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The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) | 
 enlarge | Author: Neal Stephenson
Publisher: Spectra
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $4.80
You Save: $10.20 (68%)
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Rating:  330 reviews
Sales Rank: 8117
Media: Paperback
Pages: 512
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0553380966
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780553380965
ASIN: 0553380966
Publication Date: May 2, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Visible shelf wear -- may have some notes/markings on pages
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Amazon.com
John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually a super computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord Finkle-McGraw's daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling neo-Victorian society. But Hackworth loses the primer before he can give it to Fiona, and now the "book" has fallen into the hands of young Nell, an underprivileged girl whose life is about to change.
Product Description
In Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson took science fiction to dazzling new levels. Now, in The Diamond Age, he delivers another stunning tale. Set in twenty-first century Shanghai, it is the story of what happens when a state-of-the-art interactive device falls in the hands of a street urchin named Nell. Her life—and the entire future of humanity—is about to be decoded and reprogrammed…
Download Description
In Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson took science fiction to dazzling new levels. Now, in The Diamond Age, he delivers another stunning tale. Set in twenty-first century Shanghai, it is the story of what happens when a state-of-the-art interactive device falls into the hands of a street urchin named Nell. Her life -- and the entire future of humanity -- is about to be decoded and reprogrammed. Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1996.
"[Stephenson] has gotten even better. The Diamond Age envisions the next century as brilliantly as Snow Crash did the day after tomorrow."
NEWSWEEK "[Stephenson is] the hottest science fiction writer in America... Snow Crash is without question the biggest SF novel of the 1990s. Neal's SF novel The Diamond Age promises more of the same. Together, they represent a new era in science fiction. People who plow through these mind-bogglers will walk around slack-jawed for days and reemerge with a radically redefined sense of reality."
DETAILS "Neal Stephenson is the Quentin Tarantino of postcyberpunk science fiction.... Having figured out how to entertain the hell out of a mass audience, Stephenson has likewise upped the form's ante with rambunctious glee."
THE VILLAGE VOICE "Snow Crash drew its manic energy from the cyberpunkish conceit that anything is possible in virtual reality; in The Diamond Age the wonders of cyberspace pale before the even more dazzling powers of nanotechnology."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "The Diamond Age establishes Neal Stephenson as a powerful voice for the cyber age.... At once whimsical, satirical, and cautionary."
USA TODAY "Stephenson's world-building skills are extraordinary.... The Diamond Age should cement Stephenson's reputation as one of the brightest and wittiest young authors of American science fiction."
THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
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| Customer Reviews: Read 325 more reviews...
Dated and yet... still a good time. June 14, 2008
ENS Smith (Yokosuka, Japan)
As is often the case within the science fiction genre, the novel relies too much upon the whiz-bang intricacies of a Victorian-retro future ruled by nanotechnology. Too often it veers into tangential details about this gizmo or that advancement which can be tiresome after a few hundred pages. Even worse, the conclusion of the novel features an abrupt, extreme shift in gears which seems forced, at best. However, despite all that, it retains Stephenson's manic charm, his innate ability to combine the wry and the cool into something more. There are dry spells, to be sure. Stephenson offsets them with moonlit martial arts duels, dashes of steampunk, swarm technology programs/orgies, and etc... It is a patchwork fantasy, and flawed. But it is still a great read, especially in snippets. Personally, I kept it in my bathroom for a few weeks. Worked well. Recommended for those who need some idle, interesting reading with more continutiy than the funny pages or Popular Mechanics or... yeah. Buy it and see! Or don't! }:-)
A remarkable vision of the future, that doesn't quite become tangible May 25, 2008
Nathan Andersen (Florida)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Diamond Age is an ambitious book, and one that kept me enthralled through about 350 of its 450 or so pages and then impatiently waiting for what turned out to be a highly improbable, fairly confusing, Hollywood style ending (where at all odds and in spite of massive casualties on all sides and the cataclysmic world-changing significance of the events they are caught up in, all of the main characters we're supposed to care about get the kind of familial reconciliations they want).
I didn't want to end up being disappointed by this book because I love Neal Stephenson's style and have enjoyed immensely every one of his other books -- I haven't gotten around to the few books he co-wrote with a relative, but they don't strike me as up my alley. The problem, it seems, with this book is the problem Stephenson confronts but admirably resolves in every one of his other books: it is the balance of story and background, of worldmaking and storytelling, or (in his most recent books) of history and speculative historical fiction. Here the balance between these seemed to oscillate back and forth until the weight of the world began to overwhelm my interest in the characters, and the trouble was that the world historical developments he was painting would be difficult to follow even for a contemporary.
When the story focuses on Nell and her primer it's exciting: like a futuristic version of Rousseau's Emile, where the problem is not merely to raise a child as independent in a world where we were increasingly dependent on others, but to raise a child capable of transcending and subverting a fully networked world in which interdependence is indispensable.
Where it gets into trouble is the effort to paint a shift from a "feed" based nanotechnological society (at least one or two technological revolutions beyond ours) to a "seed" based society (that I don't really understand at all even though he makes the political implications clear enough).
This is a good read, and a nice step forward in scope from Snow Crash -- but it gets a bit unwieldy and Stephenson doesn't to my mind quite pull it off. He does admirably in his next four books.
