Title: The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
Publication Date: 1995
Plot: The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, and 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.
Miscellaneous: It alludes to Charles Dickens (with its neo-Victorian setting, as well as the narrative form), The Wizard of Oz (the main character encounters a computer named “Wizard O.2, and has some similarities to the Wizard from Oz), and alludes to cyberpunk and another Stephenson novel, Snow Crash.
This book garnered some very divided reactions. Most of the readers said it took them a while to get into; most cited around 100-180 pages in before they got immersed in it and felt more engaged. The reader leading the group has read it 3 times and felt like he was finally getting to what the novel is trying to say. There is a lot of lingo being tossed around in this novel and it can take a while to acclimate. There’s technological language, philosophical language, and world-building language that can be a little disorienting. One reader said “I felt like I jumped into the 6th season of a television show…and I don’t know what’s going.”
The discussion leader said, “Careful. Technology is not what this book is about (even though he pretty much invented the iPad).” He says the book has a lot to do with subversion, and how subversive ideas are necessary to a thriving society. The role of the Primer in the novel is to be subversive. We talked about how the things that have revolutionized and changed society all started out as subversive ideas, or things that went against the way things are. In essence, people that are subversive think things don’t have to be the way they are. If we want to grow and thrive as a society, we need to be challenged and adapt and change. And science fiction is great for this because it eases us into a world that is unknown, making it easier to show us ideas that otherwise might be hard to swallow or at least appreciate.
KFC was a funny point in the novel that the leader pointed out. The fact that the judges revere Colonel Sanders is funny. They point out how he aligns with Confucian thought and practice: he has a beautiful white goatee and he took his secrets to the grave.
Alright, the meat of our discussion was around the idea of “ignorant vs. educated” and “stupidity vs. intelligence.” In the novel, Stephenson writes that education is simply the attainment of facts. Intelligence is the ability to detect and deal with subtlety and contradiction in life. This reminded us of the AI and humor discussion in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” where Mycroft was smart, but could not really learn humor, thus separating him from humans. The leader shared one of his favorite passages. It says “Your life up to this point has given you all the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences…you will become not merely educated but intelligent.”
And he responded by saying, “We are all here because we did something very unintelligent. And it’s only by reflecting on it that we can get that intelligence back.” I really liked that perspective, that in order to truly become intelligent, we need to reflect on our experiences. And he acknowledged that he has some reflecting to do as well.
In many ways, the book is about carving out one’s own path. Resisting the flow of the way things are and finding one’s own path. It takes a great deal of reflection to determine where one has been and where one can go. And reading books (as evidenced by the Primer itself) is a great way to attain knowledge that teaches lessons and provides perspective.
Feel free to leave any comments on Stephenson, the novel, or anything else below.
Next week we’ll be talking about He, She and It.
Until next time,
E.
If you’d like to purchase The Diamond Age, you can do so here: