The Hugo Initiative: The Novels of 1999: A Retrospective: A Preview of My Genre Future (2000, Best Novel)

1999 was a banner year for me. A couple of years (at the age of 28) into starting to read “seriously” in science fiction, I had been subscribed to Locus for a couple of years now, I was reading past and current Hugo nominees and Nebula nominees and winners for a couple of years, and I had decided, in that fateful year, to do something I had not done previously: Vote in the Hugo Awards. I was pretty disconnected from any sort of organized fandom, I had only been to one con, but I dutifully became a member of the 2000 Worldcon (held in Chicago, but I didn’t have the temerity to actually attend), and proceeded to vote in the Hugo awards for books in 1999.

The Hugo nominees for the 2000 Worldcon were as follows:

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge [Tor, 1999]
A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold [Baen, 1999]
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson [Avon, 1999]
Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear [HarperCollins UK, 1999; Ballantine Del Rey, 1999]
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling [Bloomsbury, 1999; Scholastic, 1999]

At the time that Hugo voting had ended, I had read four of them, and voted on that basis. (I had not yet read any Harry Potter and did not feel inclined to read through the series, I would feel different several years later) 2000 was about the first time I started to dip my toes into getting review copies, but it would be many more years before I got my “break” in that regard. I fondly remember getting an ARC of Darwin’s Radio, it was quite the surprise and delight.

So without further ado, let’s look at the Hugo Finalists (called Hugo Nominees then) for the year 1999.

A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge

At the time I was just so delighted to have another novel in the “zones” verse of A Fire Upon the Deep, even if it was a very loose prequel, just having Pham as the only link between the two novels. Still, the ideas of the Zones from an outside perspective, thanks to the conceit of a solar system right on the edge of the boundary, and the idea of  a three way first contact situation, this was the kind of SF I ate up with a spoon. A Deepness in the Sky was exactly what I thought that modern science fiction should be about, this was fueled by at the time of a renaissance of space opera after a fallow period for the subgenre.

Now, looking back, like its predecessor , some of the technology and assumptions feel a bit dated. There are some interesting conceits here, and the weird high concept of Unix versus Windows except expressed as polities and their operating parameters was something I just didn’t get, then, but I sure see now. Those frameworks do not hold up quite as well for me in 2019 as they did in 1999. Technology and the modes of computers are a very different beast in this day and age. The computing world was a smaller place, then, and now, for many people, operating systems and their fundamental principles just aren’t relevant. I also think, now, in this day and age, the Spiders could have been handled a bit better. Perhaps I have been spoiled by writers like Adrian Tchaikovsky, but Vinge’s spiders do not seem alien *enough*, and the revelation that they have been secretly in on a lot of the communications and spying on both sides could have been foreshadowed or flagged earlier in the narrative for best effect.

A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold

Deep within the Vorkosigan series, A Civil Campaign is the “Romance novel” of the set, as the plot revolves around Miles Vorkosigan trying to win the heart of Ekaterin, who met Miles, and  in the course of events became widowed, in the previous novel, Komarr. Miles fell head over heels for Ekaterin, and while Barrayaran customs mean that she should not be openly courted so soon after her husband’s death. And since Ekaterin’s husband’s death is tied to Miles’ investigation, there are all sorts of political and social landmines in Miles way. Meantime, Barrayar is a changing, with a sex change to make a woman eligible to inherit an estate, and another putative heir to another estate may have Cetagandan ancestry.

