the digital age

Meg Kelley Diamond Age Book Review

Page history last edited by Meg Morrissey-Kelley 1 yr ago

Megan Morrissey-Kelley

Book Review #1

The Diamond Age

Eng 529

Dickens Meets Nanotechnology

If one can conceptualize the marriage of Dickensian structure and underlying pauper to princess themed plot to that of a cyber-oriented, globally identifying world of nanotechnology, the materialization would mirror the world created by Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age. Stephenson’s novel offers a collision of history and future through the infusion of a neo-Victorian, socially stratified society simultaneously rooted heavily in Confucian ideal and computer-generated interactive experience. “The artful blend of old and new throughout the book reminds the reader how little human nature changes, even as the world humans create changes dramatically,” (Merrill 3).

Through a variety of demographically diverse characters woven together through paralleled texts that eventually converge, Stephenson is successful in revealing both the age-old issues that arise as a result of severe discrepancies in class, education, and the distribution of resources as well as the emergence of issues encompassed in the evolving relationship between humans and technology. Stephenson’s novel takes place mainly in the city of Shanghais in a time where human bodies can be hardwired with weaponry and credit cards. Each home in The Diamond Age comes equipped with an M.C., a matter compiler, from which synthetically comprised foods and household items can be acquired at the touch of a mediaglyphic. The physical division of human and non-human is quickly disappearing, as technology is inverted in nearly every facet of existence. The human experience has expanded far beyond the physical world and the lines between what is perception, reality, and virtual reality are blurred.

The creation of nanotechnology bearing mites, “of diamonoid structure,” (Stephenson 61) was developed to track people, record information, rid bodies of disease and aid in the mission to uphold moral conduct. These mites serve to further mechanicalize the human experience and remove anonymity from the equation. John Percival Hackworth, a Neo-Victorian engineer, used such nanotechnology in his creation of A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. The Primer, an interactive book with virtual realistic capability known as ractive technology, was designed for a young girl of the Atlantis, the most affluent class, as a means to educate through lessons and personalized moral tales. “John Percival Hackworth projected his thoughts into matter…But he felt the need to go beyond that—he wanted to reach beyond matter and into someone’s soul,” (Stephenson 57).

The Diamond Age centers largely around Nell, a child born into the lowest class of thetes. The daughter abandoned by her father, Bud, a hardened criminal and neglected by her mother, Tequila, Nell is abused and neglected by a host of men her mother enters into fruitless relationships with. The only source of protection and unconditional love in Nell’s life is her brother, Harv. At a young age Harv, confined to the phyle of thetes, is well-versed in the world of thievery and street crime. After attacking John Percival Hackworth on the street, Harv returns home with A Young Lady’s Primer for Nell. And thus, Hackworth alters the fate of young Nell as he unknowingly reaches her soul with his work and provides her release from the future lack of education and guidance behold. Again in Dickensian vein, Stephenson exemplifies through Nell the notion of upward mobility and the Confucius belief that provides the bedrock of The Diamond Age, “By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.”

Nell is quickly transformed into Princess Nell, as she is injected into the fairy tale universe that spans far beyond the “smart paper” of her beloved Primer. Her ractive primer speaks to her, teaches her to read and write, and teaches her to be the confident heroine escaping from her real world necessitates. Behind the words that affect Nell’s soul and lead her on a real and virtually real journey through dark and light, exists Miranda. Miranda is the voice in which Nell finds solace and seeks escape. In a booth, reading lines from a teleprompter, Miranda becomes enraptured in the life of Nell. Miranda becomes Nell’s savior by truly identifying as her primer. And, though Nell is unaware of the person who exists on the other end of her book, she is aware that her primer loves her, as she is protected from people who hurt her and taken on journeys with her inanimate objects turned lesson-bearing companions to capture the keys that lead to the ultimate freedom. Miranda is “another seeker whose fate is bound up with the primer—a woman who holds the key to a vast, subversive information network that is destined to decode and reprogram the future of technology,” (Wiltsie 1).

Nell’s primer takes her on journeys through the real world as well. Transcended from her rank as thete, Nell arrives in the dovetail community, a phyle of people who honor the art of creating things by hand that are composed of real materials such as wood, glass and steel. It is here that Nell is taken in by Constable Moore and learns that “real life turns out to be more complicated than what you have seen in that book…All it amounts to is that you must be ready to learn from sources other than your magic book,” and thus the relationship between the physical world and the virtual world are fused.

In the creation of The Diamond Age, “an age marked more than anything by the practical implications of building virtually every device in the world atom by atom,” (Merrill 2), Stephenson was able to apply that same level of deconstruction within a world where people belong to neatly compartmentalized phyles and classes. By allowing readers an overall examination of his constructed society as whole, he successfully created a reference for his audience in which the characters he magnified could be examined and understood as archetypes of his futuristic world. By juxtaposing the cyber world with old fashioned values; a judicial system that ordered both canings and death by microscopic explosives in the bloodstream and classrooms for the elite complete with ruler induced knuckle rapping and the laborious copying of text with pen on mediaglyph free paper, Stephenson also created a world his reader could understand and, in many ways identify with.