The Diamond Age

Nanotechnology has dissolved the nation state. People now belong to phyles: tribes of affinity and culture, of which the wealthiest is the Neo-Victorian, whose members have rebuilt a code of manners on the foundations of molecular assembly. Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw commissions a book for his granddaughter, an interactive primer designed to raise a subversive mind rather than an obedient one, and John Percival Hackworth, the engineer who builds it, makes an illicit copy for his own daughter. The copy is stolen, and ends up in the hands of Nell, a small girl in the Shanghai slums with an abusive household and no prospects at all. What the Primer does for her, over years, is the spine of the book. Around it Stephenson assembles a vast and restless cast: an actress who performs the Primer's voices for money, a Confucian judge, engineers, criminals and a movement stirring in the Chinese interior. It is a novel about education as the only durable form of wealth, executed with wild inventive appetite and a genuine tenderness towards the child at its centre.