And then there are the butterbugs, the most fun part of the plot. So this novel is relatively light on the sciences, and strong on the manners and courtship. There was a movement in novels back there, particularly in fantasy, called “mannerpunk”, where works by writers like Sherwood Smith were a noticeable theme in Fantasy. At the time, I saw ACC being an SFnal version of the same. So, I didn’t think too much of the novel at the time. I wanted more Miles as Lord Auditor, not Miles as moonstruck young man (disclaimer, I was in a rough place, relationship speaking, at the time)

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

By this point, I had read Stephenson’s Snow Crash, because it seemed to be the thing to do. I had really really liked The Diamond Age, because I felt I kinda understood the basics of computing thanks to the primer within the novel. At the time of Cryptonomicon, I was also somewhat interested in codes and cyphers and always have been, really. So when Cryptonomicon dropped into my lap in 1999, it was very much a dive into delight. Paralleling time frames, lots of historical characters, a ton of detail and research that comes out onto the page, I think then and now, it’s clear to me that the novel is the first “modern” Stephenson--a big sprawling book that reflects the author’s desire to go down deep deep rabbit holes and take willing readers with him. At the time, I definitely was a willing reader.

Today? I’ve cooled quite a bit on Stephenson’s work and it doesn’t quite excite me to the level it once did. Oftentimes thee days, I want something more than the rabbit hole, and frankly, reading Stephenson these days is a big investment in time and effort that for me doesn’t always pay off as it once did. The digressions sometimes are “get to the POINT” rather than “oh nice, here we go down a mini rabbit hole within the rabbit hole. In Cryptonomicon itself, I am thinking particularly of the erotica side story within the novel.

Sometimes you need an stronger hand from the editor.

Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear

Back in the 80’s the Eon sequence brought Greg Bear to my attention (Blood Music came later). Novels like that sequence, Songs of Earth and Power, Moving Mars, Slant...I didn’t get a good sense of his real range until a couple of years before Darwin’s Radio, when he popped up with an alternate history YA novel, Dinosaur Summer. I began to see that Bear had a wide range indeed to his pen.

 But even so, when I dived into Darwin’s Radio, I read it with the wrong protocols, at the time. I kept expecting this to be a science fiction novel, or a hard science fiction novel, in any event. I was underprepared at the time and kept waiting for the hard SF to kick in. I didn’t quite realize until relatively late in the novel’s narrative (which involves “junk DNA” turning out to be not so much junk and instead a mechanism for speciation of Humans into a new species) is really a technothriller with a lot of biology, rather than a science fiction novel. I was expecting something far more akin to Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain and didn’t get it in the book, which was confusing to me at the time.

These days, having read more technothrillers and understanding and grokking the form and style, I can see what Darwin’s Radio is and what it’s trying to do much better now. It is a technothriller with an extra dollop of SFNal setting and backmatter, something that I have decided since is not usually to my taste. Bear’s writing, and Darwin’s Radio are an exemplar of the form, however. If you were an SF fan who wanted to step into Technothriller waters, The book would be a good choice. (Coincidentally, the more recent and unrelated The Darwin Elevator by Jason Hough also would qualify in that regard).. Whether a novel that is mostly Technothriller something that should be nominated, or win the Hugo award--I am in favor of a big, broad tent. But I can see how some people might demur.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

At the time of the 2000 Hugos,as  mentioned above, I had not read any of the Harry Potter series. I had seen the first three movies, and enjoyed them, but my feelings about MG and YA novels had not evolved to the point that I had felt inclined to pick up the books for myself. (This would eventually change with the release of Half Blood Prince, whereupon I decided I would dive into the series). I did find Prisoner as a movie to be intriguing because of Cuaron’s directorial style.

As far as the novel, when I did read the book, I felt that the movie was the first where they really started to have to excise whole rafts of the novel in order to fit the plot into a 2 hour movie. When I read the book, and then rewatched the movie after, I was impressed how much the movie captured the overall spirit of the book, even as I realized how rich the book was. I began to see how much young teenage readers were in having the series at hand, Books of Gold for readers to try genre fiction. I may not see it as the best book of 2000 but I can see why it broke through the nomination list and became a finalist.

In the end, A Deepness in the Sky won the 2000 Hugo. Did Hugo voters get it right? Did I get it right for myself? I think that it really did. Even with the nits above, its head and shoulders better than the other nominees.

