Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
May. 12th, 2010 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarp(It appears that I speak at greater length when angered than when pleased.)
John Percival Hackworth, a brilliant nanoengineer in a world in which nanotechnology has eliminated scarcity, is hired by an eccentric aristocrat to create an AI book - really, a video game - to teach his spoiled granddaughter to be self-reliant and unconventional. The book is titled The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
Hackworth, inspired by the project and determined to give his own young daughter the same benefits, has an illicit copy of the Primer made, only to have it stolen. It falls into the hands of an abused, illiterate, and brilliant little girl named Nell. Dr. X, the black market kingpin who made the copy for Hackworth, has an interest in the Primer for his own purposes, and Hackworth finds himself being blackmailed. As Nell learns from the Primer, other people develop an interest in Nell, including a voice actress Miranda, who does the voice of the book and unwittingly becomes Nell's surrogate mother.
That's the plot, but the plot is second to the worldbuilding - which, unfortunately, is very unpleasant. The book's ideas about what cheap nanotechnology might do to the world are fascinating, but they come along with a lot of other ideas, which are interesting only the sense that they are bad.
Neal Stephenson's revulsion for society makes it difficult for him to distinguish one of them from another, and most of the cultures he describes are the same dystopia. He gives the impression of having read some social psychology, and come out of it feeling the sort of humiliated bitterness that a teenager raised Young Earth Creationist might get from bio class. How dare they lie to him and tell him he's an individual! It turns out that a human being's social environment affects his or her behavior! This is an obvious contradiction!
The book appears to regard affiliation with a social group or political movement as demeaning, because being part of a group makes you act like part of a group, which is, apparently, different from acting like yourself. In this book, the only healthy relationships are the ones between individuals - and the two heroes, Nell and Hackworth, spend a lot of the book without any real relationships at all. To relate to or feel responsibility towards a larger culture is to lose your humanity. This shows up first as "tribes" whose loyalty to one another is demonstrated via their mindless, unrelenting violence towards outsiders, and later by a sect of Chinese revolutionaries who don't appear to want anything in particular out of their revolution, except to kill and rape a lot. They are written as a zombie horde in costume as the Boxer Rebellion.
Presumably this philosophy of unilateral disgust is part of why Stephenson thinks it's acceptable to come out with all the incredibly racist imagery he uses here. Because he scorns all group affiliations, including white groups, it's fine for him to define China entirely in terms of sinister Chinatown doctors, infanticide, mob violence, and footbinding. No problems there!
It's notable that the one group for which he does feel sympathy is the wealthy and almost completely white Neo-Victorians - the only white people he describes with anything approaching the level of distaste he does the rest of the world are, I'm sure coincidentally, the poor ones. Nell and Hackworth both identify themselves with the Neo-Victorians, but are permitted to do so because their culture really is superior to others. (The book says this several times, uncritically, so it is not speculation on my part.) There are two incidents of What These People Need Is A Honkey Syndrome: The revolution can't succeed without Nell and Hackworth, apparently. I have a vague recollection that China has, in the past, managed a few revolutions without much outside help.
(There's no particular reason Nell couldn't have been Chinese, by the way - she's born in China and spends her early childhood there, but she's white and never learns to speak the language. Mainly so that there can be scenes where she thinks about how bizarre and alien all these Chinese people speaking Chinese are. At one point she's working at a brothel, and the Chinese prostitutes, some of whom she had previously rescued from the evil revolutionaries when they tried to destroy the place, torture her and sell her out to the same revolutionaries to be raped and murdered. It's not even considered that they might do otherwise.)
Beyond the general grinding unpleasantness of the book's ideas about humanity, it badly needed to be edited. There are some very long and totally unnecessary sections involving Hackworth's sexual issues, which seem to assume that we're going to be more interested in the character than I think anyone could be expected to be. He's the genius-with-an-impoverished-emotional-life character type, and isn't given a good deal of development beyond that. His priorities at first are focused on his daughter, but when they shift later, it's never really clear where they went. He makes several decisions at the end that are never explained. I think they're supposed to be a metaphor for freedom?
Nell's inner life is clearer, because it's expressed through the metaphor of the Primer - but a lot of that could have been cut out because, again, it doesn't really go anywhere. Nell spends most of the book without any goals, and the one she develops towards the end we see her realize only from the outside, because the PoV switches to that of a minor character. The revelations she comes to seem to be imposed on her by outside forces.
What would've helped the book would have been more dialog from Nell and Hackworth, not more ruminations into their subconscious - but dialog would involve them talking to other people, with whom they would be presumed to have relationships. This does not seem to have been on the agenda.
John Percival Hackworth, a brilliant nanoengineer in a world in which nanotechnology has eliminated scarcity, is hired by an eccentric aristocrat to create an AI book - really, a video game - to teach his spoiled granddaughter to be self-reliant and unconventional. The book is titled The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
Hackworth, inspired by the project and determined to give his own young daughter the same benefits, has an illicit copy of the Primer made, only to have it stolen. It falls into the hands of an abused, illiterate, and brilliant little girl named Nell. Dr. X, the black market kingpin who made the copy for Hackworth, has an interest in the Primer for his own purposes, and Hackworth finds himself being blackmailed. As Nell learns from the Primer, other people develop an interest in Nell, including a voice actress Miranda, who does the voice of the book and unwittingly becomes Nell's surrogate mother.
That's the plot, but the plot is second to the worldbuilding - which, unfortunately, is very unpleasant. The book's ideas about what cheap nanotechnology might do to the world are fascinating, but they come along with a lot of other ideas, which are interesting only the sense that they are bad.
Neal Stephenson's revulsion for society makes it difficult for him to distinguish one of them from another, and most of the cultures he describes are the same dystopia. He gives the impression of having read some social psychology, and come out of it feeling the sort of humiliated bitterness that a teenager raised Young Earth Creationist might get from bio class. How dare they lie to him and tell him he's an individual! It turns out that a human being's social environment affects his or her behavior! This is an obvious contradiction!
The book appears to regard affiliation with a social group or political movement as demeaning, because being part of a group makes you act like part of a group, which is, apparently, different from acting like yourself. In this book, the only healthy relationships are the ones between individuals - and the two heroes, Nell and Hackworth, spend a lot of the book without any real relationships at all. To relate to or feel responsibility towards a larger culture is to lose your humanity. This shows up first as "tribes" whose loyalty to one another is demonstrated via their mindless, unrelenting violence towards outsiders, and later by a sect of Chinese revolutionaries who don't appear to want anything in particular out of their revolution, except to kill and rape a lot. They are written as a zombie horde in costume as the Boxer Rebellion.
Presumably this philosophy of unilateral disgust is part of why Stephenson thinks it's acceptable to come out with all the incredibly racist imagery he uses here. Because he scorns all group affiliations, including white groups, it's fine for him to define China entirely in terms of sinister Chinatown doctors, infanticide, mob violence, and footbinding. No problems there!
It's notable that the one group for which he does feel sympathy is the wealthy and almost completely white Neo-Victorians - the only white people he describes with anything approaching the level of distaste he does the rest of the world are, I'm sure coincidentally, the poor ones. Nell and Hackworth both identify themselves with the Neo-Victorians, but are permitted to do so because their culture really is superior to others. (The book says this several times, uncritically, so it is not speculation on my part.) There are two incidents of What These People Need Is A Honkey Syndrome: The revolution can't succeed without Nell and Hackworth, apparently. I have a vague recollection that China has, in the past, managed a few revolutions without much outside help.
(There's no particular reason Nell couldn't have been Chinese, by the way - she's born in China and spends her early childhood there, but she's white and never learns to speak the language. Mainly so that there can be scenes where she thinks about how bizarre and alien all these Chinese people speaking Chinese are. At one point she's working at a brothel, and the Chinese prostitutes, some of whom she had previously rescued from the evil revolutionaries when they tried to destroy the place, torture her and sell her out to the same revolutionaries to be raped and murdered. It's not even considered that they might do otherwise.)
Beyond the general grinding unpleasantness of the book's ideas about humanity, it badly needed to be edited. There are some very long and totally unnecessary sections involving Hackworth's sexual issues, which seem to assume that we're going to be more interested in the character than I think anyone could be expected to be. He's the genius-with-an-impoverished-emotional-life character type, and isn't given a good deal of development beyond that. His priorities at first are focused on his daughter, but when they shift later, it's never really clear where they went. He makes several decisions at the end that are never explained. I think they're supposed to be a metaphor for freedom?
Nell's inner life is clearer, because it's expressed through the metaphor of the Primer - but a lot of that could have been cut out because, again, it doesn't really go anywhere. Nell spends most of the book without any goals, and the one she develops towards the end we see her realize only from the outside, because the PoV switches to that of a minor character. The revelations she comes to seem to be imposed on her by outside forces.
What would've helped the book would have been more dialog from Nell and Hackworth, not more ruminations into their subconscious - but dialog would involve them talking to other people, with whom they would be presumed to have relationships. This does not seem to have been on the agenda.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 02:31 pm (UTC)Then a friend "borrowed" my copy (and my Snow Crash, dangit!) and never returned it. No loss.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 01:32 am (UTC)Have you read any of his later books? I don't remember The Baroque Trilogy being anywhere near as offensive; my biggest complaint was that Stephenson still doesn't really know what to do with his women.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 07:31 pm (UTC)I think he probably wants to be able to write women, but because he doesn't actually seem to believe in social activism - because once more than two or three people are involved in a cause, they become brainwashed maniacs - I'm guessing he doesn't really believe in feminism, either. Which would explain why his female characters tend to blindly accept that they're going to suffer workplace discrimination or get raped, even when they're in the process of taking over the world.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 10:20 pm (UTC)I think Eliza, the main female character, escapes some of what you're talking about, but not all of it. The royal women have less trouble in that department (because history circumscribed what Stevenson could do with/to them?).
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 02:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 06:47 am (UTC)He argues that since modern society is too corrupt and too brainwashed by political correctness and cultural relativity to have any real moral standards, the only remaining 'virtue' is internal consistency to one's personal moral ideals and the only remaining 'vice' is hypocrisy. Which Stephenson considers silly because after all humans are fallible, so it is perfectly acceptable for people to hold others to an arbitrary moral standard which they themselves make no effort to uphold.
Okay!
no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-14 12:46 pm (UTC)In retrospect, the only really interesting part of the book was reading about young Nell and how she was assisted (mostly) in her very young age by the Primer. When she got older and the primer was teaching her how to write binary code it became a lot less interesting. I also thought the IDEA of the Mouse Army was very interesting, although it was aggravating how they (Chinese girls) had been made to only serve the white girl, of course. (In retrospect the racism seems a lot more blatant and annoying than it did at the time.)
no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 11:25 am (UTC)I think the lack of connections thing is what made this book so much worse for me than Snow Crash, where Hiro had friends that made him worry (Da5id, Juanita) and then of course the whole "They Fight Crime!" thing with YT.
Yeah, ever since Snow Crash, no one seems to edit him at all. That's the problem with SF&F writers who get famous - all the sudden, their publishers get waffly about having them edited, and the books all turn into indigestible doorstops.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 06:34 pm (UTC)As for the success-breeds-lack-of-editing, I don't think that's purely a F&SF problem? Stephenson and Rowling are pretty classic examples, of course, but Anne Rice is sort of in that nebulous zone where fantasy and horror overlap, and she's perhaps one of the most notorious examples possible (considering that she's so full of herself she's actually told people her books don't NEED to be edited). I've seen several cases of mystery and romance authors whose earlier works all clearly were tightly shaped to fit a publisher's very strict demands for length, but started writing noticeably longer books once they'd reached a certain level of success, and I'd be surprised if that sort of thing didn't happen with the mainstream bestseller authors too. (Heck, Diana Gabaldon might count as an example considering how much she dislikes being lumped into genre, and how minor the fantastical elements of her series are -- and her Outlander books have definitely been getting more sprawling and unfocused with time...although considering even the first book was 600+ pages, they've been doorstoppers right from the start...)
no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 10:22 pm (UTC)By the way, I don't recommend the much-hyped Boneshaker.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-13 01:43 am (UTC)"He could not help smiling at his own complete haplessness"...
I found, and find, that one line fascinating and sort of use it as a... point of reference? for some people I know and other characters in books I like better. That type of person is very interesting when they're self-aware about the fact that that's their lifestyle narrative kink.
Mind you, this is not in defense of the book as a whole. I just tend to read like I'm going on a piratical raid, and keep the bits I like and shove the rest offdeck.
Neal Stephenson's writing suggests to me that he would have been a better writer if born into an era which favored some other form over novels, like, say, long-form poems ala Spenser and Milton, wherein having discrete pieces that interrelate kinda-sorta and go on for a while but don't end properly doesn't actually ruin the thing, at least not as badly.