The Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson

Penguin Adult, 1996 - Fiction - 512 pages

Decades into our future, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful Neo-Victorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called a young lady's illustrated primer, designed to raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. Unfortunately, for Hackworth, he loses his smuggled copy to a gang of street urchins in a mugging. One of the young thugs presents the primer to his little sister, Nell and suddenly her life - and perhaps the whole future of humanity - is about to be decoded and reprogrammed... vividly imagined, stunningly prophetic, and epic in scope, The Diamond Age is a major novel from one of the most visionary writers of our time.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - themulhern - LibraryThing

I read this book in the previous century and again this month. _This_ is the book where all Stephenson's preoccupations, the ones that he's been working out in all his subsequent novels, come together ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - cypher2048 - LibraryThing

I really enjoyed this book, but the end seemed a bit rushed. It built up a bunch of interesting threads and they all came to a head right at the end, but a lot of the circumstances and motivations ...

About the author

Neal Stephenson has published four novels: The Big U, Zodiac, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. For the last of these he won a 1996 Hugo Award. He also writes (with J. Frederick George) as 'Stephen Bury'. Their books are Interface and Cobweb. Most of his books are published in Penguin. He lives in Seattle, where he is at work on other novels.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Diamond Age; Penguin : Science Fiction; Penguin books; Penguin fiction
• Author: Neal Stephenson
• Edition: reprint, revised
• Publisher: Penguin Adult, 1996
• ISBN: 014027037X, 9780140270372
• Length: 512 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Fantasy / General