What I voted then:
1. A Deepness in the Sky
2. Darwin’s Radio
3. Cryptonomicon
4. A Civil Campaign
5. Left Blank

(I didn’t understand the real nuances of No Award, I just stopped my list at four. What I probably meant at the time was to put No Award as my fifth.)

What I would vote today:
1. A Deepness in the Sky
2. A Civil Campaign
3. Darwin’s Radio
4. Cryptonomicon
5. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 


What other books in 1999 did the Hugo voters miss? That I missed?

Walter Jon Williams’ catastrophe novel, The Rift, came out in 1999 and sank without a trace. Pat Murphy’s retelling of The Hobbit in space, There and Back Again, also came out, and I missed that one for years, too. Judith Tarr teamed up with Harry Turtledove for their novel Household Gods, a time travel novel in the tradition of Lest Darkness Fall, but with a female protagonist. I read that one at the time and liked it. I think it’s even stronger today. Dragonshadow, by Barbara Hambly, was also a strong novel. But in that day and age, fantasy was rarely on the Hugo ballot, Harry Potter being an outlier in that regard.

Did I keep voting and nominating in the Hugo Awards? Well, reader, sadly life sort of got in the way. I voted in 2001, but then 9/11 and its aftermath led me to a path that caused me to leave New York, forestall my nascent reviewing chops for a while, and I would not get myself settled in that regard and begin reviewing, or voting in the Hugos, for several more years. But in retrospect, the 2000 Awards, and the year 1999, was a preview of my genre future.


POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Nanoreviews: The Flowers of Vashnoi, That Ain't Witchcraft, Atmosphaera Incognita

Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Flowers of Vashnoi [Subterranean]

With no expectation of another full length Vorkosigan novel anywhere on the horizon, the publication of The Flowers of Vashnoi was a welcome addition to the canon. It's a somewhat unexpected story as the novella focuses on Ekaterin instead of Miles, Cordelia, or even Ivan. Through Ekaterin, Bujold tells the story of the Vashnoi region which is still irradiated from the long ago nuclear bombardment of the district. That's not what the novella is about, of course. This is the story of some of the people who still live in that district, scratching out an existence away from "civilization". It's about survivors, autonomy, doing right, and the responsibilities of power.

It is, as might be expected from Lois McMaster Bujold, a story told with grace and skill and a unmatched smoothness. I've seen an inclination of others to describe The Flowers of Vashnoi as "minor Bujold", but that fails to acknowledge that a "minor" work from Bujold would be a major work from nearly any other writer. Compared to the absolute best of Bujold, perhaps this is "minor Bujold, but it is simply an excellent story told well.
Score: 8/10

McGuire, Seanan. That Ain't Witchcraft [DAW]

With the eighth novel in the Hugo Award finalist Incryptid series, Seanan McGuire brings the three novel story arc of Antimony Price to a close. Still dealing with the fallout from Verity announcing to the world (and mostly to the Covenant) that the Prices are alive and standing in opposition to the Covenant’s goals, Antimony is likewise dealing with the ramifications of having to make a deal at the Crossroads to save her life and those of her friends – the ramification being that one day the Crossroads will come to collect. This is that novel.

McGuire pulls off the impressive task of having a huge world changing event late in the novel that is also somehow not the most significant thing that happened in That Ain’t Witchcraft in terms of impact to the Price family, and even that world changing event might be presumed of a smaller scale than it really is. This isn’t the space to go into the spoilers of what and why, but what McGuire pulled off is far more impressive than it might seem on the surface. Also impressive is that eight novels into a series I am in a continual state of delight at how fresh McGuire has been able to keep the series. The shifting viewpoint characters may have something to do with that. As such, I will be sad to say goodbye (for now) to Antimony Price and excited to see what Seanan McGuire has in store for us with Sarah Zellaby as the new viewpoint character in next year’s Imaginary Numbers.
Score: 7/10

Stephenson, Neal. Atmosphaera Incognita [Subterranean]

I am not a Neal Stephenson aficianado by any stretch of the imagination, only having read Seveneves previously and that is it, so I cannot speak to how Atmosphaera Incognita compares to his other work except that it is shorter. At its core, Atmosphaera Incognita is about building a space tower. That sentence doesn't sound nearly impressive enough to describe the scope of that project. This isn't a science text, but much of the story is built around the engineering of the tower - the challenge of the whole thing and the soaring success of accomplishment. It works.
Score: 7/10



Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 3x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

Microreview [book]: Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson

The Most Stephenson-esque Book Yet!