Stephenson creates intriguing nano tech world February 24, 2008
Jeremiah Johnson (Los Angeles, CA)
Diamond Age is a fascinating read although it loses steam half way through. Stephenson writes about the future with nano technology as if hes been there. The characters are well written (more believable than Snow Crash) and there is a lot of insight into differences between cultures (philes). Stephensons background in Geography and Physics is quite evident here. I would give it 4.5 stars and it would be even better if the plot was cleaned up a little as it starts to drag and become convoluted in the middle. Still worth the read.
 for neo-Victorians, Dr. X's crew February 2, 2008
R. Friesel Jr. (Burlington, VT USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I go back and forth with whether I liked this book or whether I liked this book a lot. With the exception of Stephenson's endings, I tend to find his werks very strong overall; these are compelling reads with digestible but thought-provoking questions and scenarios and some rather scintillating characters that are one part Jungian archetype and two parts original. Diamond Age shares those qualities with the rest of his body of work and yet somehow seems a bit... deficient?
It's clear that Diamond Age is the successor to the Snow Crash world, each critical variable accelerated along every axis. And that's where its strengths emerge; it's a bit more of a long-form treatment of the subject matter, takes a more delicate approach (e.g., Nell's story), and goes unafraid into some areas where you felt he might have tip-toed in some previous werk. But at the same time, when you put this one down, the classic Stephensonian termination shock gets a bit hyperbolic. There's a lot of slack-jawed: "But... What next?"
It coulda been a contender January 27, 2008
Juan Falcone (Rockland County, New York)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" is divided into equal-length "Part the First" and "Part the Second," which require two opposing ratings:
Part the First -- 5 stars, for a brilliantly-imagined and peopled alternate world
Part the Second -- 1 star, for a shallow, badly-acted, pulp-SF collection of cliches
In the Part the First, we learn how a near-magical, interactive Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is stolen from its rightful owner -- the brilliant nanotech artifexer John Hackworth, from a neo-Victorian community situated on an offshore island near Shanghai -- and ends up lifting its unintended recipient, the underprivileged girl Nell, out of her dismally violent family life. Here, Stephenson weaves the same magic as Lewis Carroll did in Alice in Wonderland, incorporating a biting, subversive children's story into an engrossing adult book. Stephenson artfully limns the social conventions of both western and Chinese cultures, capturing elaborately witty dialogues, devious social strategies and intricate psychological perspectives with near-perfect fidelity. His 22nd century world is a completely convincing, multi-threaded, total-immersion experience, which nearly compels the reader to keep turning the pages.
But in Part the Second, it all goes wrong. A fundamental premise of good science fiction is that there should be a single factor requiring suspension of disbelief; the rest of the fictional milieu should be solidly anchored on ground familiar to contemporary readers. In "The Diamond Age," the nanotech matter compilers, working from atomic feeds, are the "suspension of disbelief" item. Though violating every principle of energy conservation, once accepted, they conduct the reader into a beautifully articulated, internally consistent set of consequences for the boldly-sketched characters.
Unfortunately, from the first pages of Part the Second, the veiled sexuality of John Hackworth's neo-Victorian world is suddenly exchanged for crude biology-text descriptions of sexual excretions. These occur in the realm of the Drummers: semi-sentient, merged-minded humans living in underwater dirt-dauber nests, who spend their time in darkened caverns either fornicating or pounding on the walls. This ham-handed lurch into a bizarre netherworld is unerotic, tasteless, and incidentally disqualifies many teenaged readers who might benefit from the book's arcane vocabulary and bold neologisms. But worse, it's a blunder. As a plot device, the Drummers are silly, absurd; they fatally puncture Stephenson's carefully-crafted illusion, letting the air out of his 22nd century fable. But they are hardly the only defect of Part the Second.
In Part the First, brief excerpts quoted from the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer provide a window into the unconventional education which young Nell is receiving. However, in Part the Second, probably thirty pages are devoted to a discursive, repetitive shaggy-dog story involving logical mechanisms. Young Nell, improbably transformed into a computer geek, debugs a dozen different versions of the same Turing machine. This lengthy lacuna apparently sets up the geek-insider joke of crowning her as "Princess Nell, Duchess of Turing." The snarky title of nobility is so devoid of significance that it is never mentioned again.
As the conclusion approaches, all semblance of social artifice, conversational subtlety and psychological insight is dumped overboard. It almost seems that Stephenson either lost interest, or was racing the clock to meet a publisher's deadline. In any case, the lovingly-detailed characters from the early part of the book gradually shed their human qualities, in a manner which parallels that of Nell's four childhood pets. In a convention obviously borrowed from the cartoon strip Calvin & Hobbes, her wise, didactic "night friends" revert into mute stuffed animals in the daytime. Similarly, by the end of the book, the major characters have degenerated from complex, thoughtful human beings into plastic super-hero action figures. In the chaotic conclusion, all that holds the reader's interest is whether they will collide with each other, trip over the props, or whether the whole stage setting will explode, providing the ultimate copout ending for a lazy author (and this is very nearly what happens).
In particular, the long-foreshadowed encounter between Nell and her beloved Primer narrator and surrogate mother, Miranda, is disposed of (on the penultimate page) in six slapdash paragraphs, without a word being exchanged. It actually angered me: I waded through 500 pages, for THIS as a payoff? What a ripoff! What an insult!
After all the pointless sound and fury of its botched anticlimax, "The Diamond Age" can be seen clearly as a damaged jewel: a priceless diamond that was ruined on the grinding wheel by a master cutter who let his attention slip. Probably the best hope, should it adapted for film, is that a sensitive screenwriter can be found to excise the obscene graffiti, puerile indulgences, and malicious vandalism strewn through the latter part of the book by its own misguided or demotivated author.
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