Words&Dirt

Having worked my way through almost all of Neal Stephenson’s novels, I’ve come to recognize a phenomenon I call The Stephenson Guarantee: You don’t know what any Stephenson book will be like before you crack it open, but you can be assured it won’t be like anything else. The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is no exception. This isn’t my favorite Stephenson novel, but it certainly occupies an important place in his corpus. It’s also damned impressive for a near-future vision from 1995; although the advanced nanotech that drives the story is largely unrealized twenty years later, the book contains many other imaginative innovations that have since come to pass, either in part or full. And nanotech may be just around the corner, if technologists are to be believed.

It was a queer and exciting feeling to read The Diamond Age––a story about Nell, a young girl who accidentally comes to possess a nanotech book (The Primer) with the ability to sense its environment and incorporate the girl’s experiences into its instructive narratives––on a Kindle. My Kindle is certainly no Primer, but it’s also something more (and also less) than a paper book. Primer-like technologies are probably a couple decades or more away, so it seems plausible that future readers might look back on the quaint little Kindle and sigh: “It was clunky all right, but maybe we wouldn’t have got where we are without it.” Perhaps, I kept thinking as I prodded the touchscreen to turn pages and pull up definitions of unfamiliar words, perhaps we are on our way.

Trying to summarize the plot of The Diamond Age (or any Stephenson novel for that matter) is daunting, because the author generally eschews traditional narrative arcs, favoring instead a smorgasbord of oddly strung together concepts and moments of insight. This style, while contributing greatly to Stephenson’s mystique, is rarely rewarding in the way we expect. The relative dearth of traditional character development and clear resolutions of conflict, coupled with the deluge of tech-talk all Stephenson readers come to expect, can make The Diamond Age seem like a tough read. And it is. But it’s also worth the effort.

This book helped me realize something important about how I interpret Stephenson’s work, which is that his worlds almost always exceed his stories and characters. Stephenson designs linguistic webs that explore (and exploit) human nature, socio-cultural dynamics, geography, environmental and economic pressures, offbeat humor, historical trends, and sheer whimsy. The Diamond Age takes many forms: a fairy tale, a Dickensian rags-to-riches narrative, a treatise on the benefits and risks of nanotech, a crash course in Turing machines, an inquiry into the capabilities of the collective unconscious, a Confucian morality play, and a touching look at parent-child relationships. Although many of the characters in this book are interesting, fun, and even endearing, Stephenson’s runaway enthusiasm for ideas left little room for them to grow on me in the fashion I expect from “great” literature. But, of course, this is not “great” literature. It’s something else entirely.

It’s often difficult to locate unambiguous moral lessons in Stephenson novels, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t prod morality in a meaningful way. In The Diamond Age, Stephenson ruminates on the persistence of tribalism in human psychology and community. Beyond the predicament of living in a future world where nation-states have given way to “phyles” (self-chosen tribes), characters struggle with the timeless tension between the desire to do right by those closest to them (friends and family), and the desire to do what’s right for humanity in general. In a wonderful passage, the headmistress of a neo-Victorian prep school points out that even the best and brightest fail to dent the world if they ignore the collective efforts of fellow humans:

It’s a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost––swallowed up in the ocean––unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes. (loc. 5325)

In his or her own way, each character in The Diamond Age discovers that while individual concerns can sometimes mesh nicely with group priorities, such synchrony cannot be counted on. We must, therefore, make difficult choices, sometimes with consequences that we neither endorse nor fully understand. This is not a novel insight about the character of the moral universe, but simply a creative reminder of the ineluctable frustrations that complicate human conduct.

A complementary idea is found in how the Constable (another of Nell’s neo-Victorian mentors) draws the distinction between intelligence and education:

The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people––and this is true whether or not they are well-educated––is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations––in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. (loc. 4684)

The Constable goes on to explain that life experience is the only thing that can truly confer intelligence, and that habitually reflecting on experience will help an errant mind become a healthy one. I feel little need to comment on the value of such ideas other than to register my unequivocal agreement with them.

On top of everything else, Stephenson can smelt sentiment when you least expect it, as in this scene where a loving father watches his sleeping daughter:

We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. ‘Common as the air’ meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver glow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving––no, demanding––of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona. (loc. 1031)

The Diamond Age may not be a masterpiece of coherent storytelling, but its pages are not deaf to the mysterious life of the heart. This book will get your brain buzzing and your chest thumping; you will chuckle and yawn and furrow your brow more times than you can count. So if that sounds like fun, dig in.

Rating: 8/10