welcome to The Diamond Age.

Flipping through pages depicting an elegant techno-Victorian society set as a jewel in the crown of a juxtopian east coast China, I wondered exactly why I'd waited 18 years to read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

Presented as 21st Century post-nationalistic collapse cyberpunk (and later firmly retroclaimed by steampunk), the novel opens with a bodymodded & teched out street criminal (à la William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy characters), but the narrative quickly disposes of him as an illustration that this story's subversion's going to be far more intellectual.

To coin perhaps an even more divisive sectarian subgenre label, it's innovatively nanopunk, as technology takes control of matter at the molecular level. Better than the food generators in Star Trek's 24th century, Stephenson has matter compilers that build preset comestibles & household items, eliminating daily needs. The challenging question here is when basic needs & the necessity for work is solved, what do people begin to live for & what purpose does society serve? In a word: Culture. Which then makes the luxurious manifestations of that culture the ascendant form of societal credibility. 

With a world where one's cultural affiliation determines your role, the paradigms of East vs West and how their differences have an ugly history of disconnection in the shadow of Western Imperialism, and how that culture is passed to subsequent generations, becomes crucial. Enter "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", the book within the book. While books have always been the ultimate cultural vessels, this particular compilation's a fully interactive (or "ractive" in the novel's parlance) smartpaper text flash-style visual fairytale custom tailored to molecularly bond neurologically with its young recipient, and adapt its lessons to the desires & immediate emotional/physical requirements of the owner. Plus the fairytale, thanks to some of the grim circumstances of the future, is in a ruthlessly Grimmsian vein. All that and it reads out loud, too. Where this unique book ends up is wherein hangs the tale.

In deliberate contrast to the clipped noirtech codelines of cyberpunk, Stephenson's writing style's elegant, every so often paved with subtly beautiful words like gallimaufry, alamodality, callipygous, velleity, farrago, artifex, phyle. (So concinnus!) If Dickens wrote science fiction now, this would be it, replete with his semi-passive comments on class systems accepted for good or ill, but particular to oriental/occidental cultures. While these aren't necessarily critiques, more setpiece observations of differences, it does make you think about status quo, racial bias, and ethnic nurture, and uses these factors as forces in the plot.

Just as Stephenson turned an idea into a virus in the kinetic Snow Crash (1992) and brought memetics to a wider audience, here he implies that the web is an unknowing & unconscious coalescence of data from all who use it to form a greater dynamic & reactive pattern, that the internet itself is an input device that may at some point generate a great answer, or idea, or innovation that will advance the human condition and technology beyond current imagining.

And in a finer point, Stephenson discusses theatre as a metaphor & literal tool for transmission of data between biological entities. The observer effects the observed, and visa-versa. The idea that narrative/stories/myths not only entertain but gift us with lessons/knowledge/perspective in a programming fashion, and by adding live immersive roleplaying aspects & cooperative nanosites into the mix, the audience is not only unseated but stars in its own group composite play.

[A vampire's nanosite gathering sustenance during the day before heading back to its tech savvy master's lair?]

The plus side of my waiting 18 years to read this lands it amidst some of the concepts Stephenson extrapolated on happening, which makes its provocative imaginings now even more relevant: nanotechnology being applied to communications and medicine, the very beginning of multimedia interactive books as apps on tablets for kids, China's revisions of its forced labour manufactories, the encryption processes for data, the idea of virtual currency (i.e. Bitcoin) being able to evade taxes, and especially Ray Kurzweil endeavouring to map the mind, something that will require a printer-style molecular matter compiler by the time he's done. Maybe we can then use the singularity to literally copy people into finely crafted talking smartbooks. (Shut it, blathering Melville! I'm listening to Verne, okay?)

With its concepts so high it nears abstraction, The Diamond Age is an ambitious gem worth cutting into for the wealth of conceits & facets it shines & inspires with.

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Addenda from 10/13/2013: 

Only later do I find out that The Diamond Age is a very loose sequel to Stephenson's Snow Crash (but they each stand very much on its own with only one side character crossing forward, having marked differences in tone), and even attached to the rather irreverent prequel short story "The Great Simoleon Caper", but their world is contiguous.

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Further Addenda from 7/9/2018:

Twenty-three years after it's publication, _The Diamond Age_ is still being actively discussed. Attended the Tucson Steampunk Society's July 2018 Book Club meeting, which was livecast here. I arrive fashionably late at 44:35, asked to introduce myself shortly after at 45:12, waggle my first edition hardback at 46:40, declare my love of the Primer at 47:25, make wishful commentary about the matter compilers at 54:05, and my nanopunk neologism springboards post-cyberpunk conversation from 56:30 for quite a good while. The conversation will continue until our own Diamond Age arrives, probably sooner than you think.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

are you Ready, Player One?

