Book review: The Diamond Age

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes of education, social class, ethnicity, and the nature of artificial intelligence. Says wiki. Most of that is true. It's a good book among the genre; kinda like Anathem in that it does actually have something to say. And vaguely like Anathem in that the second half doesn't work as well as the first.

There are links to Vacuum Flowers. Not explicit, and of course the solution is different, but the problem is Integrity again, not in the moral sense necessarily but of society. The idea that people might swear allegiance to a govt of their choice is nice; all these different govts are able to interact via a Common Economic Protocol which is referenced whenever a difficulty might appear, but never explained.

The coming-of-age is of the heroine, Nell, and this works well. Nearly all is set in the Leased Territories, or Shanghai or regions thereabouts, don't strain my geography too much. Wiki tries to tell me this has themes of ethnicity but I fear they are handled in a shallow manner: the inscrutable Chinese Celestial Kingdom type stuff, and a variety of stereotypes. I don't rate it's discussion of the nature of AI either; the various Turing machines that appear later on are somewhat hey-ho.

Nell, educated by the primer, turns out to be a highly intelligent adaptable high-functioning person. 500,000 Chinese peasant girls have also been educated by the primer, albeit one without Miranda and for fewer years, and they get relegated to supporting roles, as I suppose is inevitable in a novel. Yet there is no real thought in the book about what consequences this might have. In contrast, in the West, we get more detail of the two other girls - Elizabeth and Fiona - who have also been educated by the book, and it doesn't seem to have been a great success for them.