If Snow Crash was so good that cyberpunk went in to a coma, The Diamond Age effectively pulled the plug.Much like seemingly everyone else I loved the first part of this book and felt that the second part didn't quite live up to the same extremely high standard.Aside from the literary death of cyberpunk when Bud (a character that I'm sure we've all read about many times before but still want to know his story in this instance) is the victim of Confuscian capital punishment and the data transfer i...

I gulped down the 500 pages in four days, and it was not an easy read. I admit ruefully that Stephenson's vocabulary is better than mine. I feel like this book demands analysis, and I don't know enough to provide it. All I could do is count heads and make remarks about the colour and gender and fate of each major character. Which, OK, is worth doing, but it's 3:42am and I've been reading since about 8pm, so forgive me if I don't open it up again just now.I want a primer.I also want more about Dr...

Stephenson is undoubtedly a good writer. I feel as though that's a trite thing to say, but I'm not talking about the overall story, I'm talking about the way each sentence is crafted. Also, I felt the need to read the book with a dictionary next to me, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I suppose. As far as the overall story, there's a lot to like, plenty of varied characters, several story lines that are more closely woven than one might originally think, and plenty of action. There's a kind

If Charles Dickens climbed in an H.G. Wells time machine and went forward in time and he decided to create a post cyber-punk, progressively dystopian bildungsroman novel with a strong female lead and with a fascinating glimpse of a future that expands on the world begun in Snow Crash, he would have written this novel. This is Great Expectations with nanotechnology. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson is to post-modernist science fiction thought as what Dickens was to his era: a smart, entertainin...

Okay, here's what this Stephenson guy did with his novel. He got together a focus group of 25 unpaid, thirteen year old boys and made them puke out as many buzz words in 10 minutes that they could about science fiction. The buzz words had to be something that would palliate the hyperactive endocrine glands of 13 year old males. Stephenson then roiled together this mess with a rag mop and wrung it into a bucket called The Diamond Age: Or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.To give you a thin sample...

This has been on my shelf a while, I think a friend sent it to me. I have to admit, this is a dense read sometimes in the way that hard sci-fi can be: Glazing over at "tech speak tech speak tech speak." If you fall of the tech-speak train you start to glaze over a bit and get confused, or at least I do. I'm sure all the technology is masterfully crafted and is visionary, I just couldn't 100% follow it. It's like sometimes authors TRY to be obscure in their writing in order to be "highbrow" to r

There is so much that is good about this book. The initial world building, the idea behind the Primer, the main characters, these are all done brilliantly and the story proceeds really well for the first half. But then other stories come into play and confusion sets in - at least in my head it did! - and it is like a roller coaster coming off the rails and crashing very, very suddenly on the last page.One thing about Mr Stephenson though is that he really has a way with words. He uses real words...

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a place in the future? The crowded, multi-factioned, multi-leveled city of Shanghai and nearby Pudong made me miss my hometown terribly. Stephenson's descriptions of brightly lit Nanjing Road and small, dim, alleys of hawkers was so spot on. The mix of high technology, the sophisticated neo-Victorians, and the Confuscians made a confusing but ultimately satisfying story.I came to The Diamond Age with a vague idea of what the book was about. Like previous stea...

I get the feeling that Stephenson's writing process goes something like this:Hey, I found a really cool idea here. I wonder what I can do about it....He then writes about 200 pages of really awesome, meticulous world-building, with innovative ideas about, in the case of this book, the possibly uses of nanotechnology and its eventual social ramifications, and then goes, Oh, damn, I'm writing a story, and high-tails it to the end of the book, leaving the reader a little wind-blown and confused. It...

Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and beca

Initially, I wasn't tempted by "The Diamond Age," but the subtitle drew me in. A book advising young women? Interesting. However, given a choice between this book and the classic young women's story, Little Women, I think I'll go with Little Women. At least none of the girls are raped.The Diamond Age, Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer was an interesting, convoluted, frustrating book packed with ideas, characters and too little plot. I suspect Stephenson of being in love with his ideas and wou...

Up to about halfway through, I was in love with this book, but then Hackworth goes to the Drummers and we skip 10 years, and my thoughts are like this: if you as a writer didn't care about those 10 years enough to write about them, why do I care enough to read them? Worse, science fiction is already more concerned with the ideas than the characters, but when the writer is consciously trying to mimic the further-removed-from-reality discourses of Victorian-era writing, we wind up so distanced fro...

“A book is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society.”After an underwhelming experience with "Snow Crash" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), I decided to give Neal Stephenson a second (and possibly final) chance with “The Diamond Age”. I have come to accept that some sci-fi writers are idea guys (or gals), and that amazing ideas don’t necessarily wield amazing books, and that’s OK. And the idea of what is basically a Dick...

This is the second Neal Stephenson book I have read, the previous one being the marvelously entertaining Snow Crash. Unlike Snow Crash this not an easy read, being the impatient sort I almost gave up on it around page 70, fortunately some wiser heads than mine pulled me back (thank you Goodread friends!). The problem for me is the initial inundation of unfamiliar words, some are of the author's invention, the others are just English words not in my vocabulary!The book focuses on the trials and t...