Status Updates From The Diamond Age: Or, a Youn...

So far so good, this is classic, heady Stephenson, and I'm loving it: steeped with visceral metaphor and mathy similes, a future extrapolated (sometimes farcically) to 11, and moderately paced before the spine crease, with different character groups set up to converge at some point and all tied to the titular primer, which is not so much a Macguffin as a mirror darkly.

OMG Hackworth's imagined ingredients for the bottle of McWhorter's Original Condiment.

I love how, in all earnestness and reverence, Judge Fang refers to KFC as The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel. Because of the Colonel's Confucian goatee.

Divided between Nell reading in her primer, her real life endeavours, the artifex John Hackworth becoming a double agent and the remaining characters. Some of those are the most interesting. Doctor X, judge Fang.

The primer is an almost visionary foreboding of what we came to see as AI in the last one or two years. Fascinating world building with pale main characters.

Lol, I just love Neal's math-inflected prose. If you're going to skewer your target with 3 figurative spears, might as well make 'em orthogonal and go for the nerd cred: "Spear number three; now Hackworth's pounding heart sat at the origin of a bloody coordinate system plotted by Lieutenant Chang, conveniently pinned and exposed for thorough examination."

The future is nano. Everything from food to furniture can be composed at home. Thousands of artificial mites are in the body. Cities turn black when mites of warring factions in the air reach critical mass. Cybermodding is the norm. Whole cities are build on artificially grown corals. Neo-victorianism is one of the new factions competing in a new world order against others and what remains of nation states.

To my dear imaginary followers: may your holiday gifts be wrapped in freshly compiled "thick, glossy mediatronic paper bearing animated Christmas scenes: Santa sliding down the chimney, the ballistic reindeer, the three Zoroastrian sovereigns dismounting from their dromedaries in front of the stable."