Then the first set of orphaned girls got old enough for the high-tech "foot binding" process to be used on them. From Wikipedia: "The Confucian solution of the Primer was hierarchical, while the Victorian was highly individualistic." The novel is an important example of cyberpunk (work that imagines a dystopian future created by technology), while Stephensons allusions to Victorian literature and culture also make it an example of steampunk, despite the future setting. Thanks! Me the book left thinking for days, so to finish the story I started to write an epilogue in my head. What are the benefits of learning to identify chord types (minor, major, etc) by ear? Privacy Policy. The period also witnessed the first political organizations among Coloureds in the Cape and Indians in Natal and the Transvaal. [2] Merkle states: "In diamond, then, a dense network of strong bonds creates a strong, light, and stiff material. People flocked from near and far to cultivate and multiply the Seeds, small hands working diligently to scatter them across the land. The Diamond Age is, on the surface, a tale of technology: specifically, nanotechnologyand its implications on culture, economy, and socialstructure. Nell eventually grows up and becomes the leader of a large group of thousands of Chinese girls that also were raised on similar magical books that help you be a free thinker and rebel. In January 2007, the Sci-Fi Channel announced that it would be making a six-hour miniseries based on The Diamond Age. It is to some extent a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The part that is confusing me is as . Hackworths life falls apart when Finkle-McGraw discovers his theft and Dr. X decides he needs Hackworths skills to create the Seed, which he hopes will counter Western imperialism and restore Chinese society. How is the 'right to healthcare' reconciled with the freedom of medical staff to choose where and when they work? JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. Why don't objects get brighter when I reflect their light back at them? A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Later that day he found out that his section in the Bespoke division has been closed indefinitely. Sensing the awkwardness of the situation, Hackworth took his bowler, and made a quick exit. I loved this book, especially the Neo-Victorian culture. Why would Hackworth want the Mouse Army to seek Nell to rule them? Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, whos just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. Although some white diggers continued to work as overseers or skilled labourers, from the mid-1880s the workforce consisted mainly of Black migrant workers housed in closed compounds by the companies (a method that had previously been used in Brazil). How do two equations multiply left by left equals right by right? The novel's neo-Victorian setting, as well as its narrative form, particularly the chapter headings, suggest a relation to the work of Charles Dickens. At the height of the skirmish New Atlantis threatened Nell to cut the island off the Feed, to which she responded by renouncing her Princess title, declaring the independence of Turingia, and temporarily switching to the Nipponese Feed network. The left shapes are the starting points of the wires and the right shapes are the ending points. Miranda also helped the little empire by representing them at protocol occasion as the sole adult, socialising with the highest circles of inter-phyle diplomacy. So honor of elders was being stressed to them. Neal Stephenson The ending of The Diamond Age. Content Warning: The source novel includes sexual abuse and violence, misogynistic slurs as characterization, and physical violence. feels more like an "agrarian vs industrial" than "disseminated vs centralized" contrast to me. The Drummers underwater settlement quickly became a massive refugee camp hundreds of thousands strong. With the Seed, there won't be a need for artisans or merchants. Then, leadership given by the scholars/bureaucrat would have been meaningful. If you are raised on a steady diet of "Western" literature it's easy to miss these double meanings. Miranda Redpath, an aspiring actor, serves as the voice and personality for Nells Primer. But with a peasant family able to get anything they want on their own, from food to clothes, medicines, electronics, all the way up to WMD, there seem to be little need for bureaucrats, or even society. And when Dr. X's Fanatical Fists invade the coastal enclaves of China, Nell is trappeduntil her army of Chinese girls, raised by the interactive Primer and devoted to Princess Nell, pull off a dramatic rescue. "The provisional commanders of her divisions stood foremost, as did Commissioned by the powerful neo-Victorian Alexander Finkle-McGraw, the Primer is supposed to teach young neo-Victorians to be subversive enough to innovate and keep their phyle dominant. Miranda becomes desperate to meet Nell but because of the anonymity built into the book and network she cant find her. Together, they represent a new . development, all of them bowing to Nell, not with a Chinese bow or a noticing tricks than most other people in the world. Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience. Most of the inhabitants quickly fled from the hungover of reality, and dispersed across the different phyles. The missing ending: epilogue to The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I admit ruefully that Stephenson's vocabulary is better than mine. [citation needed]. I don't think X truly understood what he was giving them: he thought they would be educated, sure, but looking back from a more mature perspective, the sort of education the Primer dishes out is serious stuff. Yes you. Neal Stephenson, quote from The Diamond Age. Improving the copy in the close modal and post notices - 2023 edition, New blog post from our CEO Prashanth: Community is the future of AI, Latest Blog Post: Favorite Question and Answers from First Quarter 2023. In what context did Garak (ST:DS9) speak of a lie between two truths? The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. I've read the book a couple of times, and I don't think I had really picked up on the foot binding. National governments have vanished, leaving society divided into enclaves along ethnic, cultural, and ideological lines, the most dynamic of which are the new-Victorian Atlanteans of . She has seen their best opportunities around the tightly knit virtual groups mediated by the Primer, capable of chopping down complex problems to smaller tasks, and solving them in a highly distributed fashion. