The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Diamond Age is science fiction with both personal stories and global and political events. Some of it was good. There were many entertaining scenes, characters, bits of dialogue, and so on. I loved the idea of the Primer itself: a book designed by a concerned grandfather, hoping to teach his granddaughter to think independently and dare to go outside the customs of their society. The Primer is both a storyteller and an interactive video game, designed to bond with its reader and become a surrogate parent/teacher. A device raising a child, rather than the child's family, is still relevant.

The story of how the Primer gets into the hands of Nell is also notable. If the goal was to teach a privileged young lady how to be subversive, this goal became subverted because it lands in the hands of a poor and “tribeless” little girl. (Though the nitpicker part of me wonders why Hackworth didn't try simply asking Finkle-McGraw for a copy of the book for his daughter.)

There were a lot of detailed digressions–descriptions of history and technology that didn't serve the plot or feed my imagination for the world Stephenson created. It made the book a chore to read at times. The young heroine, Nell, was an underdog and I do like to root for a good underdog. But she was a bit too passive to hold my interest or inspire admiration. A lot more things happen to her than happen because of her actions. Other characters, Harv and Judge Fang for instance, piqued my interest more than Nell but alas they vanish after the first half.

There aren't really antagonists as such. Instead there are two powerful old men, Dr. X and Finkle-McGraw, who pull most of the strings and cause the conflicts that occur. They are ambiguous in terms of whether what they want is for the greater good or serving their own ends. They're nowhere to be found when all the shit hits the fan toward the end and I'm not sure what the point of that was.