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To start with, Neal Stephenson is a great author. Both Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are well written, exciting books that are hard core science fiction. By that I mean that the science is an integral part of the plot. They are not a "Space Opera" where there is a story set in the future, but you could just as easily set it in the present, or the past, by changing a few words.
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(To see what I mean about space operas, take a script from an old Star Trek show. Now get a word processor to go through and replace:
And now you have a script for Homer's Odyssey, which Start Trek is just a copy of. By swapping "Arrow" with "Cannon" you now have a Swashbuckling Tale set in the 16th Century Carribean. Or 19th Century Pacific, or wherever you want. It doesn't matter. Neal Stephenson's books aren't like that. This is a good thing.) |
What they are like is a William Gibson book, that has been written coherently. For those of you who have not plodded your way through a Gibson book, that means that it is stocked full of brilliant extrapolations of current trends, along with enough quirky, unexpected changes, for you to believe that this really is an accurate picture of the future. The technology, the society and the social attitudes have been put together with a lot of skill into a seamless whole. And it is great fun.
Stuck in this totally believable version of the early 21st Century is a group of amazing characters. At first we are a little confused as to why such a diverse range of people are in the same book, but gradually all becomes clear. We are caught up with the hero and heroine as they gradually become aware that they are in a desperate race to save the world. Cliched, but with some truly clever twists.
The only complaint I had was the tendency of Stephenson, (and this is a much bigger problem in The Diamond Age) to become a bit too Mystical at the grand finale. This is only to a very minor extent in Snow Crash however, and it certainly does not detract from the enjoyment of the book.
I preferred Snow Crash to The Diamond Age probably because it is set in a time closer to our's, so the technology and society is much easier to evaluate and appreciate. But friends of mine preferred The Diamond Age, so buy both and enjoy.
Order Snow Crash
The Diamond Age
by Neal Stephenson
Like his work Snow Crash, The Diamond Age is set in the 21st Century, but at the end of it rather than in the first half. This means that the technology, social developments and social attitudes in the book are that much further from our own. This has both good and bad points.
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Once again I'll go off on a tangent to discuss the matter of social change. A lot of authors write stories about times very different from our own. They are about peasants in the middle ages, or explorers in the 35th Century or Roman merchants. But then the authors write of characters that have the attitudes, mannerisms, and behaviour of 1990s Americans. Well this simply is not believable. People change. 1940s Americans were different from 1990s ones, as any reading of World War 2 era newspapers will attest. 1990s Indians think and act differently from 1990s Americans as the riots of PRO-nuclear protesters reveals. To set modern, western attitudes in Ancient Greece is excusable if it is done for humourous or deliberate artistic purposes. To pretend it is realistic is just childish. Stephenson makes a point of changing the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour of his characters to match the times in which they live, this is, I feel, a very strong point in his favour. And in the favour of other Authors who do the same such as David Brin. |
This book contains a great deal on the subject of nanotechnology. This is a perfect example of Arthur C. Clarke's observation that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The nanotech in this novel is all perfectly believable, and in keeping with the predictions of engineers who are working on developing this technology. But the cumulative effect is very much like the magic of a fantasy book. It takes very little imagination to see that it wouldn't take many more decades for some social subgroups to completely lose track of the technological aspect and treat such behaviour as really being magic.
This similarity to magic leads to the only complaint that I have about this book. The temptations exists for the author to start to treat the technology as magic. And for weird, mystical things to occur in order to wrap up the story line. In parts of the book, Stephenson gives in to this temptation, and the book is poorer for it. However this is limited, and the rest of the book more than makes up for it.
There are no connections between The Diamond Age, and the earlier Snow Crash, but it is very easy to see that the world in the time of The Diamond Age could have developed from the world as it existed in Snow Crash. Both novels show evidence of Neal Stephenson's writing talent though. There is a enormous amount of research that goes into a novel like this, and it is clear that in this case, it was worth it.
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