The Diamond Age glimmers as a not-too-distant future in which our Earthly cultures have been transformed by nanotechnology. The dot-com boom was just bubbling, the *nets re-weaving into a shimmering and GUI web, but authors like these were already looking past the cyberspaces (a term coined by Gibson) of the dawning digital age… Stephenson, who spent some of his childhood here in Champaign-Urbana, was clearly a cyberpunk/ steampunk visionary like William Gibson or Bruce Sterling. Strongly attracted to science fiction and fantasy, I remember my delight to find new work from the author of Snow Crash.
(The commercial behemoth we know as only went online the year that Stephenson published his book.) I spent happy hours browsing, drawn often to new books of genre fiction. When first I read this book, in the closing years of the 20th century, readers still browsed through shelves in book stores. These days, a particularly cherished book is Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel, The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. I relish each new book I open, but I cherish all of the old books that I never close. Dan Steward is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department.
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