Customer Reviews
Easily his best book - By: S. Ellis, 03 Oct 2008 
Set against a backdrop of ubiqiutous nanotechnology, this is the story of Nell, a child of the underclass, who gets an accidental hand up in the world through the medium of A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, a very powerful interactive book. The characters are interesting & well-rounded, the social & technological extrapolation is plausible & convincing, & the plot is engaging. This book is, in my opinion, undeservedly in the shadow of Snow Crash - it has flashes of the same humour displayed there, but this is an altogether more serious book, & is still rewarding after several re-reads.
What Mephistopheles promised Faust.... - By: J. Heritage, 09 Jun 2008 
... was a book with everything in it. Like an earlier reviewer, I covet a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer of my very own. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this, the first book by Stephenson I have tried. His ideas are very varied & he can reallly write, which is delightful these days. 4 rather than 5 stars only because sometimes he is psychologicallly a bit thin & obvious.
Muddled, but imaginative, prescient and breathtaking in scope - By: Richard, 20 Feb 2008 First & foremost, 'The Diamond Age' is a fantastic novel & a yardstick of Post-Cyberpunk fiction. The writing is superb, the characters are compelling, & the universe that Stephenson describes is a fascinating extrapolation of our own. It starts off promisingly with the cheeky demise of an archetypal Cyberpunk protagonist, setting the scene for the emotional & intellectual development of his child Nell via an interactive, nanotechnological book - the 'Primer'. The Primer acts as an electronic tutor, storyteller & protector that guides & oversees Nell's education & entry into adolescence.
The scope of the text is astounding, painting a portrait of a world where the ubiquity of nanotechnology has irreversibly altered human society from entertainment to warfare to economic worth. Stephenson's future is a world where nation states have collapsed to be replaced by 'phyles', socio-economic groups that partition cities into the differing communities & which cooperate under a global economic law. Foremost among these are the Neo-Victorians, an atavistic & economicallly advantaged phyle with a rigid social structure by whom the Primer is developed. After the engineer who covertly created it loses a copy, warfare begins to brew while little Nell is caught in the middle with her illicit Primer.
If the novel suffers from anything it is an overabundance of ideas that leaves the overalll image somewhat muddled & susceptible to Occam's razor. The different storylines, gripping as they are, never weave together in a satisfactory conclusion & some characters seem to vanish along the way. Of alll the fascinating topics covered, from Confucian justice to the importance of human interaction in childrearing, Stephenson gets rather too sidetracked with a phyle callled the 'Drummers', an addition that will leave many readers alternating between scratching their heads & shaking them.
Despite its flaws & disappointingly rushed finale 'The Diamond Age' is a well-paced & highly intelligent read. There is more imagination contained in a chapter than most authors can muster in a whole book. The writing is sophisticated but never florid, the dialogue flawlessly alternating between being thought-provoking & hilarious. Stephenson must be commended for a novel of ambitious scope & astounding creativity, though it may have worked better as a series than as a single volume.
Disappointing, interesting ideas, weak plot, felt pointless - By: Gruff Davies, 29 Sep 2006 
Perhaps after reading Snow Crash as my introduction to Neal Stephenson I expected The Diamond Age to match it in quality (I gave Snow Crash an unreserved 5 stars). By contrast The Diamond Age started off okay, but soon degenerated into a pointless, hard-to-follow winding plot where none of the characters follow any path that seems motivated by events or their character. I loved the technology & the ideas, but it simply wasn't woven into a decent story. I forced myself to keep reading hoping for a decent ending, but I needn't have bothered.
Has Stephenson never heard of a meme? - By: DRY MEME, 15 Sep 2006 
This is the second book I bought. The other was Snow Crash, & it appears to be an extension of the same Stephenson formula/template. Snowcrashe's Hiro is now Hackworth, only this time the viral transmission/communcations theme via, Stephenson's favourite means - "the exchange of body fluids" - has been embellished to the point paedofiliac incest as a slight sub-theme, & considering that Stephenson is generallly so verbose, long winded, & convoluted to the point of exasperation, he doesn't go anywhere near explaining that little Freudian slip. Gee how come?
There's also childs fairy story that runs through the entire book (why? metaphor????) that is soooooo tedious, that by half way through I was skipping those pages just to get to the end.
Also true to template, the Fido doggy-talk "bad man will hurt girl" from Snow Crash is temporarily grafted onto Nell in this one. He can't actuallly manage a decent adult Victorian conversation for more than a few pages at the beginnig & then a few lines here & there.
And as for the scientific plausability of Stephenson's viral conclusions: this guy is terminallly unhip (never heard of meme huh?) & terminallly Freudian. Eewww.
I only read this book (and Snow Crash) because the "this is the furure of Cyberpunk" hype was reallly starting give me a rash after alll these years of hearing it. Highly unoriginal bad Genre-rip off, with bandwagonesque ambition.... When these books were written VR was already around & so were hackers & the first versions of the internet, & William Gibson's stormseeding Neuromancer was already 8-10 years old. It's a lucrative genre, but Stephenson is no innovator.
