Scott's review of The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) by Neal Stephenson
A friend of mine has periodically attempted to get me into the works of Neal Stephenson, the sci-fi writer who made a big splash with the virtual reality novel Snow Crash. Stephenson's work is imaginatively ambitious, and here, in describing the neo-Victorian future of a world where matter compilers can make anything, he fills the book with a huge raft of characters and concepts, most particularly "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", a super-intelligent book which uses nanotechnology to take its youthful charges into a world of fairy tale princesses and castles which teaches them the true lessons of life along the way. The Diamond Age truly takes off in those passages "taken" from the Primer, but otherwise I find Stephenson's style, while ambitious, too dry and anodyne to make for a complete reading experience. Aside from the sympathetic portrayal of the Primer's chief (and accidental) test subject, a runaway urchin named Nell, I found myself getting lost in Ste...more
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