Presented as 21st Century post-nationalistic collapse cyberpunk (and later firmly retroclaimed by steampunk), the novel opens with a bodymodded & teched out street criminal (à la William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy characters), but the narrative quickly disposes of him as an illustration that this story's subversion's going to be far more intellectual.
To coin perhaps an even more divisive sectarian subgenre label, it's innovatively nanopunk, as technology takes control of matter at the molecular level. Better than the food generators in Star Trek's 24th century, Stephenson has matter compilers that build preset comestibles & household items, eliminating daily needs. The challenging question here is when basic needs & the necessity for work is solved, what do people begin to live for & what purpose does society serve? In a word: Culture. Which then makes the luxurious manifestations of that culture the ascendant form of societal credibility.
With a world where one's cultural affiliation determines your role, the paradigms of East vs West and how their differences have an ugly history of disconnection in the shadow of Western Imperialism, and how that culture is passed to subsequent generations, becomes crucial. Enter "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", the book within the book. While books have always been the ultimate cultural vessels, this particular compilation's a fully interactive (or "ractive" in the novel's parlance) smartpaper text flash-style visual fairytale custom tailored to molecularly bond neurologically with its young recipient, and adapt its lessons to the desires & immediate emotional/physical requirements of the owner. Plus the fairytale, thanks to some of the grim circumstances of the future, is in a ruthlessly Grimmsian vein. All that and it reads out loud, too. Where this unique book ends up is wherein hangs the tale.
In deliberate contrast to the clipped noirtech codelines of cyberpunk, Stephenson's writing style's elegant, every so often paved with subtly beautiful words like gallimaufry, alamodality, callipygous, velleity, farrago, artifex, phyle. (So concinnus!) If Dickens wrote science fiction now, this would be it, replete with his semi-passive comments on class systems accepted for good or ill, but particular to oriental/occidental cultures. While these aren't necessarily critiques, more setpiece observations of differences, it does make you think about status quo, racial bias, and ethnic nurture, and uses these factors as forces in the plot.
Just as Stephenson turned an idea into a virus in the kinetic Snow Crash (1992) and brought memetics to a wider audience, here he implies that the web is an unknowing & unconscious coalescence of data from all who use it to form a greater dynamic & reactive pattern, that the internet itself is an input device that may at some point generate a great answer, or idea, or innovation that will advance the human condition and technology beyond current imagining.
And in a finer point, Stephenson discusses theatre as a metaphor & literal tool for transmission of data between biological entities. The observer effects the observed, and visa-versa. The idea that narrative/stories/myths not only entertain but gift us with lessons/knowledge/perspective in a programming fashion, and by adding live immersive roleplaying aspects & cooperative nanosites into the mix, the audience is not only unseated but stars in its own group composite play.
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| [A vampire's nanosite gathering sustenance during the day before heading back to its tech savvy master's lair?] |
The plus side of my waiting 18 years to read this lands it amidst some of the concepts Stephenson extrapolated on happening, which makes its provocative imaginings now even more relevant: nanotechnology being applied to communications and medicine, the very beginning of multimedia interactive books as apps on tablets for kids, China's revisions of its forced labour manufactories, the encryption processes for data, the idea of virtual currency (i.e. Bitcoin) being able to evade taxes, and especially Ray Kurzweil endeavouring to map the mind, something that will require a printer-style molecular matter compiler by the time he's done. Maybe we can then use the singularity to literally copy people into finely crafted talking smartbooks. (Shut it, blathering Melville! I'm listening to Verne, okay?)
With its concepts so high it nears abstraction, The Diamond Age is an ambitious gem worth cutting into for the wealth of conceits & facets it shines & inspires with.
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Addenda from 10/13/2013:
Only later do I find out that The Diamond Age is a very loose sequel to Stephenson's Snow Crash (but they each stand very much on its own with only one side character crossing forward, having marked differences in tone), and even attached to the rather irreverent prequel short story "The Great Simoleon Caper", but their world is contiguous.
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Further Addenda from 7/9/2018:
Twenty-three years after it's publication, _The Diamond Age_ is still being actively discussed. Attended the Tucson Steampunk Society's July 2018 Book Club meeting, which was livecast here. I arrive fashionably late at 44:35, asked to introduce myself shortly after at 45:12, waggle my first edition hardback at 46:40, declare my love of the Primer at 47:25, make wishful commentary about the matter compilers at 54:05, and my nanopunk neologism springboards post-cyberpunk conversation from 56:30 for quite a good while. The conversation will continue until our own Diamond Age arrives, probably sooner than you think.
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While a
mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena
IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for
employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan,
airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a
craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally
interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.
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