He's an incomparably imaginative man, who is able to find ways to express ideas that some of us couldn't even imagine.

I know a lot of people love Neal Stephenson, and I can understand why.

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. And what it teaches little Nell is how to be great.Īll of this is quite awesome - there's a great hunt for the Primer, plans within plans and all that. The Primer is a smart book, fully interactive, able to teach reading, science, history and martial arts, among other things. 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. And had that been all that happened, the story would have been short. Children did not elect to join their phyles, they were indoctrinated into them from birth, which made them, well, boring.Īnd so Lord Finkle-McGraw commissioned a great work - The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to guide his granddaughter to a more interesting life. 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. Within one of the phyles, the Neo-Victorians, one of the more highly-placed Lords realized what was wrong with the world. 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. 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. The Diamond Age is, fundamentally, about what would happen, or what might happen, if we really got nanotechnology working properly. It happened in Cryptonomicon, where he dove into the murky waters of cryptography and brought up brilliant gems, and it happened here, too. It happened in Snow Crash, where he was playing with the origins of language and the fundamental functioning of the human mind. 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. I get the feeling that Stephenson's writing process goes something like this:

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson