Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age. 1995; New York: Random, 2003. E-book.

Neal Stephenson is one of the most imaginative writers today. He comes up with clever and original scenarios in so many of his stories. Occasionally, the setting and conflict are so clever that there does not appear to be much of a resolution. The Diamond Age is not like that. It is a cyberpunk gem from beginning to end, with a delightful, if hard-fought, ending.

We follow three main characters, and, I confess, at times it was a little hard to keep them all straight. There is Hackworth, a computer programming genius who has developed a cyberbook that echoes the reader’s life experiences in a fictional format.

There is Nell who through a set of coincidences gets the original copy of the Primer, Hackworth’s book.

There is Miranda, an actress at an interactive (“ractive”) theater. Not unlike the Primer, she puts on scenarios requested by the audience partly by acting and partly by computer generated projections. She often acts in interactive books like the Primer and becomes involved in Nell’s life through the Primer.

Other characters who appear frequently are Charles Hollywood, Miranda’s agent; the Constable, sometime guardian of Nell; Harv, Nell’s older brother who looks after her until he doesn’t any more; Tequila, Nell’s drug-addled, oversexed mother; and the mysterious Doctor X, a kind of éminence grise who may or may not be a super-menace like the bad guys in a superhero comic. There are indeed echoes of Ming the Merciless or Lex Luthor in Dr. X’s persona—or even maybe Ernst Blofeld or Dr. No. After all, James Bond stories do include a certain amount of science fiction, too.

The future earth is reminiscent of that of Neuromancer, but perhaps a bit more civilized and bit more like the world today. The nation-states, “phyles,” are quite different but rooted in the countries that exist today. A major difference is that people in some phyles can choose to join them voluntarily if they agree to go along with the country’s culture. Indeed, just as some of the Star Trek stories raise the question about what it means to be human, so The Diamond Age would have us take a look at what it means to be part of a culture.

…while people were not genetically different, they were culturally different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced. (20)

Ah yes, political correctness was still in the universities in that future time. But in other places it was changing:

“Now there was a time when we believed that what a human could accomplish was determined by genetic factors. Piffle, of course, but it looked convincing for many years, because distinctions between tribes were so evident. Now we understand that it’s all cultural. That, after all, is what a culture is—a group of people who share in common certain acquired traits.” (321)

Much of the story takes place in the Far East where Nippon and Chosun correspond to Japan and Korea. China has been balkanized somewhat, but there is a radical Red Guard type movement called the Fists of Righteous Harmony that is trying to forcibly unite the country and expel foreign influences from the Han areas. Stephenson rightly points out that the Western influences include Marxism, so while the Fists act like Red Guards, they are not promoting socialism or communism.

This is where Nell grows up, in the Leased Territories (Least Territories?) of the Orient. Her mother Tequila is a prostitute who takes in a series of abusive boyfriends. Nell and Harv are often subject to the abuse. The Primer becomes at first a kind of escape for Nell, but she begins to see that it is teaching her. She learns from the Primer how to cope in her family situation, how to fight back against the abuse, and eventually how to escape. She flees to a country of Victorians (“Vickys”) who pattern their society after Victorian England.

There she attends school and continues her adventures in the Primer. In the Primer she goes on a quest to obtain twelve keys that will give her authority in the Kingdom of the Coyote King. This could be the precursor to Ready Player One’s Easter eggs. These adventures take years and parallel what is going on in her “real world.”

Miranda is being paid anonymously to interact with Nell through her Primer whenever she is available. Miranda becomes her guardian, though physically absent, through what she sees and encounters in the Primer. Nell begins to understand that there is a woman keeping an eye on her through the Primer and thinks of her as her real mother.

Meanwhile, Hackworth’s employers, led by Lord Finkle-McGraw, want him to locate the Primer that has disappeared. Aristocracy is granted to industrial leaders. Finkle-McGraw’s firms are Imperial Tectonics and Machine-Phase Systems. Hackworth is also recruited by Dr. X. The goal of Dr. X, and maybe others, is to find the Alchemist, a technician so skilled he can convert matter into any other substance by creating the Seed.

This is where things get really sci-fi and cybernetic. In Stephenson’s future world, there are not only computer viruses but microscopic drones and computerized viruses that can be placed inside people. Originally these were made to fight infections and keep people healthy (see first comment below), but some are also used to understand better what the hosts are thinking (not exactly mind-reading but not far off), report their location and activities to authorities, and to influence their behavior. Some could explode and kill their hosts.

These immunocules or artificial mites can be picked up sometimes by breathing them in, by being shot or injected with them, by eating food or drinking liquids that contained them, or by exchanging body fluids with others who are already hosts.

The world also has matter compilers, M.C.’s, that can create many objects by working matter at the atomic level. Most people, for example, now eat food generated by matter compilers. This is not unlike the “Computer, make me a drink” we see in the more futuristic Star Trek shows like Voyager. The next step is to make the Seed, a device that inherently grows whatever it has been programmed to reproduce.

Hackworth is led to an underwater phyle he calls the Drummers. They live in tunnels under the seas and appear to be some kind of cult. Hackworth spends ten years with them, but hardly remembers a thing. He vaguely recalls an evil initiation rite (which gets explained a bit at the end) but he believes he is sent there by Dr. X to prepare him to engage with the Alchemist. [N.B.: Because of some of the details of this rite, the book might not be appropriate for younger readers. It is evil.]

As the Israelites escaped the evil of the Pharaoh who killed their babies by a miracle of passing through the water, so something very similar happens to help some captives escape the Drummers. The final image of the story says it all.

There is much more. There are parallel quests going on. Yes, Nell is looking for the twelve keys in her Primer fantasy, but she is also looking for a place where she belongs and where she can be safe. Stephenson does raise the question about what happens when cultures believe in nothing, cultures which see the world as a mere random accidental collection of molecules.

“It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that foundation—we learned this in the late twentieth century when it became unfashionable to teach these things.” (322)

Alas, two decades into the twenty-first century it is even more unfashionable. Let’s pray Stephenson’s timing is merely a little off and not missing the mark entirely.

“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of climate, you are not allowed to criticise others—after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?…In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour—you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another.” (190)

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code…The internal, and eternal [italics in original], struggle between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.” (190-191)

Why do so few people write such things any more?

…the Trickster may be deemed a universal, but he appears in different guises, each appropriate to a particular culture’s environment. The Indians of the American Southwest called him Coyote, those of the Pacific Coast called him Raven. Europeans called him Reynard the Fox. African-Americans called him Br’er Rabbit. In twentieth-century literature he appears first as Bugs Bunny and then as the Hacker. (106)

Do we have to be tricksters these days to espouse morality?

“Which path do you intend to take, Nell?” said the Constable, sounding very interested. “Conformity or rebellion?”

“Neither one. Both are simple-minded—they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.” (356)

From my experience of many years as a high school and college English teacher, intelligent students who dislike ambiguity end up going into computer programming. The rules are rigid. But that field also attracts the hacker because rebellion is attractive, too.

We also get a little philosophy from Dr. X who claims to be Confucian speaking for the Chinese, but he sounds Aristotelian, or even Thomist:

“Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is…Western, and completely alien to us. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti, But it has been impossible…” (457)

Substans and accidens?

Lest, it appear that The Diamond Age is a philosophical tome or a literary work, it is not. Not really. It is a story. It is cyberpunk. But it does resonate. Neal Stephenson is clever, but he is also a smart hacker who digs ambiguity.