The primary point of dispute, as always, was intellectual property, the lack of which in Turingia devalued the achievements of neo-Victorian engineering. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. As far as the overall story, there's a lot to like, plenty of varied characters, several story lines that are more closely woven than one might originally think, and plenty of action. How to intersect two lines that are not touching. Victorian one but something theyd come up with that was in between.". Has Dynabook inspired Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age? And it does - what I love about Stephenson is his high level of prescient-ness. Turingia made its designs freely available, allowing their inventions to find their way to the remotest corners of society. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. did was buy and sell things. Who's to say how things were to play out in the long run? Courts, governments, and jurisdictions in The Diamond Age? So the Mouse army, can be thought of as the combination of the best elements of both cultures/worlds. It is to some extent a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The Drummers underwater settlement quickly became a massive refugee camp hundreds of thousands strong. rev2023.4.17.43393. The Feed carries streams of both energy and basic molecules, which are rapidly assembled into usable goods by matter compilers. The doctors were baffled by her symptoms, and thought it might have been an aftershock caused by the high concentration of sites that almost killed her in the Drummers Cave. Molecular nanotechnology is omnipresent in the novel's world, generally in the form of Matter Compilers and the products that come out of them. The story is about rich foreigners and poor Chinese people. Major cities have immune systems made up of aerostatic defensive micromachines, and public matter compilers provide basic food, blankets, and water for free to anyone who requests them. I think the issue is the Primer. I powered through the last 100 pages more out of feeling of obligation than honest interest in the novel. What sort of contractor retrofits kitchen exhaust ducts in the US? Sounds like anarchy to me. Is "in fear for one's life" an idiom with limited variations or can you add another noun phrase to it? The only way to combat this is through combat. I have to admit, this is a dense read sometimes in the way that hard sci-fi can be: Glazing over at "tech speak tech speak tech speak." The ending of The Diamond Age Nathan Nov 27, 2013 05:59PM 0 votes Perhaps it was the effect of the subversive aspect of the Primer on the Mouse Army. Talented nano-engineer John Hackworth designs an interactive book, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, intended to function as both parent and teacher. And when Dr. X's Fanatical Fists invade the coastal enclaves of China, Nell is trappeduntil her army of Chinese girls, raised by the interactive Primer and devoted to Princess Nell, pull off a dramatic rescue. Alternative ways to code something like a table within a table? Browse other questions tagged, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site. @SteveEd: The mass produced primer would only have been an opportunity for abuse if it had been modified. 7 yr. ago Miranda was grasping at straws to contact Nell. highest status in the Confucian hierarchy. As if the writer could not spend a bit of time after writing a 1000 pages to explain how exactly the story unfolds, and how the carefully built characters will turn out. Nell and the Mouse Army settle down Hackworth feels that Victorian culture is stagnant and that children need a more open mind and ability to rebel. In the novel, the material needs of nearly all thetes are satisfied by freely-available food and clothing, albeit of low quality; thetes without the political connections of a phyle are entitled to similarly low-quality "free justice.". Miranda lived in one of the nicest room of the palace overlooking the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Commissioned by the powerful neo-Victorian Alexander Finkle-McGraw, the Primer is supposed to teach young neo-Victorians to be subversive enough to innovate and keep their phyle dominant. Snow Crash is without question the biggest SF novel of the 1990s. suitable for the unique cultural requirements of the Han readership. Or did I miss something? Peasants planted the seeds and had highest status in the Confucian hierarchy. For more information, please see our Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. I think the change done in the Mouse Primer, was to make them loyal to the first Primer, to Princess Nell. The book of the seed is inside Nell's Primer at the end and being worked on by the drummers even as they remove Miranda from the Drummer community. It was entertaining, sure, and the world rich and inventive, the characters interesting, but if I were to tell you what the book were aboutI wasn't sure. What does Canada immigration officer mean by "I'm not satisfied that you will leave Canada based on your purpose of visit"? A little mound with a small palace was built in the middle of the island that served both as her residence, and as the host of the central governing body. Cities appear divided into sovereign enclaves affiliated or belonging to different phyles within a single metropolis. Good question though. scholar-bureaucrats at the top, because they had the knowledge and wisdom to maintain social order; followed by 2) farmers, because The Primer, with its fairy tales and ability to teach Nell basic literacy as well as more complex academic subjects, changes Nells life and allows her and Harv to escape their home. Then the first set of orphaned girls got old enough for the high-tech "foot binding" process to be used on them. