The Diamond Age.

Neal Stephenson won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1996 for his novel The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, a postcyberpunk bildungsroman that can’t survive under the weight of its own self-importance. While Stephenson managed to create a credible Gibsonian universe in his earlier hit, Snow Crash, here his worldbuilding detracts from the story about the titular book that might be able to reprogram the future of humanity, and his hifalutin language doesn’t meld well with the story’s focus on a child protagonist.

The “primer” of the book’s title is a “ractive” book (short for “interactive” … I’m not a fan of this kind of conlang/argot shit, which ends up little more than an annoying distraction), designed by the engineer John Hackworth for Lord Gussie Fink-Nottle (close enough) using nanotechnology and I think what we’d now call a 3-D printer, designed to raise a young girl – the Lord’s granddaughter, and, via a pirated copy, Hackworth’s daughter – to be a hypereducated, worldly, creative young adult. The copy intended for Fiona Hackworth ends up in the hands of an impoverished, abused girl named Nell, brought to her by her scapegrace brother, Harv, setting in motion a great and possibly unintended sociological experiment pitting nature against nurture – not a mother’s nurture, but a surrogate in the form of the actress, Miranda, who performs nearly all of the “ractive” functions in the Primer for Nell.

The Primer itself is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure hepped up on nanotech; in fact, Stephenson’s whole universe here revolves around nanotechnology, where static objects can be built in Matter Compilers, and nanosites – microscopic entities designed to perform specific functions in the air or within someone’s body – abound, including security infrastructures that must have the NSA seething with envy. (The book’s very title was coined by cryptography pioneer and nanotechnology researcher Ralph Merkle, whose great-uncle made a certain boner with which you, being a visitor to this particular blog, are likely familiar.) Stephenson’s vision of an age of nanotechnology, combined with a dark post-nationalistic viewpoint where communities are organized in “phyles” that called to mind the guilds of early RPGs, is so overly and unnecessarily complex that it overwhelmed the core storyline of Nell’s education and maturation through her experiences with the Primer. The “Drummers” hive-mind phyle is one of the novel’s bigger messes, ambiguously-described yet central to the operation of the Primers and, ultimately, to the resolution of the plot.

My other, secondary problem with The Diamond Age was the absurd vocabulary Stephenson used in it – perhaps a nod to its underpinnings in Victorian literature, but coming off as stilted and sometimes inappropriate to the characters in question. Nell is only about eleven or twelve years old when she has this thought:

It was just that the story was anfractuous; it developed more ramifications the more closely she read it.

Now, maybe all of you knew the word “anfractuous” from childhood, but I only encountered it sometime in the last two years, somewhere in The Recognitions or Gravity’s Rainbow or some classic from the 1800s that routinely sent me to the dictionary. It’s a valid English word, actually a pretty useful one, but you’re never going to hear that or “ramifications” in the internal monologue of a preteen. Stephenson’s either showing off or incapable of capturing the vernacular of someone that age – and the whole book is full of maddening word choices like these.

The shame of this incoherence is that Stephenson buried what might have been a remarkable novel of ideas, one that merely uses the platform of his nanotech universe to explore the roles of community, government, family, education, and religion in a world where we’re that much closer to the singularity. Even one of those topics would make the foundation for a good novel, although I can’t blame Stephenson – who’s not afraid to be prolix in his prose – for aiming high. Unfortunately, the resolution of the story is so muddled, both in plot and in philosophy, that by the end of the book it wasn’t even clear how we’d gotten there, much less whether there was a point to any of this.

Next up: As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m tackling Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and it is indeed an excruciating read.