The Diamond Age or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
by Neal Stephenson
For a hard sci-fi adventure, I have to admit that the title of this book sounds like part of a bet. Something along the lines of "I bet you couldn't write a popular book called 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'". Regardless of why he chose the title; it worked.
First comes the technology. The world of the Diamond Age includes still-developing nanotechnology, specifically in the form of "the feed". The idea is that you lease a feed line from "the source" and that allows you to create certain items from the matter that flows in over the feed. It is, correctly, limited to the kinds of things that have already been programmed into the feed network.
Next comes the society. Obviously, intellectual property concepts play large, since with feed technology anybody could make anything cheaply. The limitation is in figuring out how to make a new thing from the feed for the first time. The other societal difference is that, for inadequately explained reasons, cultural groups have stopped holding on so very tightly to specific territories. The New Atlantans, a neo-Victorian outgrowth of British Commonwealth culture, exists in many parts of the world but is not very static in exactly which places it lives. With such good communications technology, the strength of a phile (cultural group) is more important than the strength of a place. Ideas of untracable communication and public-key cryptography play a role in this, specifically in the assertion that after these technologies became ubiquitous, the old-fashioned governments collapsed. This seems rather unlikely to me, but it's a decent premise for a story. The concept of non-localized countries is also present in his book, Snow Crash. I suspect this might be a continuation of the same universe.
The main character in the story is Nell, who we meet when she is only a few years old (presumably four, but it's never quite stated). She gets ahold of a book called, you guessed it, The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. It is actually a high-tech computing device that serves both as entertainment and education. There is a lot of storyline about this, but I don't want to get too far into it.
This book is a moderatly addictive read, and I finished it in about four days.
I give this book an 8/10.
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