The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

One of the more nebulous categories in my Popsugar Reading Challenge this year was to read a steampunk novel. I knew the genre had something to do with the Victorian time period and lots of copper cogs and gears, but I didn't have a true definition what this term really meant. Accordingly, I took to the internet to do some research and collect some book recommendations. I found what I was looking for on a website aptly named "The Best Sci Fi Books." I learned that the steampunk genre is defined as a type of science fiction which combines the Victorian time period with more modern technology, especially devices that are steam-powered. Topics typically covered in this genre include widely varying ideas like time travel, alternate histories, magic, romance, and supernatural creatures like vampires. Think top hats mixed with aviator goggles and steamships and you've got the general idea.

After looking through the website's list of book recommendations, I decided to try The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. The summary I read promised that the novel included some interesting feminist ideas, which intrigued me right away. This pick also allowed me to give Neal Stephenson another shot. It just happens to be one year this month since I read a different novel by him, Seveneves. My review was not positive. I felt like his characterization was weak and didn't like his obsessive focus on describing the technical aspects of his world. After a year of recovery from that reading experience, I finally felt ready to try another one of his novels to see if I just started out with a dud of a book, or if I truly don't like him as an author. Stephenson is very famous in the science fiction world and has won multiple awards for his novels, so I felt like I needed to give him another shot.

The Diamond Age is set in a future where the structure of the world has changed entirely due to the prevalence of nanotechnology. This new technology has enabled people to craft everything from necessities to luxury items using matter compilers. This has eliminated a lot of the problems of poverty, but exacerbated other societal issues, like conflicts between different cultures and religions.  The countries of the world no longer exist as we know them; different alliances have risen up and formed new countries based mostly on race and religion. The largest and most successful of these factions have modeled themselves on the society of the Victorian time period, and live according to their restrictive moral code. In this way, the novel qualifies as steampunk, but in a slightly different way than a traditional novel in this genre. The characters in this story have chosen to live a life that imitates the past rather than actually being set in a past time period.

The story follows a few different characters, but is mostly centered around a young girl named Nell. She lives with her mother and brother in an unincorporated city surrounding the neo-Victorians. Her family is too poor to belong to one of the big societies, so they live on the fringes of it and scrape by using the free food provided by public matter compilers and their mother's meager income. Nell's luck changes one day when her brother manages to swipe a mysterious book from a stranger and gifts it to her. The book, titled "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer," is quite unique. It is designed to bond with a little girl and help her learn to be strong and independent. Nell quickly falls in love with the primer and begins learning everything from how to read to how to defend herself from its interactive pages. The stories that the primer tells Nell are structured like fairy tales, but symbolize events going on in her life and in the world at large. By reading, she becomes intelligent enough about how the world works to both take care of herself and change the fabric of society.

Aside from the development of Nell, the novel also follows a few other characters, including the brilliant nano-tech that crafted the primer, some big players in the different factions, a theater magnate, and the actress that does the primer's voice work. Each one plays a role in either Nell's evolution or the ever-increasing conflicts going on between the societies. While the threads of their stories seem quite separate at first, they all converge in the end as Nell comes of age and begins to use the knowledge she gained from her book. This is a story about what the world might be like post-scarcity and the role that individuals could play within it, if they have the strength and intelligence to step outside the accepted pattern of things.

I liked The Diamond Age more than Seveneves, but I was still troubled by several aspects of it. On the positive side, I liked Nell's character and really enjoyed following her journey. She is definitely a protagonist that you want to root for. I also really enjoyed the concept of focusing on young girls in particular as targets for the primer; it was interesting to see the juxtaposition between the repressive Victorian society and the newly-empowered Nell. For the most part, the story was quite interesting and even though the book was long, I was able to move through it reasonably fast without feeling like it was a slog.

On the negative side, I was bothered by some of the same issues in this novel as I was with Seveneves last year. The summary I wrote above falls woefully short of describing everything that happens throughout the course of this novel, but the plot is so bizarre that to explain it any further would be impossible. The amount of technical detail included in The Diamond Age is staggering. I found the long descriptions of how the nanotechnology functioned to be dry, difficult to understand, and disruptive to the reading process. The amount of detail included about the setting was also overwhelming. It was to the point where I was never really clear on how the world worked because there was just too much exposition about it and nothing was logical enough to infer what I didn't understand. It was impossible to keep straight in my head.

On top of all this extraneous detail, I found some parts of the plot to be deeply confusing. For example, there is a mysterious faction named the Drummers that somehow live under the sea and communicate through near-constant sexual orgies. The way this works is not explained in a way that made complete sense to me. I felt like I could almost understand what Stephenson was going for, but I couldn't articulate it if I had to, which is a shame, because this ended up being an integral thread of the plot. I ran into a similar situation with the experimental theater troupe known as Dramatis Personae. They put on shows that work with a mix of physical staging, virtual simulations, multiple stories occurring simultaneously, and audience participation. It was really difficult to envision what this would look like. I didn't enjoy feeling lost throughout big chunks of the story.

The ending of the novel was a huge disappointment. Once Nell decides to leave her school and make her own way in the world, the plot stops making sense. For some reason, Nell ends up choosing to go work in a brothel where she is eventually raped. Nothing in the story up to this point would lead the reader to think she would choose to work in such a situation, and no explanation is ever given for it. It was very sad to see a strong female character that spent most of the book learning how to navigate the top rungs of society degraded by pointless sexual violence. This was a terrible choice that spoiled the story for me. I thought this novel was going to be about female empowerment, and it ended up falling into the tired old pattern of using violence against women as a meaningless plot point.

In the final chapters, a war breaks out between the different factions. Sadly, I didn't really understand which groups were on which sides, why they were fighting, and what anyone was hoping to achieve. After spending most of the book being interested in the story, it was weird to see everything devolve into such a confusing mess. All of a sudden, everyone was shooting everyone else, people were blowing themselves up, and an army of twelve year old girls were stripping naked and walking into the ocean to join Drummer sex orgies. I was left wishing for a real ending that made sense after investing all that time into the first three quarters of this 500 page book.

Despite liking most of The Diamond Age well enough, I think that I've now read enough Neal Stephenson to know that I'm just not a fan. I don't like his style of writing and I'm not good at envisioning his worlds. I think it's good to read books that take you out of your comfort zone every now and then, but Stephenson's writing challenges me in a way that I don't find to be enjoyable. I think he has very intriguing ideas and is undoubtedly very creative, but his delivery is confusing and overly detailed. He focuses on the technical details of his setting instead of developing his characters, which ultimately spoils the reading experience for me. I'm glad that I dipped my toe into this new genre, but I think Stephenson and I are done for the foreseeable future.


Challenge Tally
Popsugar Challenge: (a steampunk novel) 36/40

Total Books Read in 2017: 43