The Diamond Age
From LeoWiki
| Score | Title | Author | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6.6 | The Diamond Age | Neal Stephenson | Cyberpunk |
| Technophilia | 6 |
|---|---|
| Secularity | 8 |
| Quality | 7 |
| Xenophilia | 5 |
| Personal Tilt | 7 |
The Diamond Age is a very didactic novel. I have not read other books by Stephenson, so it is possible that my quibbles are caused more by the deficiencies of the writing style than by disagreement with the beliefs expressed.
Nevertheless, Stephenson makes no distinction between objective narration and the recounting of the characters' thoughts. These thoughts are often lectures expressing ideas that I find distasteful and, frankly, wrong.
Untraceable money transfer over the internet has destroyed our nation states and everything else we hold dear by destroying taxation. Money, on the other hand, is still around with explanation for its existence or for why people can't just transfer a few billion to their account from /dev/random.
An Amish-like cultural movement has decided that corsets and repression of sexuality are darn good ideas. These "Victorians" have magically become uber-successful business people. They are now one of the three dominant cultures along with the mumble-mumble and the Han Chinese.
A Victorian Lord commissions a low-class (but not too low-class) engineer to make an interactive nanotech picturebook for the Lord's daugther so that she'd have the spunk to buck the system and to simultaneously brainwash her into believing in the supremacy of the Victorian bullshit.
Naturally, this Lord disses tradtional educational systems for their tendency to brainwash in his very next breath. A few hundred pages later, he extolls the virtues of hipocricy. Eh.
The central theme of this book is the superiority of managers (dinosaurs) over geeks (shrews), artists (birds), and bluecollars (ants). The starving masses invariably are faking it. All the poor are lazy liars. Being on top is a valid excuse for stepping on the hands of others who try to climb up.
Stephenson alleges that "some cultures are better than others". He betrays a misunderstanding of the descriptive principles of natural selection by using them as a prescriptive foundation of his value system.
Uhm, that's just wack. Past survival is no indication of future survival. More importantly, past extinction is no indication of future extinction. Cultural diversity prevents wholesale extinction of everyone.
(I've seen a few blighters complain about the unified mind/body stance of Egan's Diaspora and Schild's Ladder. As such, I feel obligated to bitch about the mind/body dualism stance of Stephenson's The Diamond Age. A human is a Turing machine, dammit, even if the unanimous consensus in DA is the opposite.)
Pah. The book is an interesting read. Just don't divert power from Frontal BS Shields to Warp Thrusters or the Holodeck while reading it.
