Comments on: Stephenson — The Diamond Age

By: Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Stephenson — Anathem (A Review)

Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Stephenson — Anathem (A Review) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:08:32 +0000

[...] to say, those who enjoyed Stephenson’s earlier books (Diamond Age is reviewed on chicagoboyz here) will enjoy this one. And those whose imaginations are captured by long stretches of history [...]

By: Ted B. (Charging Rhino)

Ted B. (Charging Rhino) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:27:17 +0000

In American, “Victorian sensibilities” were overlain on a robust social-framework we inherited from England Protectorate to Recency-period…whereas the British adopted them as a coping mechanism to their imperial social-pressures where their social and economic-values were in conflict. In American, these same pressures were co-parallel; and seen not as a “control on progress”, but as progress itself. Rather than the British “keeping people in their place”, it provided the “empty places” for Americans (native-born and immigrant)to “fill-in”.

By: Jim Bennett

Jim Bennett — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:06:38 +0000

One can date the era in The Diamond Age within a decade or two. The childhood incident related by the character Finkle-McGraw, in which an airliner makes a forced landing in Iowa and local civil society, including the Boy Scouts, turns up at the airport spontaneously to assist, was a real incident which took place (I seem to remember) in the mid-1980s. Finkle-McGraw, in the story, was somewhere between 80 and 100, and we can assume that 10 is a reasonable meidan age for a Boy Scout. So that would put the beginning of the story somewhere between 2060 and 2080.

The Victorian ethos is not entirely irrelevant to America. Many late-Victorian institutions and attitudes crossed the Atlantic and influenced American “WASP” culture, that is to say upper-middle-class Northeastern US culture, heavily; it took advantage of similarities that were already there. New England town academies, whose roots were in the dissenter academies of midlands and northern England, were transformed into English-style boarding schools with an Eton- or Rugby-style curriculum. The Boy Scouts themselves, a quintessentially Second Empire institution, helped spread this ethos throughout middle-class America. (One of the reasons “Boy Scout” is often used by Americans as a decription for Canadian attitudes is that Anglo-Canada had an even heavier infusion of Second Empire culture — so there is a common source.) So, although America’s roots are found primarily in the English Seventeenth Century, there was a substantial graft of Second Empire influence. The Neo-Victorians would probably have felt at home in the Metropolitan Club in Washington or the Union League in Philadelphia.

By: Lexington Green

Lexington Green — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 03:32:59 +0000

One of my favorite books of all time.

I am cautiously optimistic about the TV show. Stephenson is writing the screenplay. So, there is hope it will be good.

The Neo-Victorians are depicted pretty favorably overall by Stephenson — repressed, but productive and orderly and hardworking and brave. I think the TV show could simply show them as they are in the book and let the viewer make his own decision about how to judge them.

I note that the way the Vicky architecture is described, it fits in perfectly with Veliz’s idea of English (or Anglospheric) culture as asymmetrically gothic. I wonder if Stephenson read Veliz.

Also, is it really a yellow peril book? The Celestial Kingdom is not so much on the march as pushing out the foreigners. Those scenes reminded me of Charleton Heston in 55 Days at Peking, probably intentionally.

(I don’t see why the seed technology is necessarily going to support an authoritarian culture. The idea is that it is going to support an agrarian culture.)