One of the best realised and most workable nanotech economies in any SF novel. (The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson)

Member Name: jdkane

Product:	The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
Date:	08/03/01 (30 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Science; very practical, very sound; no real flaws, much prophecy of good seeming: A

Disadvantages: Scene-setting; Little bit reliant on readers knowing the place already, not really descriptive; B

Neal Stephenson's neo-Victorian oddity, notable chiefly for a stylised, unusually smoothly forced cast of changing societies and one of the best realised and most workable nanotech economies in any SF novel.

The time is some period in the 21st century; disgruntled with the almost total moral collapse of the society of the day, a small group of skilled professionals hive themselves off into an essentially Neo- Victorian subculture. The total collapse of the present infrastructure in the face of industrial nanotechnology and the disintegration through overload of the telecommunications system leave everything wide open- with the only certainty being that the old power players are hideously ill equipped for the new world and whoever is in charge, it will not be them.

A generation later, the New Victorians, through dint of technical skill and superior professionalism, are the leading phyle- physical location has almost ceased to be meaningful- but all is not well. Like the original Victorians, the Neo- Victorian movement was basically reaction. Like the original Victorians, the first generation has first hand experience of living in a corrupt, dead society; ample evidence of the hell that results from a collective failure of self control. The second generation, the up and coming young, have never known the reasons which impel their parents- and one very powerful Equity Lord is sufficiently worried by his child's future that he commissions a brilliant young bespoke nanoengineer to build him a teaching device, an illicit magic book, to teach his young lady the arts of self- determination and self- defence. John Percival Hackworth is the nominal hero of the book, the engineer, who cannot quite leave well enough alone; he has a daughter of his own, and makes an illicit copy.

Enter puppetmaster number two. Complex plots are much easier to keep track of if all the characters are well drawn; you can identify the wants and needs of them, ke
ep track that way. Doctor X is certainly different, despite the generic name; we first encounter him as a collector of strange nanites. They are all self- modifying; there are assault nanites designed to do bad things to the human body and it's immediate environs- in fact, one of the characters we meet is a consultant in nanotech warfare, a mercenary of the microminiature, and an ex-Scot, incidentally. As there are offensive nanoids, there are defences against them; the arms race has gone far beyond the ability of humans to keep up, and doctor X collects the fallout, paying bounty on unusual nanoids. He is also a fully paid up Confucian. Hackworth contacts him to make a second, illicit copy of the Primer, for his own daughter. After doing so, he is mugged, and the Primer stolen- to order, by doctor X, who has three hundred thousand abandoned orphans on his hands, although we find both these things out much later.

His daughter does end up with a copy, as part of a special school - along with a young orphan girl, the daughter of an executed criminal (the judge who sentenced him, incidentally, later becoming an active colleague of Doctor X), who has a very great deal to learn. Nell is probably the real heroine of the novel, and her relationship with the book runs all the way through it. Also with the woman on the other end. It is an interactive book; someone, some thing, has to serve as the animating principle. Most 'television' is interactive in some form or other; tactile rigs require a person on the other end, a ractor, to act it all out, to create the master sensation, plotline, which is fed to the viewer. Miranda, a promising and profitable actress who went to great expense to get the best possible rig, ends up performing the majority of the motivating for Nell's copy of the Book. Effectively, an electronically separated mother-daughter relationship, with Hackworth's central genius- his design, his Book-making him the absentee father.


Doctor X has a great deal in mind. Entirely apart from the book, and the orphans, he is also at work on the salvation of China from domination by western ideals. To this end he sponsors, at the end of the book, a rebirth of the Boxer Rebellion in order to have enough chaos for his long- term plan to take effect.

In telecommunications, centralisation died and went to hell, taking a large part of the global economy with it, some time ago. Decentralisation is the mode, everyone being their own web server, passing on messages as they come to them in the manner of some hyperactive bush telegraph; but not in nanotechnology. The general consensus is that decentralisation is collective suicide. The technology has too much weapons potential. Feed systems are the rule; giant molecular sieves that can process out individual breeds of atom for nanoassembly purposes with high efficiency, but which are far too large and far too complex for any one person to have. Seed technology- the true Von Neumann capability, self assembly from naturally occurring materials without pre-processing, everyone has a construction plant in their back pocket level technology - is only theoretically possible, and research is forbidden - the hunter-killer nano come and flush your brain out of your ears kind of forbidden.

Doctor X has other ideas. He is not a westerner to whom the idea of the big stick comes naturally - but a Confucian, with respect for peasant culture, a reverence of learning and a more pragmatic but still non-violent approach to life. Seed technology could turn the poor, destitute and immiserated citizens of inner China's lives into something much more closely approximating paradise. Nanopeasants? Wild thought- but try and poke a hole in it. You can't.

His only problem is that it is impossible to research and produce. So he needs a brilliant but very hard up engineer - and disgracing Hackworth, with a little help from the judge, serves
that purpose - and a safe site to get the project off the ground, which is where Nell, who is receiving a virtual training designed to mould her into a latter-day (but hopefully more successful) Boadicea, and his three hundred thousand orphans who are receiving a watered down version of the same, come in.

Shows you just how much there is to the plot that it took me this long to get round to the abstract stuff. The plot is outstanding, the science terrifyingly plausible, the characters - well, one would not be a Neo- Victorian without self-control, now would one? Although to be fair it is not a novel about people in society, primarily, (despite comparisons with Pygmalion, the trend is in the other extreme) it does take it into account well. The characters do genuinely belong to different cultures when they chose to, at least far more so than usual. Description does not serve adequately the brilliance of the book. It is complicated but worth keeping up with - at least it is used complexity, all leading somewhere in the web. A sadly undernoticed, offbeat gem that desires attention.

Imagination; excellent extrapolation- a novel set in the real world of the future as it ought to be; A-
Science; very practical, very sound; no real flaws, much prophecy of good seeming; A
Scene-setting; Little bit reliant on readers knowing the place already, not really descriptive; B
Characterisation; Elementally sound, wooden in parts but only because it ought to be; B+

Overall; brilliant tongue-in-cheek nanofiction that deserves a far bigger place; A-

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