Two things that are true: 1) I don’t read that much SF. 2) When I do, I sometimes get a little impatient with world-building. I don’t know if there’s a cause\/effect relationship between those two things, and if there is, I don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect, but I did find myself feeling sort of impatient with some parts of The Diamond Age<\/i> by Neal Stephenson. The book is set in a version of the 21st century (as imagined from 1995) in which nanotechnology is omnipresent and has changed the world hugely. Food, clothing, and even buildings can be created by “matter compilers”; diamonds are cheaper than glass; “real cloth” is a status symbol. In this world, people live in tribes called phyles, and the New Atlantans\/neo-Victorians—who have a Queen Victoria II and a lot of the old Victorians’ etiquette\/social structures—are one of the wealthiest and most influential of the phyles. John Percival Hackworth, a New Atlantan engineer, is commissioned to make a singular interactive educational device for a rich man’s granddaughter: the rich man, Lord Finkle-McGraw, wants his granddaughter’s life to be interesting, and as part of this, he wants to see if he can make sure she learns independence and subversiveness, as well as everything she’s “supposed to” learn. That device is the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer<\/i>, but it ends up not actually being so singular: a copy also ends up falling into the possession of a lower-class girl named Nell (and later, there end up being other copies\/versions, too). <\/p>\n
Nell’s dad is dead, and she lives with her brother, her not-very-present mom, and a string of her mom’s boyfriends, almost all of whom are awful and abusive. Nell finds solace in the Primer, and then some: she learns to read from it, and it basically raises her\/she raises herself, with its help. Nell’s story, including the stories-within-a-story (we get to read a bunch of passages from Nell’s copy of the Primer), was totally my favorite thing about this book: Nell’s an intrepid and appealing heroine, and watching her grow up is pretty delightful.<\/p>\n
We also get bits of other stories, largely Hackworth’s, but also other characters connected to him and\/or to Nell, and\/or to the Primer, and these other stories are variably interesting\/fleshed-out. There is a lot of plot in this book, and not everything is resolved at the end: there are several side characters whose fates I found myself wondering about. Still: once I got into it, I quite liked this book and am glad I let my boyfriend convince me to read it. (He also convinced me to read Cryptonomicon<\/i>, which I didn’t like so much, so I was somewhat skeptical about further Neal Stephenson books, but now maybe I am less so.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two things that are true: 1) I don’t read that much SF. 2) When I do, I sometimes get a little impatient with world-building. I don’t know if there’s a cause\/effect relationship between those two things, and if there is, I don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect, but I did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}