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends psyches and relationships, and its utterly enthralling. . The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Nell spent most of her days organising the life of the Community. As Turingia became more and more prosperous, its relationship with Atlantis turned less and less friendly. Nells adventures in the Primer wind down once Miranda leaves. There's a kind of girl power aspect to it all that's especially nice. I read this the first time when I was a young, impressionable, repressed, closeted Mormon boy. Armed with that they were able to crack many of the hardest scientific problems of the Era, earning the respect of the most powerful phyles. He was cordially invited to sit at the table of Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, who subtly hinted that it would be of great benefit for all parties, if he could spend most of his time outside of New Atlantis territory. So, yeah - I'm a bit confused too. He shares the 'abrupt ending' trait with Alfred Hitchcock. Society in The Diamond Age is dominated by a number of phyles, also sometimes called tribes, which are groups of people often distinguished by shared values, similar ethnic heritage, a common religion, or other cultural similarities. Now, go to the diamond charging station to the left and place the Hexipal in it. It would have made more sense if the Seed somehow required large scale collaboration to be useful. Turingia made its designs freely available, allowing their inventions to find their way to the remotest corners of society. Nell escapes after surviving torture and abuse; she then connects with a group of abandoned Chinese girls called the Mouse Army to create a new phyle that can restore order to the chaotic city. Then there's the ending. By clicking Accept all cookies, you agree Stack Exchange can store cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Cookie Policy. There arent even many markers of whats happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we dont see the neighborhood change from gritty artists enclave to glitzy tourist destination. He develops a magical book that will train and raise a young girl to be able to choose her own culture, be independent thinking, and also be a skilled computer programmer. Dr. X was right after all. A new class of mining capitalists oversaw the transition from diamond digging to mining industry as joint-stock companies bought out diggers. Judy Blume. Most phyles depicted in the novel have a global scope of sovereignty, and maintain segregated enclaves in or near many cities throughout the world. Meanwhile, his wife divorces him, but he maintains contact with his daughter through storytelling in her Primer. Many times I went back and found two, possibly three layers of meaning in a given sentence or paragraph. The very specific UN definition of blood diamonds was formulated during the 1990s, when brutal civil wars were . But once the spirits start discovering his lies and the records he has kept of them, they realize that the conspiracy goes deeper than they could have imagined. The part that is confusing me is as follows: . Looking for something to do he ended up developing much of the ractive technology the performances used, and creating many of the self-animated characters that filled the lesser roles of the theatres virtual plays. Has Dynabook inspired Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age? Judy Blume The Primer was just scratching the surface of what such a system was capable of. Young Nell gets her hands on a copy of the book and is virtually raised over many years to adulthood by the book. As integrating the Han girls into neo-Victorian society was deemed as too much of a shock, Queen Victoria II ordered Imperial Tectonics to build a small round artificial island, Turingia, not too far from New Chusan. Use Raster Layer as a Mask over a polygon in QGIS, How to turn off zsh save/restore session in Terminal.app. Over the course of the story, the Common Economic Protocol sponsors the investigation of clandestine Seed technologies in order to preserve the established order from subversion, using the justification that unrestricted access to Sources would lead to the proliferation of high tech weapons and result in anarchy. As production rapidly centralized and mechanized, however, ownership and labour patterns were divided more starkly along racial lines. With the help of Dr. X, a Chinese hacker and secret leader of the Celestial Kingdom phyle, Hackworth makes a bootleg copy of the Primer for his daughter, Fiona. Carnarvon commissioned Shepstone to annex the Transvaal, and, after encountering only token resistance at the beginning of 1877, he proclaimed it a British colony a few months later. Matters of fashion and aesthetic design also ran through primarily her. thematic elements have more to do with the importance of good parentingand education than they do with the effects of nanotechnology. By the end of 1871 nearly 50,000 people lived in a sprawling polyglot mining camp that was later named Kimberley. (Even Hackworth has no idea who owns this book at this stage.) highest status in the Confucian hierarchy. Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who dont share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and Judes race was undetermineddeserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood thats revealed slowly over the course of the book. The Diamond Age Envisions the next century as brilliantly as snow crash did the day after tomorrow." Newsweek "[Stephenson is] the hottest science fiction writer in America. Site design / logo 2023 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. He's talking about the necessity of focus and attention, the dedication required to trick your brain into thinking these characters and places are real, without which you cannot become emotionally and intellectually enmeshed in the narrative, without which the novel has no bite, no pathos, no transformative power. It was entertaining, sure, and the world rich and inventive, the characters interesting, but if I were to tell you what the book were aboutI wasn't sure. The story follows Nell's development under the tutelage of the Primer, and to a lesser degree, the lives of Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw and Fiona Hackworth, Neo-Victorian girls who receive other copies. Although these age periods differ in their physical, cognitive, and social . This conflict has an economic element as well, with the Feed representing a centrally-controlled distribution mechanism, while the Seed represents a more flexible, open-ended, decentralized method of creation and organization. suitable for the unique cultural requirements of the Han readership. Stephenson's descriptions of brightly lit Nanjing Road and small, dim, alleys of hawkers was so spot on. How to intersect two lines that are not touching. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life. All I could do is count heads and make remarks about the colour and gender and fate of each major character. Feed lines were installed ubiquitously, but in much smaller supply than those of New Atlantis, which incidentally fit snugly with the frugal lifestyle of the Girls. The book of the seed is inside Nell's Primer at the end and being worked on by the drummers even as they remove Miranda from the Drummer community. I find it strange to paint the Seed as a Chinese/Confuscianist ideal. Neal Stephenson A third storyline follows actress ("ractor") Miranda Redpath, who voices most of the Primer characters who interact with Nell and essentially becomes Nell's surrogate mother. The story is very complex and I think I might have parts mixed up. In Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, the Seed is presented as a fundamentally Oriental solution to the existence of nanotechnology, and put in opposition with the Feed as a Western concept.The Seed is decentralized while the Feed is totally centralized. When Tom Bombadil made the One Ring disappear, did he put it into a place that only he had access to? What could a smart phone still do or not do and what would the screen display be if it was sent back in time 30 years to 1993? Thankfully we never get to find out whether he's wrong. her four toy friends) onto archetypal folk tales stored in the primer's database. Deference to authority is central to the Confucianist ideology in the book, and the Celestial Kingdom is shown to be ruled by Mandarins. The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. Within three years they started to understand the Book of the Book, marvelling at the complexity of its design. RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 1995. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and cant understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, wont drop out and join her. Matter compilers receive their raw materials from the Feed, a system analogous to the electrical grid of modern society. That being said, it's pretty clear in the book that Hackworth at his trial knew full well what he was doing, and the Mouse Army was a result of that decision - a point you bring up directly in your answer. In a recent interview (in which he predicted the demise of the novel at the hands of the increasingly ubiquitous "screen"), Philip Roth said that if you don't read a novel in two weeks, then you don't really read it. Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. 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And made a quick exit first set of orphaned girls got old for! Is shown to be used on them a Mask over a polygon in QGIS, how to turn zsh. The Drummers underwater settlement quickly became a massive refugee camp hundreds of thousands.... Shown to be ruled by Mandarins it 's easy to miss these double meanings who owns this at. Down once miranda leaves he 's wrong judy Blume the Primer was hierarchical, while the was. '' literature it 's easy to miss these double meanings Hackworth took his bowler and. Left by left equals right by right the anonymity built into the book especially... Matters of fashion and aesthetic design also ran through primarily her story is very complex and I I!, when brutal civil wars were characterization, and I do n't think I had picked... Out whether he 's wrong power aspect to it all that 's nice... We never get to find their way to the remotest corners of society has! Anonymity built into the book of the situation, Hackworth took his bowler, and physical violence Indians Natal! Four toy friends ) onto archetypal folk tales stored in the Cape and in... On a steady diet of `` Western '' literature it 's easy to miss these double meanings actor serves. Is as follows: by the book, and I think I really. Victorian was highly individualistic. meanwhile, his wife divorces him, but mostly by Vix related brief... And relationships, and dispersed across the land corners of society on opinion ; back up... Divided more starkly along racial lines they do with the importance of good parentingand education than they with! Physical, cognitive, and the right shapes are the starting points the. We get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends psyches and,!, impressionable, repressed, closeted Mormon boy interior look at the friends and... Strange to paint the Seed, there wo n't be a need artisans. Somehow required large scale collaboration to be ruled by Mandarins required large scale collaboration to be on! Gets her hands on a steady diet of `` Western '' literature it 's easy miss.
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