Stephenson, Neal. Seveneves. William Morrow: 2015.

Neal Stephenson is the Gary Oldman of novelists—he can take on practically any genre, and do it well. He went from straight post-cyberpunk sci fi to quasi-historical to quite historical epic, followed by a dip into the near-present, then veered into the murky realm of speculative fiction. His most recent book, Seveneves, weaves together his entire oeuvre (I can never remember how to spell the funny-looking word for “body of work”, constantly getting it confused with the French word for ‘egg’, so just in case I’m wrong this time, I mean the one that’s not an egg!). It’s got plenty of speculation, a veritable mountain of hard sci fi concepts and babble (more on that below), and takes place in two distinct time-frames, the immediate future and the so-distant-it’s-almost-unrecognizable future 5000 years hence.

If you, like me, love a mind-bending initial premise, then you’ll take to Seveneves immediately: its first sentence begins, ‘The moon blew up.’ This seemingly random, unexplainable event sets in motion what amounts, we learn quickly, to the End of the World. This is awesome! I was thinking as I read those early pages, a cool ‘what if?’ premise that asks the hard questions about, for instance, what actually has value if only the tiniest fraction of the human population is to survive (genetic diversity, scientists and engineers, intrepid no-nonsense types who can Get Things Done, etc.), and what has absolutely none (friggin’ politicians who interrupt messianic scientists constantly to talk incessantly, almost everything and everyone on earth, cloak-and-dagger plotters (=politicians), and also politicians and their sycophantic, cannibalistic lackeys. Politicians!). Of course, if none of the latter list would have any value in a high-pressure survival situation, one cannot help but begin to question their value even in our day-to-day lives…

Yes, the beginning of Seveneves is masterful and entertaining. And actually the ending, 5000 years in the future, is fairly intriguing as well. Even the middle has its moments. But the story definitely gets bogged down, or indeed bedeviled (the devil is, after all, in the details), due to Stephenson’s almost obsessive need to explain the workings of every single physics concept in excruciating detail. Ever wondered how orbit adjustments are/might soon be made in low earth orbit? Prepare to have all your questions answered, multiple times.

I’m probably even nerdier than Stephenson in most ways, but even I was taken aback by the loving, painstaking effort he put into all such descriptions. Trademark Stephenson, to explain the workings of thrusters or whatever in lavish detail, yet deadpan though multiple romantic encounters. He’ll spend dozens of pages on what amounts to background world-building, in a style that, while always entertaining to read, flirts with an almost footnote-like “here’s what you need to know about this physical process” approach, but skip through anything with the barest hint of melodrama (the inevitable attrition of the Cloud Ark population, for example, essentially isn’t described at all; instead we lurch forward in time to the critical moment for that dwindling population, skipping all the human drama in between).

As my previous reviews on this site will attest, I think romance, melodrama, and human emotions are all super-awesome, but techno-babble not so much. Given that context, you might be expecting me to “grade” Seveneves harshly. Expect again! (An expression that, I just noticed, doesn’t really roll off the tongue like “Think again”…)  Midway through I was gearing up to Go Negative due to all the descriptions of minute course corrections and the near-zero discussion of how everyone felt about things, but before I could bring my Guns of Negativity to bear, it suddenly hit me: all that emotional stuff is ALSO more or less useless in a high-pressure, ‘survival of the species’-type test. Who cares about a given character’s internal monologue about how much of a bummer it is that they had to work hard? Or whether so-and-so is getting married, or whatever? It’s all made irrelevant by the enormity of the challenge facing humanity. 

