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Summary: 21st century sociology and political science textbook
Review: The Diamond Age is a 21st century sociology and political science textbook in novel form. As its subtitle, "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" suggests, it contains a sub-narrative that introduces metaphors and isomorphisms for everything that young children need to understand to survive the predatory 21st century and its powerful cliques, intrusive nanotechnology, and overall lack of concern for anything that you or I might call safety or certainty. These sub-narratives, well worth the price of the book by themselves, induce the etiquette of "proper" behavior in a child effectively abandoned by her parents, teaching her all the fundamentals of human relationships, mathematics of secrecy and cryptography, social and political limits of certainty, etc.. By the time she reaches puberty she is pretty much mature as we would understand that term today. The technology and struggles for political control of it are basically just a backdrop to the real story, which is how a child might grow up with "outsourced" parenting via the 'net, and how a parent might get caught up in forces well beyond human understanding just for being a parent.Although some find the scenario terrifying, I find it convincing and almost journalistic. Often, single paragraphs tell a whole story in themselves, e.g. the "Reformed Distributed Republic" of individuals whose only association is committing to a common web of trust - along the lines of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and the computer Mycroft - tested from time to time by putting their lives on the line to express trust in each other in tightly-timed tests. I found this one model very compelling and it is only one of dozens and dozens more that pop up in the book. Finally, the central contrast in views between the Confucian Dr. X, Judge Fang and the Western and compromised-Chinese society they live in, is eye-opening about how the Confucian ethics work. It opened me up to Confucius in a way that no other work had done. This book is to the 21st century what 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea was to the 20th. Some details will be wrong, but the whole vision will be vindicated as more or less where we go. Like it or not.
Rating: 
Summary: If you're looking for another Snow Crash, this may not be it
Review: I saw Neal Stepheson on ZDTV talking about his newest book. Then I went to look at reviews of his books. Snow Crash looked interesting, so I purchased it. I read it in 2 weeks on my honeymoon. It was the best book I have ever read. Then, with enthusiasm I purchased Diamond Age. I started reading it and the first chapter I felt back in the atmosphere of Snow Crash. The next chapters following that faded quickly and I was disapointed. If I had read this first, I would have liked it much better, but I was spoiled. It was a good book, but far from a second Snow Crash.
Rating: 
Summary: major closure issues as always
Review: bad news: same lame confusing non-ending as usual. good news: this is a very fun book. If you wonder how the world will handle nanotech, or ever think about it, or wonder how technology will infiltrate culture this is a great bit of futuristic daydream. It's well worth the read, much as Cryptonomicon was, despite NS not being able to write a decent ending.
Rating: 
Summary: A real stinker. Starts out strong, then limps home sick.
Review: I loved Snow Crash, so it was with extreme optimism that I started in on The Diamond Age. The first third of the book was great! Then it was as if someone else took over the writing of it. Nothing made much sense, what did was contrived, annoying, and worse boring. I couldn't wait to get to the end of the book. I kept thinking "it's got to get better" but it didn't. If I could give it less than one star on this system, I would. Save your money.
