_Diamond Age_

[Stuart Moulthrop]

GR fans will instantly recognize the hommage.  If (a) I had the book handy
and (b) I weren't so badly medicated at the moment, I'd give a smarter
account, or maybe just quote the darned thing.

_Diamond Age_ itself is an impressive book, though not quite the stunner I
thought it was going to be after the first 100 pages.  Like a Certain Other
Writer We Know, Stephenson has more ideas than will fit in a novel.  Since
Stephenson is so fascinated with the notion of Neo-Victorianism, I'd
venture to say that DA "wanted" to be one of those 19th-century
triple-deckers (600-pages-plus), but time pressure and market restraints
wore it down.

In one respect DA does strongly resemble GR:  I defy anyone to come away
with an unambiguous sense of the ending.   This is the first SF novel since
maybe _Ubik_ that seems to demand a second reading.

Politically, DA is to GR as the 90's are to the 60's -- its world-view is
straight cyberpunk dystopia: the only order is provided by meta-corporate
"phyles," or big men with guns, and though somebody does try to make the
world safe for little girls (by turning computers into books), it turns out
that only little *western* girls count.  In the end, at least after reading
#1, the novel seems to vindicate western rationalism and technocracy
against the Yellow Peril.

Maybe I'll recant after a second pass.

(Note: "Yellow Peril" was  what they called Claude Shannon's famous paper
on information theory.  DA is about that, too.)

-- Stuart