Seveneves is quite an unsettling story, in that respect, much like the recent Australian apocalyptic film These Final Hours. If there were an extinction-level meteor strike whose atmosphere-igniting firestorm will reach your country in twelve hours (or, in the case of Seveneves, a similar catastrophe in about three years), all of the normal narrative logic fails to apply. Hey, it seems like Jimmy and Zoe will get together after all—thank goodness he didn’t end up with horrid Vicki! Plus, Zoe’s pregnant, so happily ever after it is! But wait a minute…none of these relationships ultimately mean what we normally think they mean, because all (or, in Seveneves, virtually all) of the characters have been denied any chance at a future. Their ability to influence things, whether through making a genetic contribution (having kids) or by swaying the hearts and minds of others, is literally zero. If humanity will soon cease, for all intents and purposes, to exist, does anything we normally care about matter anymore? Stories such as these force the viewer to ask terrifying questions about what has ultimate value, and we might be surprised by what we discover in the night at the end of the tunnel.

So ultimately, Stephenson won me over with the unshakable logic that hardly anything, including who shacks up with whom, is of any import at all, and can safely be elided, whereas the physics of movement in space and such things are suddenly of tremendous importance (and perhaps have been all along, but we humans can only see this clearly when we are standing in our own graves!).

There were things about the book that struck me as not fully successful/satisfying, notably the transition from the present to 5000 years in the future (I’ve drunk the cool-aid that the journey is more important than the destination, but Stephenson clearly doesn’t rate how things came to be as of any significance compared to the simple matter of what is, and thus decided to skip ahead to the ‘good part’). Yet it was close to spell-binding throughout, even during the long near-asides to describe the workings of a thingamabob. Despite having only the faintest traces of melodrama about it, even to the point that we pretty much know almost none of the characters have any chance at a future at all, Seveneves was quite emotionally satisfying nonetheless, at least to me. Any fan of Stephenson’s prior work will likely find Seveneves, to paraphrase Rick Blaine, “just like his other books, only more so.”

The Math:

Objective Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for forcing readers to confront the bitter reality that all the crap we spend our time obsessing about (who ‘ends up with’ whom romantically, etc.) is of questionable value

Penalties: -1 for taking the Battlestar Galactica gambit of moving the story one year into the future, but multiplied by (literally) 5000, thereby demanding readers just accept our solar system’s future without any chance to see how things developed the way they did

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 "Well worth your time and attention, even if 40% of it is scifibabble!"


Zhaoyun, Wearer of Rose-Colored Glasses and Reader of Dreams, has been keeping it real here at Nerds of a Feather since 2013.

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Dossier: Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash (Bantam, 1992)

Filetype: Book

File Under: Postcyberpunk

Executive Summary: Hiro Protagonist loses his job as a delivery driver working for the Mafia-controlled Uncle Enzo's Pizza, and nearly loses more than that as punishment for delivering a pizza late, but 15-year-old skateboard Kourier Y.T. takes pity on him and gets the delivery there on time. This begins the unlikely partnership in an alt-future Los Angeles dominated by corporate city-states and "burbclaves" between Hiro and Y.T. Hiro is a world-class programmer and was one of the architects of the Metaverse, a networked, virtual reality simulation that millions around the world log into daily, but now he's a freelance hacker and intelligence stringer for the Feds, who are still on the scene but only just. He also happens to be the world's greatest swordsman -- both within the Metaverse and without. Y.T. lives in a burbclave with her mother, who works for the Feds and, Y.T. thinks, is in the dark about Y.T.'s job as a Kourier. When Hiro's other (and materially more successful) Metaverse co-creator Da5id succumbs to a computer virus called Snow Crash that not only destroys the operator's system but also the operator's brain, Hiro begins investigating inside the Metaverse with the help of his ex-lover and Da5id's ex-wife Juanita, and enlists Y.T. to help out in the real world. Juanita clues Hiro into a connection between ancient Sumerian linguistics, the Tower of Babel, and a bizarre religious sect backed by mega-industrialist L. Bob Rife that lives on a sprawling offshore colony called The Raft. A gigantic Aleutian hitman named Raven fits in somehow with both Snow Crash and The Raft, and if Hiro can't figure out how, then he, Y.T., and Juanita will all wind up dead, and human technological culture blasted back to the stone age.

