Reviews - The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

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The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

This was highly recommended by a friend at work plus my brother (he and I usually have the same taste in scifi). It's Hugo awarded and highly esteemed by many. I'm embarassed to say I simply couldn't get into it. Didn't care for any of the characters and kept trying to drudge through it for months. Finally gave up and returned the hardcopy to my brother. This was a total disconnect for me.

lukeabrams's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous funny mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Loveable characters: Yes

gregarius's review against another edition

3.0

Imagine a book that knew everything, had infinite resources, educated the reader, and grew and changed and adapted to the reader and her circumstances. Now put that book in the hands of someone who has nothing and see what happens. That's a fairly thrilling premise, but it gets lost somewhere along the way.

Stephenson created a fantastical world filled with nanotechnology. He took some fairly straight-forward premises and extrapolated very interesting consequences. For example, if we had matter-reconfiguration devices like the replicators in Star Trek, how would it affect the impoverished? If weapons become microscopic robots that float in the air, how does that affect governments? It was a really interesting world to live in through the course of the book.

However, the story itself took a sharp turn for the last third and became an absolute slog to get through. I no longer cared about any of the characters or their motivations; some scenes were nonsensical and felt out of place in the novel; it was only redeemed by a climactic battle at the end (which also seemed out of place). I loved it at the beginning, liked it in the middle, and hated it by the end. I kinda wish I had just stopped reading it at the two-thirds mark.

dkathunt's review against another edition

4.0

Original, interesting concept, not only weaving a complex and involved near-future universe and presenting us with the evolution of an intriguing character, Nell, as she matures from a scared, abused little girl into a woman, but providing thought-provoking commentary about the nature of cultural groups, their interactions and conflicts as well as the concept of nature vs. nurture in terms of child development. Written in '95, the description of the all-encompassing and interactive nature of the web seems in some ways prophetic.

fuffy_frog's review against another edition

3.0

I have no clue what happened in this book, but it wasn't terrible and I was able to finish it. I found the characters really dull. Like no personality at all.

simonlholland's review against another edition

2.0

DNF--29%--Really disappointed, it was lacking a charm that Neal Stephenson's books usually have. And maybe it's just the types of books I do/don't like, but this seemed like a somewhat random futuristic theory that wasn't grounded in anything, and didn't have a substantial plot or any interesting/developed characters to make it feel relatable. But the thing is, Snow Crash was very similar in terms of the wild, futuristic world it took place in, but that actually felt like it had a true plot and substantial characters to pull it forward. And on the other end, Seveneves was VERY grounded in massive amounts of science, but had a bunch of interesting characters and a great plot pushing it forward. With this, I was 150 pages in and literally none of the characters had any discerning traits and the plot seemed like it was going nowhere, so there was nothing to make the complex world he was pushing more digestible for a casual reader. Maybe I'll come back to it in a year or two.