The Bottom Line: Though deriving from an immature Stephenson writing style, his piercing insight into society is unfailing. He provides exceptionally rational brain fodder for understanding the nature of creativity, morality, and spirituality.
benho's Full Review: Neal Stephenson - Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's ...
In preparation to embark on Stephenson’s latest novel(s), the 3000 page monumental Quicksilver series, I have been working to finish his earlier endeavors. In my first book review on epinions, on Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, I described feeling that his book was written just for me. Its combination of deep computer science nerdiness with deep thinking about the construction of society was uniquely appealing.
I later used Stephenson’s first major novel, Snowcrash, as a fictional analogue to the work of Macarthur Genius Grant winning economist (and a potential member of my thesis committee) Avner Greif in a term paper for a class.
Thus, finally picking up the last of Stephenson’s notable pre-Quicksilver novels, Diamond Age I can now frankly aver that Stephenson comes as close as possible to being the cyber-fictional representation of my own personal intellectual Weltanschauung (I could have simply said worldview, but like Schadenfreude or Lebensraum, Weltanschauung has entered into the standard snooty lexicon, as evidenced by Microsoft Word’s failure to complain).
I should first say that as a crafter of fiction, Stephenson is above average perhaps, but merely somewhat above passable. Better than Ayn Rand certainly. The characters are all somewhat flat, and he recycles the same cast through all of his novels, i.e. the semiautobiographical heroic ultra-rational socially inept computer hacker, or the blandly over-typical plucky Disney princess. Stephenson certainly improves over time. Snowcrash was the most immature being the first, and Cryptonomicon fairly decent, being the third; Diamond Age has almost the shakiest plot of the three, and its whimsical vision of technology perhaps the most fantastic with robotic horses, Victorian morays, magical wonderlands, and orgiastic sex-based computation. And of course, interspersed is the Kill Bill liberal dollop of samurai violence sensibility, and inexplicably, all of Stephenson’s novels seem to throw in a nearly gratuitous rape scene in the concluding pages. However, the immense intricacies of Stephenson’s multithreaded plotline do ultimately come together in a possibly satisfying albeit chaotic fashion.
What appeals to me firstly is still the computer hacker sensibility, the inside-jokes. Through one chapter, one of the characters wanders through the seven castles of Turing. For me, I was taking a step back into my 6.004 class at MIT. While never saying so explicitly, it was clear that each castle was a different level of computing abstraction, from the Turing Machine, to waterways that represented TTL transistor logic, to air tubes that represented a Von-Neumann machine, to a series of books that represented the LISP programming language, to a complex operating system, to a marketplace of scribes that represented network protocols, to the grand Wizard, the end user, of human exceptionallism. However, while the computer references are nice, the deep ideas make Stephenson exceptional.
Like Rand, the true art of Stephenson is the power of his ideas. Using cyber-technology as a medium, he offers a computer engineer’s perspective of issues such as the nature of creativity, morality and spirituality, a view that matches almost perfectly with the theoretical frame of my economic game theoretic research in sociology. His notion of creativity jibes well with my Bayesian notions of optimal educational production, on how to lead interesting lives. Morality is seen as a functional mechanism to maintain cooperation in the prisoner’s dilemma of life. And spirituality, the orthogonal dimension to the rational world, echoes James C. Scott’s notion of techne vs. metis – the difference between mathematical rationalism and wisdom – and a useful framing of a fundamental question.
Stephenson has been called by one of my professors, “one of the greatest political economic thinkers of our time” and Stephenson’s use of computer technology allows a deep connection with the master of computer science within me. In Quicksilver, Stephenson takes a step back into the 17th century, and demonstrates the general applicability of his ideas. I look forward a bit hesitatingly to the plunge, though 3,000 pages seems quite daunting. Though I suppose Das Kapital consumed far more.
Set in 21st century Shanghai, this is the story of what happens when a state-of-the-art interactive device falls into the hands of a street urchin nam...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.