The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)

This is a post-cyberpunk novel and a coming-of-age story, set in a world where nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. It deals with the themes of post-scarcity economics and the nature of artificial intelligence. Read long ago, this may be due for a reread.

Read in the 1990s. ( )

I'm sorry, I can't take it anymore. I can't finish this book. I'm just over halfway through and I'm stopping right now. It's beautifully written and all, but I personally can't deal with this whole moral theme of a young woman being better off in a 'Victorian' themed society, even one free from the pressures of the past. Yes, I can see where the author is going with moral standards and self improvement and weirdly I mostly agree, but I can't deal with being better off in a Victorian workhouse lesson in the school (even if the lesson does come from a most biased source)

I guess maybe I'm like someone getting carried away at a professional wrestling match, booing way too hard at the bad acting bad guy, but in which case I guess the book as done it's job a little too well. (The following is a semi-rant based purely on this. Weirdly, I'm going to say it's a great book otherwise. Unless you have some 'history' hangups like me, you really will enjoy this)

I was willing to along with it and all, the girl escaping from an abusive permissive mother from the modern/futuristic society who doesn't believe some people are better than others, including sadly the boyfriends who mistreat her children; it was an interesting role reversal for a while but there's a point when it just to my mind gets somewhere between delusional and in bad taste. I won't drone on about infant mortality rates, racial arrogance; hell I know there's a massive market for this stuff. You only have to look at how many people - a comically large proportion of which seem to be female -go gooey over a good period drama, usually set in an era where a man could legally beat his wife with a small cane, or force his wife to have sex whenever he wanted, or even just go off and steal someone else's country for their natural resources while killing them 'moral' reasons and in general, their own societies improvement through the medium of explosives....... oh wait....

Anyway, I can't deal with it. It'll probably turn out someday that I'll finished reading this and deeply regret writing this but it's going to be a while.

( )

Excellent novel! You can definitely see why this is considered by some to be one of the origins of the steampunk genre. It's also clever, epic, and moving. ( )

Excellent novel! You can definitely see why this is considered by some to be one of the origins of the steampunk genre. It's also clever, epic, and moving. ( )

Stephenson is amazing-- how does he do it? Bogged down a bit in the middle, sometimes the primer sequences were too long, but the last 50 pages ended everything beautifully. Loved this: ".. the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people-- and this is true whether or not they are well-educated-- is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations -- in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward." ( )