I have this recurring dream about being trapped in a factory. In the dream, I’m strapped into a chair in front of a black conveyor belt. The conveyor belt emerges from a little window in a gray wall way off in the distance. The end of the conveyor belt is right in front of me and terminates in a drop-off. On the conveyor belt are an endless line of silver serving dish covers. As each dish cover reaches the end of the conveyor belt, a thin robot arm comes down and lifts the cover off and under each one is a rat or a squid. In the dream I am compelled to announce each rat or squid as it falls off of the conveyor belt. “Rat. Squid. Rat. Rat. Rat. Squid. Rat. Squid. Squid.” It seems so meaningless. Meaningless! Marooned in a sea of meaninglessness, my brain turns against itself and I laugh maniacally. Ah HA! HA HA HA HA! Ha hahaha!
Sometimes reading is like that. A rat here. A squid there. Then another rat. But sometimes the robot arm lifts the serving dish cover and underneath is a monkey with a ruby loupe in its eye repairing a golden clockwork octopus with an air-powered nut driver and you think to yourself, “Where did that come from?” Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson is a lot like that. It is simultaneously meaningful and meaningless. It can be delightfully confusing and seemingly directionless. It is over-complicated and deliciously so.
Not that it’s perfect. For one thing some of the characters really called for more development than they got. Also the story sometimes veered wildly into territory that seemed to come from nowhere. On the plus side, the reader is forced to give up having any idea of what is going to happen next. There is no “Rat. Squid. Rat. Squid.” going on here. It’s all about the clockwork octopus repair monkey squad.
The life of a nanotechnology architect is changed forever when he is commissioned by an aristocrat to bring a special project to reality. The aristocrat has designed a magical book that he hopes will teach his granddaughter to be independent. After engineering the book, the architect decides to make a secret copy of it to give to his own daughter. This plan goes awry and the unintended consequences multiply quickly. A copy of the book falls into the hands of a little girl living in a ghetto. More copies of the book are manufactured by a terrorist group whose agenda includes raising an army of orphans. The architect himself is forced to take on a mysterious clandestine mission. A multimedia actress falls in love with a little girl.
In the process Stephenson creates a compelling world and inhabits it with well-developed characters. There is a lot of darkness. Sometimes bad things happen to people who might not deserve it and not everybody is going to make it out of the story in one piece.
With Stephenson you have to let go of the last book you read by him. You may have loved Zodiac, but it’s not like Zodiac. You may have loved Snow Crash, but it’s not like Snow Crash. You may have loved Cryptonomicon, but it’s not like Cryptonomicon.
Creepy Factor: 3 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 4 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 3 out of 5 (There is some really strange sex going on under the ocean, among other places.)
Final result: I loved this book. After I read it, I took it straight to one of my best friends and told him to read it. It deservedly won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1996.
The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer – Neal Stephenson – Bantam – 1995
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