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| Posted By : Nathan Jerpe - 7/2/2008 4:25 PM | | Hi folks, looks like we've got a group read selected for the month of July:
The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
A pre-discussion regarding format, time frame, etc. is currently underway here:
I suppose we can use this very thread for the discussion itself? Should we can get this thread stickied?
Also, seeing as how we've got lots of Ouroboros posts lying around from the last discussion, I'm thinking we could at least request a separate Group Reads forum? Just a thought...
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| Posted By : James Enge - 7/7/2008 12:49 PM | Nathan said...
Care to split it in half, maybe? The book falls nicely into two equal-sized parts and it's quite long, actually.
For example:
July 14: Part One Discussion
July 28: Part Two Discussion
which sounded good to me, anyway.
I've actually acquired the book, but my son ran off with it. I still should be able to read it by midmonth, though.
James Enge
http://jamesenge.com/
"A Covenant with Death" in Flashing Swords
"The Lawless Hours" in Black Gate 11
"The Gordian Stone" in Every Day Fiction
"The Red Worm's Way" in Return of the Sword
"Payment in Full" forthcoming in Black Gate 12
Blood of Ambrose due out Spring 2009 from Pyr. |
| Posted By : Nathan Jerpe - 7/10/2008 5:05 PM | |
Been listening to it in the background, culminating with the quote:
"SF thrives because it is idea-porn."
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| Posted By : Nathan Jerpe - 7/12/2008 1:39 PM | Meanwhile, this is probably total coincidence, but I am a few pages in and I've become acquainted with the character John Percival Hackworth, who is an engineer by profession.
Lately I've been intrigued by a Wikipedia page I've found for a steam locomotive engineer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Hackworth
So I wonder if the author intended a resemblance between the two? Could be a stretch I know, but if you check out the page it mentions how Hackworth designed a locomotive called the Sanspareil II, which he used to issue a public challenge against another locomotive engineer. That fellow's name? Robert Stephenson.
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| Posted By : bleacheddecay - 7/12/2008 1:53 PM | I tried to start reading the book today. It hasn't grabbed me yet.
bleacheddecay |
| Posted By : Nathan Jerpe - 7/13/2008 5:12 PM | How far have you gotten? I'm only a quarter way through but I'd say its pretty mindblowing...
Did you get your hardcover yet, Bill?
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| Posted By : Bill Ward - 7/13/2008 11:00 PM | Oi! I don't even have the book yet.
Don't worry I'll catch up, plus its only been a few years since I read it, so I can follow any discussions you start.
billwardwriter.com |
| Posted By : Nathan Jerpe - 7/14/2008 8:56 PM | Well as for the idea porn, it pretty much gets going on page one with Bud going to get a skull gun implant. Not a gratituitous display of technology, I don't think; it lets us know what sort of scoundrel Bud is pretty quick.
This nanotechnology though is a real Pandora's box for this book. I've seen Stephenson base about a dozen interesting inventions off of it so far, and I'm not even through Part the First.
Anybody have a favorite? Mine might be the smart plastic wrap they use to detain criminals...
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| Posted By : James Enge - 7/16/2008 12:08 AM | I was worried on the first few pages about Bud--wasn't sure I wanted to follow him around for several hundred pages. Then he died, and everything was rosy.
Nathan, I think you're right that the choice of technology was non-gratuitous: the type of stuff Bud had (or wanted) told us the type of person Bud was. I guess I had trouble with the whole concept of a skull-gun. How could it not kill or comatize someone in short order from repeated concussions? But maybe I've been watching House M.D. too much.
I liked the way Stephenson relentlessly plays with ideas about the impact of technology and social organization. I was a little dismayed by the some ethnic stereotypes that arose in the course of the book--the Chinese seemed a little too stagily (and 19th C) Chinese; the notion, which comes up in passing, that American Indians would naturally resume life on a reconstituted midwestern prairie, as if they were hard-wired for it... well, seemed a little weird. NS doesn't represent Norwegians reverting to piracy as Vikings, or whites in the US dressing up like Pilgrims. I'm not saying NS is a racist, but some of his thinking about ethnicity seemed rather cartoony and simplistic in contrast to his sophisticated speculation in other areas.
It was funny how the neo-Victorians and the Chinese had, and kept to, very similar elaborate conventions of civility even when discussing crimes etc.
I thought the characterization was pretty good: I liked all the principals and found them pretty plausible, at least for storytelling purposes. But I wasn't so crazy about the way Stephenson distributed his attention among them; it seemed to reduce the impact of their separate-but-related stories, rather than increasing it (which is what a good braided plot can do).
The writing is clean and skillful, sometimes extremely evocative (as when Harv's footsteps disappear in a storm of "toner").
More later, maybe--this is already pretty long.