High-Tech: While there are some cool future-tech devices in Snow Crash, like the magnetic harpoons the Kouriers use, and the rat-things that act as security in all Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchulates, the chief piece of technology that defines the book is the Metaverse. Think a planet-sized VR Sunset Strip where you have to pay real money for virtual real estate, and if you can afford them, virtual Googlebots called Librarians will dig up any information you can desire just by speaking. Until the Snow Crash drug comes along, the Metaverse and the real world are separate, and dying in the Metaverse is a minor inconvenience. After? Well...

Low-Life: Hiro lives in a U-Stor-It storage unit with a roommate, a noise-rocker named Vitaly Chernobyl. Real estate has become so expensive in LA that families with 'roided-up teenage sons and regular jobs live in burbclaves in the Valley, the rich, as ever, live where they please, and the rest -- like Hiro -- scrape by where they can and carefully step around used syringes and the like when exiting their front doors. Along with the disaffected youth and would-be scenesters that circle Vitaly's band, Hiro has an easy relationship with drug dealers and others who dominate an environment where crime is more of a nebulous concept, depending on what kind of franchise you happen to find yourself in.

Dark Times: Snow Crash chiefly concerns itself with a small cast of characters who are plugged in and savvy to at least the potential of something nefarious going down behind the curtain. The majority of humanity beyond, though, are left largely uncommented-upon. Places outside of the franchulates have become lawless warzones, as witnessed through Y.T.'s trip to Compton, but for most middle-class people, life is probably pretty great. They're all self-medicating, driving big cars, living in cookie-cutter neighborhoods and following the paths expected of them. Hiro, et al., though, are onto the fact that there is a dark undercurrent beneath it all, mostly stemming from L. Bob Rife's having franchised out religion to The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates, which is helping to funnel people to The Raft, and potentially doing much worse.

Legacy: There are some influential books, and then there are influential cultural events. Snow Crash is the latter. Where Neuromancer radically re-defined the books that came after it and started a trend that grew larger, that movement reached something of an apotheosis in Snow Crash, a book that literally defined aspects of the culture itself. Ever wonder why icons that represent you on the internet are called "avatars"? While not the first person to use the word in that context, Snow Crash is why it stuck. Stephenson's envisioning of the Metaverse came to shape gaming, with Michael Abrash, the creator of the game Quake, and others freely admitting the debt they owe the book in how they came to think of networked 3D computing. Google Earth? That's pretty much how Hiro's Librarian shows him around. Like Neuromancer, Stephenson's book landed on Time's list of the 100 greatest English-language novels of the 20th century, alongside authors like Fitzgerald, Nabokov, and Pynchon, and genre luminaries like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Gibson, and Philip K. Dick. Nice company.

In Retrospect: Neal Stephenson writes virtuosic prose. Humor, attitude, clarion insights, and all around verve leap off the pages of Snow Crash, making it a tremendous amount of fun to read. Hiro and Y.T. are both intelligent and resourceful, and enjoyable people to spend a book with. It is also refreshing, even today, to read a science fiction novel where female characters give as good as they get, and -- while they may be regarded as sexual objects by other characters in the book -- are not treated like sexual objects by the book, itself. Hiro and Juanita, for instance, despite a past relationship never hit the sheets in the course of the book.

Stephenson also allows us to have fun inside the world he's created, apart from the main narrative of the book. Brief chapters will introduce a new character, follow him, her, or it through an adventure that somehow touches on the main action, and opens a wider window onto the world of the story. Mafia head Uncle Enzo's unexpected interactions with Y.T. are particularly fun, and walking around inside the mind of a Rat Thing is unexpectedly rewarding and touching. The ways in which elements of the world that at first appear structural -- such as the abundance of Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates franchises -- but eventually become central to the plot are examples of first-rate literary craftsmanship.