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. The novel is an important example of cyberpunk (work that imagines a dystopian future created by technology), while Stephensons allusions to Victorian literature and culture also make it an example of steampunk, despite the future setting. The Land Beyond was in an utterly wretched state. Wells time machine and went forward in time and he decided to create a post cyber-punk, progressively dystopian bildungsroman novel with a strong female lead and with a fascinating glimpse of a future that expands on the world begun in. I admit ruefully that Stephenson's vocabulary is better than mine. If Charles Dickens climbed in an H.G. All they Diamond Age also includes fully narrated educational tales from the Primer that map Nell's individual experience (e.g. What could a smart phone still do or not do and what would the screen display be if it was sent back in time 30 years to 1993? I have just finished rereading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age for about the fourth time and am still confused about the ending. And unlike Diamond Age, the ending of Snow Crash didn't make me feel like hunting down Stephenson and beating him with the manuscript until he coughed up the real ending..;-) Un-fun endings--Stephenson's Bane (Score: 4) by C. E. Sum on Friday September 17, 1999 @01:56AM Homepage Journal. A chance find in 1867 had drawn several thousand fortune seekers to alluvial diamond diggings along the Orange, Vaal, and Harts rivers. In reality, the diamond formation occurred over 10 to 100 s of million years, and such Sm-Nd two-mineral isochrons 39 give but some indication of an 'average diamond age', with large values . It is in Diamond Age that the impact of technology on society seems - today - remarkably prescient. Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Not the answer you're looking for? Neal Stephenson is one of my favourite authors, and I do give him credit for each of his books being based on a completely different paradigm. The Source, where the Feed's stream of matter originates, is controlled by the Victorian phyle (though smaller, independent Feeds are possible). Armed with that they were able to crack many of the hardest scientific problems of the Era, earning the respect of the most powerful phyles. "The Victorian system used Darwinian techniques to create killers adapted to their prey, which was elegant and effective but led to the creation of killers that were simply too bizarre to have been thought up by humans, just as humans designing a world never would have thought up the naked mole rat. . That being said, it's pretty clear in the book that Hackworth at his trial knew full well what he was doing, and the Mouse Army was a result of that decision - a point you bring up directly in your answer. Then there's the ending. In similar fashion, Wizard 0.2 creates an impressive light show as it apparently processes data, but it is then revealed that the computer's decisions are in fact made by King Coyote himself. It would only be natural that the central plot of the book should focus around the Turing test for artificial intelligence. I just finished listening to the Audio-book version of Neal Stephensons The Diamond Age and I wanted to check and see if I understood the story properly. It probably didnt even hurt. It only takes a minute to sign up. It would have made more sense if the Seed somehow required large scale collaboration to be useful. Tasks were created centrally, and distributed hierarchically, according to the principles of the Mouse Army. Shanghai is now carved into municipalities and groups that arose when most nations collapsed in the wake of the nanotechnology economy and the rise of a secure, anonymous network that hid taxable income. He shares the 'abrupt ending' trait with Alfred Hitchcock. As the predominantly agrarian societies of European South Africa began to urbanize and industrialize, the region evolved into a major supplier of precious minerals to the world economy; gold especially was urgently needed to back national currencies and ensure the continued flow of expanding international trade. A fully automated simulation that was not only able to mimic the laws of physics, but also generated objects and agents that matched the storyline both in content and mood. How to check if an SSM2220 IC is authentic and not fake? With his southern gambit frustrated, Carnarvon embarked on a northern strategy. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. I read this the first time when I was a young, impressionable, repressed, closeted Mormon boy. Where did I go wrong? In fact I think it also predicts a lot of the future of nanotechnology and entertainment. The phyles coexist much like historical nation-states under a system of justice and mutual protection, known as the Common Economic Protocol (CEP). The Mouse Army is doing it's own thing. Children were laughing, parents were smiling, and grandparents were crying of joy, as they saw their hard work bearing fruit. The crowded, multi-factioned, multi-leveled city of Shanghai and nearby Pudong made me miss my hometown terribly. That's right, it's very similar, except instead of nicotine, this will imbue you with knowledge equivalent to a bachelor's degree in computer science. She joins the Drummers, whose work on the Seed may allow her to unmask Nells identity and location. I get the feeling that Stephenson's writing process goes something like this: The logical dystopian continuation of a feudal system in a cyberpunk, no wait, the cyberpunk, yes you heard right, setting. Various characters suggest that this caregiving figure is what allows Nell to develop into a well-adjusted, inquisitive, and confident adult. "Diamond Age" is an extension of labels for archeological time periods that take central technological materials to define an entire era of human history, such as the Stone Age, the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. Stephenson's vision of a future shocked and titillated me, and years later I still found it returning to haunt me. They destroy the Feed in formerly