The Diamond Age

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, published by Bantam Spectra in February 1995. It is set in a world remade by molecular nanotechnology, where matter compilers in ordinary homes assemble goods from energy and raw material delivered by a central network, the Feed. A girl from a slum on an artificial island off Shanghai comes by the Primer, an interactive book made for a rich man's granddaughter, and the book becomes her teacher. The novel won the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Novel.^[1]

Drexler's assemblers, described in Engines of Creation (1986), are the model for the book's nanotechnology.^[2] Energy and molecules reach homes through the Feed from a facility called the Source, and matter compilers turn them into goods. Opposed to this centralized supply is the Seed, an anarchic and decentralized technology, described as an indigenous nanotechnology meant to end Chinese dependence on the Feed, whose development occupies the later chapters. Society has sorted itself into phyles, groups defined by shared values, ethnicity, religion or culture, and people who belong to none are called thetes. Among the Four Great Phyles are the Han, Nippon, Hindustan and New Atlantis.^[1]

Stone Age and Bronze Age are the models for the title, which names an era after a material. One ruling phyle takes its neo-Victorian manners from Charles Dickens, whose The Old Curiosity Shop has a Little Nell, and so does the heroine's name. Education, social class, ethnicity and the nature of artificial intelligence are among the book's subjects, along with the part that technology plays in a child's development and the relative values of cultures.^[1]

Nell, a thete child, lives in the Leased Territories, a slum on New Chusan, an artificial island off Shanghai. Her brother Harv steals a copy of the Primer, which the engineer John Percival Hackworth designed for Lord Finkle-McGraw to give to his granddaughter Elizabeth. Hackworth had made the copy without permission for his own daughter, Fiona. The Primer teaches whoever holds it, and the voices of its characters are supplied by a human actress, Miranda, who works as a ractor, an interactive actor, and becomes a surrogate mother to Nell.^[1]

Hackworth is drawn into a struggle between rival factions, among them the figure called Dr. X, and spends ten years with the Drummers, a hive-mind group, while the Seed is developed.^[1]

The novel won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1996, and it was shortlisted for the Nebula Award.^[1] Gerald Jonas wrote in The New York Times that the last chapters drift toward excess though the book mostly holds to its theme, and Marc Laidlaw praised the characters and setting in Wired but found the book disappointing next to its ambitions.^[1] Amazon gave its first Kindle e-book reader the codename Fiona, after Fiona Hackworth, according to Brad Stone's history of the company.^[3]

Kent Kemmish names the novel in "Our North Star", a five-page statement of the company's goals that he wrote in 2022 and later called "the best I could do one night in 2022".^[4] A section headed "Safely Rubbing Synthetic Biology's Genie Lamp" opens by saying that with utility-scale monitoring in place "we'll be free to unleash its awesome power non-apocalyptically", and it then calls The Diamond Age "A popular science fiction novel among synthetic biologists". It sums up the plot as a conflict between giant corporations that sell products from the Feed, "monolithically centralized and regulated nano-manufacturing", and a rebel group that wants the world to have the Seed, which it defines as "decentralized nanotech" that gives anyone "the freedom to locally produce anything they need".^[5] The document's citation for the novel is printed as "[ref]".

The novel was published in 1995, the document goes on, before the idea of synthetic biology had taken shape, and the road to molecular manufacturing through biology is already "more 'seed-like'": "synthetic biology will always lend itself more naturally to democratization and decentralization." It warns of "obvious profound dangers" without "the ability to monitor the world at the nano-scale", which is the case it makes for utility-scale molecular sensing. A few lines on, it imagines a "flying mansion that feeds you" grown from a design, and it closes the thought with a plan to use synthetic biology "to terraform Mars!"^[5]

The company's later position on who may make what, and on who owns an instrument design, is described in Radical openness (Molecular Reality).

• Mars trilogy
• Ideas and influences of Molecular Reality Corporation
• List of works that inspired Molecular Reality Corporation