard to put down when I was reading, and equally hard to pick up later. It was eligible for a re-read--or at least a re-listen, as I'm told the narrated version is quite enjoyable--until the (trigger and spoiler) rape  and the narrative mish-mash at the end.

The story revolves around Nell, a young girl living with an older brother, her mother and her mother's series of boyfriends, and John Percival Hackworth, creator of The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. There's a story-within-a-story plot of Nell reading the interactive Primer and experiencing the fairy-tale like story within. An abundance of other characters are involved, including a minor thug who briefly dates Nell's mom; her brother Harv; Hackworth's patron, Lord Finkle-McGraw; Miranda, the actress who reads the Primer; Constable Moore, war veteran and her guardian of sorts; Dr. X, a mysterious character who wants the Primer for unknown reasons; Miranda's boss, Carl Hollywood; Hackworth's daughter and a few others. It's also worth noting that despite being A Young Lady's Primer, it almost completely fails the Bechdel test. Because, you know: it is not just about the Young Lady; it is also about the creator of the book and Stephenson's technology.

When it comes to characters, Stephenson quickly creates a feeling of depth in some. One of my favorites was Judge Fang, with his New York accent, his adherence to Confucius principles, and his willingness to follow the path of ethics over the path of law. It reminded me very strongly of Master Li in Bridge of Birds. Sadly, we lose track of the Judge. Likewise, while the Miranda story was engaging and we get a glimpse of her emotions at a particular time of life, she disappears for the last third of the book. While both characters tied in quite nicely with the story of the Primer and Nell, the story of other parts of the Primer took precedence.

Spoilers below, naturally, because how else can I talk about this mess?

Narrative. Sigh, what can I say? The story-within-story technique is interesting and often enjoyable for me. In this case, it gives insight into just how special this book is and how it interacts with the child and the environment to shape response. However, as Nell ages, it could have done a better job with parallels to her real life, particularly in the last half when it was teaching her about the '12 keys,' which I think meant learning coding techniques. I found myself raising an eyebrow once or twice. Would a Victorian primer really have encouraged a child to stab someone? Sure, it may have been a sign of the book not quite working--or it may have been a sign of Stephenson taking the story where he needed it to go. I'm betting the latter.

It was a relatively coherent story up until about page 250 when the plot loses any sense of caring about characterization and moves characters around to get to where Stephenson needs them to make his ultimate thematic point. Hackforth ends up in a Drummer society, where much like entering Fairyland, he has aged ten years when he emerges around page 293... and then things really turn bizarre and dreamlike. Miranda decides to look for Nell and disappears from the narrative after accepting an engagement with two shady characters. Hackforth's daughter appears for a bizarre live-action ractive performed on a ship. Nell suddenly decides to leave the Victorian society and set off for China, although we aren't sure why, and ends up in a sado-maochism brothel. It was a mess and only sheer stubbornness kept me reading. When Nell is captured and raped by the Fists of Righteous Harmony it catapulted me out of bored confusion into rage. What. The. Hell. Unacceptable, but thanks, Stephenson, for making sure the A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer reinforces women as rape targets, because we wouldn't want to think we've moved beyond it as a plot device. Oh--and then he provided a capstone with a potential rape, saved for the last two pages.

I have an entire ranty post on my blog about the use of rape in stories and believe the trope was completely unnecessary here. To then call this book "A Young Lady's Primer" is insulting and makes any empowerment themes hollow. You know what else I realized? Nell has very few interactions with women in this book. With the exception of Nell, women are pawns or dependents. Except for the Vicky classroom, there no scenes of females interacting with females. Because apparently the message of "A Young Lady's Primer" is it's a man's world and women get to live in it.

Three and a half stars for the first 250 pages, two stars for the rest and negative forty stars for the end. Stick with Little Women.