Chinese territory and capture Nell. Hackworth emerges and goes on a quest with his daughter to discover the engineer behind the work on the Seed, only to learn that he is that engineer, the Alchemist. There's a kind of girl power aspect to it all that's especially nice. GENERAL FICTION, by He was cordially invited to sit at the table of Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, who subtly hinted that it would be of great benefit for all parties, if he could spend most of his time outside of New Atlantis territory. So, yeah - I'm a bit confused too. The hierarchic nature of the Feed and an alternative, anarchic developing technology, known as the Seed, mirror the cultural conflict between East and West that is depicted in the book. Content Warning: The source novel includes sexual abuse and violence, misogynistic slurs as characterization, and physical violence. . Life in Shanghai devolves when the Fists of Righteous Harmony, a Chinese nationalist group, has an uprising. What is the etymology of the term space-time? Although by this time some two-thirds of the settler population spoke Dutch or Afrikaans, political power rested largely with an English-speaking elite of merchants, lawyers, and landholders. shocked to see that her feet were no more than four inches long. Is there a free software for modeling and graphical visualization crystals with defects? Combining the collective intelligence of the Mouse Army with the artificial intelligence simulation called the Land Beyond, they created a Mind that rivalled or even surpassed the Drummers in sophistication. As Dr. X was a scholar-bureaucrat, elevating farmers to the top of the hierarchy might just be self-effacing. I find it strange to paint the Seed as a Chinese/Confuscianist ideal. Seems some artists do not care about the tidy wrap up. He did say that the Primer did not turn out quite the way they had expected it to. Society in The Diamond Age is dominated by a number of phyles, also sometimes called tribes, which are groups of people often distinguished by shared values, similar ethnic heritage, a common religion, or other cultural similarities. Now, go to the diamond charging station to the left and place the Hexipal in it. [4] The protagonist's name points directly to Little Nell from Dickens' 1840 novel The Old Curiosity Shop. Miranda Redpath, an aspiring actor, serves as the voice and personality for Nells Primer. Dr. X forces Hackworth to create a noninteractive form of the Primer to educate the girls. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. 6.0 stars. Nells adventures in the Primer wind down once Miranda leaves. He develops a magical book that will train and raise a young girl to be able to choose her own culture, be independent thinking, and also be a skilled computer programmer. The conflict between Afrikaners and English speakers led to the establishment of the Afrikaner Bond in 1879. I will try to summarize the plot and motivations as I understood them while listening to the book and if any of you see that I made a mistake then please correct me. Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, and our products. The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. It was just how people in the future entertain themselves. Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professionsas an architect, painter, actor and lawyerand struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. The ending of The Diamond Age. He basically takes a subversive book makes it more Chinese and respectful of authority but he makes the authority the owner of the missing book. I haven't finished reading it yet Also, there is a difference between the real Primer and the mass-produced Primers at the end of the book. Trouble signing in? The rules of the CEP are intended to provide for the co-existence of, and peaceful economic activity between, phyles with potentially very different values. The Diamond Age was first published in 1995 by Bantam Books, as a Bantam Spectra hardcover edition. According to a June 2009 report in Variety, Zo Green had been hired to write the series, with George Clooney and Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions as executive producers on the project. I feel as though that's a trite thing to say, but I'm not talking about the overall story, I'm talking about the way each sentence is crafted. Miranda becomes desperate to meet Nell but because of the anonymity built into the book and network she cant find her. Yet I don't think I ever truly understood the story, and certainly not the ending. Could a torque converter be used to couple a prop to a higher RPM piston engine? Stephenson's descriptions of brightly lit Nanjing Road and small, dim, alleys of hawkers was so spot on. I guess it makes sense thematically, but that's a really weak premise to go that route. The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson. After tying up his loose ends Hackworth offered his services to Princes Nell. Hanya Yanagihara As integrating the Han girls into neo-Victorian society was deemed as too much of a shock, Queen Victoria II ordered Imperial Tectonics to build a small round artificial island, Turingia, not too far from New Chusan. by In January 2007, the Sci-Fi Channel announced that it would be making a six-hour miniseries based on The Diamond Age. . To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. But The Diamond Age can be read as a cautionary tale, revealing the excesses of postmodern culturalism, and the dangers of denying history its role in shaping revolutionary and liberating subjectivities in the face of a global techno-power that has marshaled geography in its conquest of history. Some say that Stephenson cant write endings, some say it fits the genre perfectly. (NOT interested in AI answers, please). It is to some extent a science fiction coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life.

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