First of all, a bit of context-setting: I am not quite yet a father of a daughter, but I am four months out from becoming one, and I suspect my reading and emotional attachment to this book — and to Nell, as charming and plucky of a slightly-unbelievable-but-still-winning bildungsroman protagonist as one could hope for — are so heavily tempered by this book that quibbles I might have had even a year or two ago are sanded down into oblivion.
The reason for this is that in much the same way that Snow Crash purports to be a cyberpunk book but is actually a book about communication and language, The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer purports to be cyberpunk but is chiefly interested in education and parentage. Stephenson's book contains two parts (a decade-long lacuna separating the two), and each part is concerned with a single question:
- What social ills might exist in a post-scarcity world?
- How do we raise children to be interesting, happy, and virtuous?
I did not find either either side of Stephenson's first question to be particularly revelatory: the yadda-yaddaing of nanotechnology and its impacts felt thin and post-hoc to me, even if there were some flashes of brilliance in isolated asides. But where Stephenson was both clearly more interested and more persuasive was when he began to shift the narrative to focus on the triad of young girls who had received the primer, and their varying divergences.
Moreover, the device of the Primer carries with it a level of stylistic flourish difficult to find in other pieces of his work. Princess Nell's escapades served well to shepherd us through the obvious paces of character development while offering something relatively novel; the Turing Castle chapter in particular (and thereafter) was a legitimately fun (albeit, of course, campy) way to deliver what could have been dreadfully boring material.
This book suffers from the classic Stephenson tropes:
- As much as I think Stephenson lovingly writes Nell's character, I can't escape the feeling — much like in Snow Crash — that her sexual assault feels oddly transactional, as a heavy-handed way to weave villainy into a narrative that is in general pleasantly bereft of cartoonish intentions;
- The book ends with a beautiful visual metaphor that occludes but does not fully disguise its incoherence.
But — this book gave me so much to digest and ponder and enjoy, and it has not fully left my head since reading it. There are two types of science fiction: the ones that get better with age and the ones that get worse. This is the former.
★★★★★