James Enge
http://jamesenge.com/
"A Covenant with Death" in Flashing Swords
"The Lawless Hours" in Black Gate 11
"The Gordian Stone" in Every Day Fiction
"The Red Worm's Way" in Return of the Sword
"Payment in Full" forthcoming in Black Gate 12
Blood of Ambrose due out Spring 2009 from Pyr. |
| Posted By : Nathan Jerpe - 7/16/2008 7:16 AM |
James Enge said...
I liked the way Stephenson relentlessly plays with ideas about the impact of technology and social organization. I was a little dismayed by the some ethnic stereotypes that arose in the course of the book--the Chinese seemed a little too stagily (and 19th C) Chinese; the notion, which comes up in passing, that American Indians would naturally resume life on a reconstituted midwestern prairie, as if they were hard-wired for it... well, seemed a little weird. NS doesn't represent Norwegians reverting to piracy as Vikings, or whites in the US dressing up like Pilgrims. I'm not saying NS is a racist, but some of his thinking about ethnicity seemed rather cartoony and simplistic in contrast to his sophisticated speculation in other areas.
Agree with you there, sometimes his racial stereotypes are a little harsh (to paraphrase, there was something about the Chinese working for very low wages because they have no self-respect). He does have the stereotypical rich white folks reverting back to Victorianism though, although then again I really only know this because he tells me so; from their speech there are only a few clues.
NS does have some really interesting insights into society however. When he discusses the social classes he comments how common folks have mediatrons over *everything*, with animations to amuse them built into all their furniture, all their rooms, etc. They customize the hell out of their morning news. Meanwhile all the members of the gentry read the same thing in the morning, because their newspaper is made out of paper.
Speaking of braided plots, however: I thought the bit where we first learn that the book is in fact a ractive was a stroke of genius. When Miranda starts going on about how she was working with a four-year old girl my jaw dropped, all my teeth fell out, and I had to put them back in...
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| Posted By : Nathan Jerpe - 7/25/2008 1:18 PM | How's everybody doing?
Got Part I all sewn up yet? What's the deal with The Drummers at the end of it? Whew.
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| Posted By : James Enge - 7/25/2008 2:48 PM | Some random thoughts:
I may have missed something--I was reading pretty fast toward the end--but I don't see how the heroine's mastery of her book's puzzles made her queen of all the other book-users. Shouldn't they have been the queens of their own castles? It seemed like those girls had no real function except to be a faceless army for Nell at the novel's end.
As a rule, though, the characters were not faceless and I cared what happened to them. I didn't feel that Stephenson succeeded in making the stories of the different characters cohere, but I did like the book, mostly for the wealth of ideas and speculation.
NS' rejection of the strong claims of AI was pretty interesting to me.
James Enge
http://jamesenge.com/
"A Covenant with Death" in Flashing Swords
"The Lawless Hours" in Black Gate 11
"The Gordian Stone" in Every Day Fiction
"The Red Worm's Way" in Return of the Sword
"Payment in Full" forthcoming in Black Gate 12
Blood of Ambrose due out Spring 2009 from Pyr. |
| Posted By : Nathan Jerpe - 7/27/2008 1:22 PM | My thought was that the mice were all the Chinese infant girls all grown up, and they had been raised on inferior versions of the Primer that were managed by AI.
In seeing Nell they saw a version of the Primer that was a ractor on the other end, and so they worshipped it.
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| Posted By : Bill Ward - 8/7/2008 8:01 PM | OK, obvious to me I won't be reading this in a manner timely to discussion.
I will mention what struck me most about DA when I read it, the idea that, once everything is materially possible, it's our self-imposed rules and values that will really determine the shape of society. I thought the phyles were brilliant, as I think you can see a resurgence of ethnicity in the face of larger national cultural norms in today's world, and I think that tension and desire to be part of unique group will always be a part of our society. I didn't think Stephenson was thinking so much in stereotypical terms, just exploring the tendency for ethnic groups to self-define in the modern age -- I think he extrapolated from the modern phenomenon of certain groups to become more, not less, 'ethnisized' over time as a deliberate way to set themselves apart from whatever larger culture they are a part of. And now that there is an overarching global culture, you see this trend everywhere, with new generations rebelling against their parents westernized norms and searching for new modes of representation (the middle east is a great example of this). It's self-definition, and in that sense you can say it has something to do with stereotypes as a lot of times much of what a group has to go on when defining who they are is the stereotypes of their larger society. Ethnicity is now something that can be constructed, and in an age of limitless material possibility I think it would be perfectly logical to see the fracturing of humanity in a thousand deliberate units of self-definition, as choice would become essentially the only limiting factor in who or what a person is.
As for what you mention, Nathan, surely that is just Stephenson presenting the Neo-Victorian stereotype of the Chinese (which matches well with the dismissive attitude of their namesakes).
billwardwriter.com |
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