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Summary: Brilliant, best SF book of the 1990s
Review: I just finished re-reading this book and while I thought highly of it the first two times, this time its even better than before. Some of the things this book is about: how culture will superceed nations; the roles that culture plays in forming people and their relation to the world around them; how nanotechnology can make everything we know about the world of physical objects nearly irrelevant; and finally: how to program computers. There is so much wonderful thought experimententation in this book that for the first 30 pages I was saying "now THAT is an interesting idea" on nearly every page. Once the ground work of the new world has been laid down, the "wow" factor goes down but the characters become more important. At its core, this is a story about intellectual development, starting with a very young girl (Nell), and ending with a young woman who is able to create complex programs. Speaking as an software engineer, the descriptions in the book of programming embodied in physical systems was exceptionally well realized. I'm not sure how much of this later section of the book is understandable to non-Computer Science majors. I can't judge that. I suppose that might be a real weakness in the book, the fact that so much of the final chapters are meditations on everything from Turing machines to packet switched networks, all concealed in a fantasy setting with Black Knights (who add bugs to programs), busy market places (where all messages are encoded and decoded and information is worth gold), and high priests who feed programs into the master wizard computer. I don't think I can convey how much fun it is to read this book and understand how Stephenson has transformed the dross of bits and bytes into magic. I suppose all three of Stephenson's books are meditations on programming in one way or another (Snowcrash: how software could program people's minds; Cryptonomicon: how coded information rules the world; Diamond Age: how learning to program is the logical peak of young person's education). Snowcrash is the funnier book, Diamond Age is a wiser book. -- Colin Glassey
Rating: 
Summary: Good isolated ideas, worst novel I had ever read
Review: I forced myself to read to the end of the book because of the good critic the book has. The end of the novel was the "Best part" in the sense that the pain of reading had finnaly come to an end. Then I started "Snow Crash" (god knows why) and I couldn get past the 4th chapter: "a super hacker that does pizza deliveries and if he doesnt reach the destination in X minutes he get killed?...And the mafia rules the pizza biz?". I HAD to stop reading, I felt stupid... Neil Stephenson is the worst writer in have ever read in my life. I am cleary stating all this because these reviews can really be misleading. I have to admit that he has some brilliant ideas like the nanotech world, but save me all the rest of the story. To the ones that didn't like this book I recomend them to take a look at "Hyperion" or "RAMA" (for hard sci-fi) and "The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" (for fun sci-fi) and the good old Neuromancer and secuels (for cyberpunk csi-fi).
Rating:
Summary: perfectly imagined
Review: Granted, I am a sci-fi/cyber addict, but this book speaks to so much more than any genre! Truely one of the best books written. Men, never mind that it's written about a young girl; women rejoice that it is! This book has the technical detail of a perfectly imagined world and the prose of fantastic author. Not to mention a great setting - Shanghai.
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Summary: Stephenson is a Visionary!
Review: He is doing for Internet and digital media what Asimov did for Robots. Stephenson is creating the template for Cyber-media that will be followed for centuries. His insights are brilliant and (most importantly) believable, he clearly sees the future that is ahead of us.
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Summary: The only cyberpunk novel I've enjoyed
Review: This book begins as a babble, and the reader at first spends a lot of effort getting used to the technospeak. But once the plot gets going and Nell begins her journey of discovery, the book takes off and becomes riveting. This book is an amazing example of people interacting with technology in interesting ways, and not just taking technology to the next logical step. For that alone it's thought provoking. For the character of Nell and the others, including Hackworth and Miranda, it's fascinating reading. Definitely a wonderful book.
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Summary: Stephenson does it again
Review: I haven't been a Fan of anyone for a long time. But I am now officially a Neal Stephenson Fan. Stephenson, who is my age and lives in my town and whom I am looking forward to meeting as soon as both of us can clear our schedules sufficiently, is a Good Writer who Gets Memetics. Such folks are rare as a sunny day in Seattle in April, and as such ought to be cherished, nourished, and all their books bought by the dozen and given to everyone you know with more than three firing neurons left. The "Diamond Age" of the title refers to the diamond fibers used in building materials in the coming age of nanotechnology (see Drexler, Engines Of Creation). The Primer refers to a one-on-one Artificial-Intelligence (AI) teaching tool that could conceivably solve what Stephenson and I both perceive as the biggest underlying problem in the world today: how to give any and all children the best possible education. As in Snow Crash, Stephenson illuminates a future as likely as any and as shocking to our complacent selves as it is realistic. The world of The Diamond Age is one in which deliberate memetic engineering has given birth to designed cultures, most noteworthy the neo-Victorians, in which philosopher-kings worthy of Plato decide not what values are True, or God-Given, but what values make up a workable society. When a bootleg copy of the Primer accidentally falls into the hands of slum urchin Nell, she embarks on a solitary Pygmallion-esque adventure, her transformation a metaphor for the awakening of infant billions to higher consciousness. While the pages don't turn nearly as quickly as those of the fast-paced and comic Snow Crash, these pages are to be savored. Great literature isn't so much in the reading as in the recollecting. This is a book the memetic engineers of the next millennium will all have on their shelves. --Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme
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