The only place where the book falls down a little bit is in the massive info-dump regarding ancient Sumerian and the idea of a language as ones-and-zeros for human beings. The long stretches of the Librarian filling Hiro in on Sumerian mythology are tremendously evocative of, say, the section of the Mythology text book your teacher skipped over or the liner notes to a Morbid Angel album, so while interesting, they slow down the book's momentum. It feels like Stephenson understood this, however, and there's a lot of pinging back-and-forth between Hiro's conversations with the Librarian and Y.T.'s real-life escapades, which become increasingly perilous. And as Zhaoyun remarked in his review of Stephenson's The Diamond Age, this book also ends rather perfunctorily, with almost literally zero "falling action." That is to say, it happens real quick.

Nevertheless, this is a book that lives up to the hype. And for a 20-plus-year-old book concerning network technology to still make a modern reader think "Wow, it'd be cool if we could do that," that's a helluva neat trick to pull.

Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read today: 4/5
Cybercoefficient: 9/10

Posted by Vance K — who once roomed with a guy who thought Snow Crash was the best book ever written, and, on a separate occasion, boxed that roommate in the backyard while nerds of a feather comics & board game correspondent Mikey kept the ring clock. True story.

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson

Dossier – Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age, Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam, 1995).

Filetype – book (or "primer", perhaps?)

File under – postcyberpunk

Summary – A girl gets a remarkable(/ly) immersive book that lifts her out of one trajectory and into greatness, while a nanotech-engineer, having invented said book, finds himself in Hot Water and almost destroys the foundations of society.

High-tech – While not so temporally distant from the present, we're further away than in Snow Crash, with the invention of matter compilers (nanotech that, nonetheless, already exists in primitive form today: 3D printing!) a truly revolutionary development since now anyone can just ask the magic box for, like, some tasteless food, or a mattress, or a knife with a monofilament blade and presto! The implications for matter compiling are almost endless, and threaten to render the world Stephenson crafted almost unrecognizably different from our own, however. There are cyberpunk-esque skull guns, "hoplite" armor and bullet-proof dusters, as well as nanosites (really really small artificial parasites) that can invade the human body and do a) nothing much, b) good stuff, or c) make you explode.

The most alien (and, I might add, least plausible, especially the idea of a resurgence of Victorian ethics/fashion!) technologies are actually the social ones, the idea that the world will soon descend into the managed chaos of "phyles" and say adieu to nation-states. Writing in the early 1990s, Stephenson can be forgiven for having gotten caught up in the wave of optimism about the end of history and prophecies of a paradigm shift in the reorganization of society away from nation-states. The Primer is probably the most realistic fusion of existing with speculative yet believable future technologies, as already we have movies and games (and perhaps one day soon books) blending together in new and interesting ways, and the media available for use in education radically expanding...

 

Low-life – Stephenson was wise to note that the radical implications of the matter compiler do not affect the fundamental inequalities of human society, which for brevity's sake I will call the 80/20 idea. The powerful might live in a New Atlantan or Nipponese enclave, but it's an elite club (determined by birth, mainly) that only the most exceptional outsiders are invited to join; there are plenty of hoi polloi left behind by the changes, who remain trapped in a life, with few prospects, that is nasty, brutish and short. Nell is one such, who is rescued from a doubtless grim fate via the power of Education, in the form of the Primer. Several hundred thousand girls are likewise saved from oblivion by lesser versions of the same powerful book (though Stephenson utterly fails to render the consequences of this individually tailored educational regimen, since the 330k girls end up functioning without a trace of individuality, as a hive mind in fact; perhaps for him, the fact of them having been rescued from abortion/infanticide, and given magic books, is Good Deed enough?)

Dark times – Run afoul of the law, like Nell's idiot father? Enjoy your last minutes of life, as cookie-cutter nanosites invade your body and prepare to detonate from within...ouch. This is a world that is based upon hierarchy and order, and you had better hope to be born into a good tribe/phyle because if not, you're in deep doo-doo. It's also a world threatened by a massive awakening of xenophobic sentiment in what was once the nation-state of China. The 'Fists' (as in 'Fists of Righteous Harmony', i.e. the Boxers) have risen again, and are determined to win back their country and drive out/murder all foreigners. Scary (but also patently ridiculous, as is the mysterious Seed technology with which they intend to remake the world).

Legacy – Not as well received as Snow Crash, this intricate and generally well-crafted book nonetheless reached millions, and certain aspects of the book continue to resonate today, especially the Book itself, the Primer and its promise of emancipation through education.

In retrospect – Because the future it depicts is even more outlandish than that we see in Snow Crash, and because The Diamond Age combines in one package the same key stylistic/pacing weakness (a shocking lack of falling action after the climax, which in this case occurs literally on the last page!) that mars Snow Crash with the astonishingly excessive detail in world-building and exposition plaguing his post Diamond Age work (Baroque Cycle in particular), this book sits at a weird transitional point in Stephenson's career. The mid-90s were a giddy-with-hope-but-also-terrified kind of time, with the collapse of the USSR and so forth, but the more apocalyptic aspects of Stephenson's speculations on our (societies') future seem fairly outlandish to us today. The rapid progress in 3D printing notwithstanding, in the twenty years since the book was first published, the nation-state has yet to shuffle off its mortal coil, and shows no signs at all of doing so; even if some of the nanotechnological breakthroughs as must have occurred in Nell's world happened right away, one doubts whether much would actually change in the nature of society formation.

Stephenson's vision of the future rests on several underlying premises/ethical positions, some plausible enough, some pretty goofy. In the former category there is the transformative power of education; in the latter, the idea that not only fashion but ethics are cyclical; sorry Neal, a return to Victorian morals is not in the cards, and would carry none of the benefits you whimsically ascribe to such morals anyway. And as the scattered nature of this review/re-visitation should make clear, the book is so complicated (I would argue, needlessly so) that it is very difficult to sum up with any pith, or retain in one's mind for any length of time.

The only thing I remember from my first reading, all those years ago, was that there was a long section on Turing machines that was impossible for me to visualize and boring, but mostly it was about a girl who stumbled on an awesome, super-expensive book that sounded fun—a lot more fun than The Diamond Age, in fact, with its interminable discussions of Turing machines and occasionally clumsy exposition (the worst is between Miranda and Carl, who have several conversations (pp. 270-271, 284, etc.) that explain the fundamental workings of some of the key technologies in the book but might as well have a "Forced Exposition!" banner slapped on them, so ill-fitting are they in terms of narrative flow).

On the other hand, Stephenson did an absolutely masterful job of crafting morally complex characters, with no clear antagonist (even the shadowy Mr. X is obviously not a "bad guy" inasmuch as it was he, almost single-handedly, who saved the 330k girls from their fates) and plenty of hard choices for the protagonists as well.

But if even back in the 90s I was nonplussed with the ending, judging it to have ended not with a bang but a whimper, my disappointment was even stronger upon this re-reading. If only Stephenson had been able to come up with a more emotionally (and narratologically) satisfying ending! (For one thing, why the crap is the Alchemist still working on the Seed at the end, after saying, in so many words, that he didn't want to do so and would actively try to prevent its development?!?!) Just think how great this book could have been...

Analytics

For its time: 4/5.
Viewed today: 3/5.
Cybercoefficient: 7/10.

Zhaoyun, while a devoted fan of Neal Stephenson in general, is not afraid to say to Stephenson, "Hey, man, think of a less anticlimactic/abrupt way of ending your books, will you? You're killing me, here!". and has been issuing this and other gauntlet-in-your-face challenges at Nerds of a Feather since 2013.