The '80s were the last macrocultural zeitgeist.

After that it all fragments with the media's pronounced non-objective political divisiveness and the internet making endless forum & chat room for every myopic splinter interest, as we went from one shared page where everyone wondered about the same things: whether Coke or Pepsi was better, if Prince or Michael Jackson reigned supreme, what exactly's up with those Goth kids, or when the nukes would drop and justify our unassailable doomsday existentialism. After the web's technological expansion there was no way to keep track of it all, nor at that point would anyone want or even need to.

As such the 1980s will always be relevant.

Which brings us to Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One", an unapologetic 374-page lovesong to the last true pop cultural monolith that is the 1980s.

[Sweet foreign language Tron-inspired cover!]

Sack up, gunter*: Say Bill Gates or Steve Jobs dies/died, themselves competitive ego-products of 1980s greed-is-good corporate raider materialism, and instead of leaving their tech-legacies to friends or family or shareholders, decided to posthumously announce an internet-based contest within the virtual reality network they'd created, allowing the winner not only their personal fortunes of nigh-bottomless billions, but executive ownership of the whole internet itself. Essentially that's the high stakes plot of this near future 2041 cyberpunk modern masterwork.

Unlike most cyberpunk however, instead of grasping forward, Cline's virtual world frames its goggle-net in the rear-view mirror of Tom Cruise's Porsche 928, or Michael J Fox's DeLorean DMC-12: the 1980s context that not only sets our world's watershed reference points for the last agreed upon books, movies, music, and videogames, but the very same earmarks become possibly important clues for the greatest treasure hunt ever devised by a man who grew up in the '80s who was enamoured of all its facets. The conceit sounds like a writer's cop-out, but if you think about it of course we as users would want proverbial lightsabers, or sling a second-gen phaser from our spandexed space-uni hip, smoke the street comp in that unattainable Vector, sport a fierce "Lost Boys" jacket, or rad awesome big teased hair from "Square Pegs". They would pick these, and Cline takes us into the most bitchin' shopping mall of our collective media past with credit cards at the ready, going "Oh yeah! I sooooo wanted that!"

And I can't get over this book. It's so nerd geek gamer retro-wonderful, and payloads John Hughes teen brat pack films, half-remembered TV shows, nascent hacker empowerment ethos, kaiju cinema, classic Star Wars, Saturday morning cartoons, New Wave, Synthpop, hair metal, 8-bit, Radio Shack hardware and so much more into an intellectual atomic bomb signifier that completely levels the irrelevant house of "postmodernism"'s cards into the valueless joke it really is. All the things we have affection for become invaluable, and everything in its way is a miracle we can share, celebrate with each other, and, even more importantly, can be the things we can grow ourselves from, and inspire us to transcend.

Of course there's villainy ex machina and, as with any contest, loopholes & hacks to be had, so Cline builds the tension up, and the seemingly impossible search pulls his world's contestants, and the readers with them, in, trying just as hard to figure out where the clues are hidden.

Good sci-fi tends to be prescient in that egg/chicken, causal/predictive way. Just look at Verne (submarines), Dick (cloning), and Gibson (cyberspace). As we browse right now, convergence technology's busy combining networks down to smaller numbers with more features, whether that's Sony's liberal PS4 over Microsoft's over-regulated Xbox One next-gen consoles, sync service focused Windows 8.1, or multi-app A.I. driven smartphones, all vying to be the preferred user device. It's not too far off to imagine that the world wide web, the cloud, mobile networks, online gaming and video conferencing could also umbrella into one single shared virtual user interface. Recently Cline went and tried out the Oculus VR, deeming their device the looking glass step into his book's OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), the novel's world changing virtual reality.

Cline reveres the tools of technology and the things it can manifest, but indulges in a couple small humanizing moments to remind us not to lose ourselves socially & psychologically within the artifice (albeit pretty hollowly by comparison to the digital grandeur of the brilliant technostalgic world he posits, but point taken). And at the end Cline asks if we are ready to play on this newfound virtual grid where anything is possible, and if so, by whose rules? Will it be by an authority that will limit those possibilities, or by our independent selves with our shared media heritage & no limits save the potential of our imaginations? Either way, Cline's vision is coming. Are you Ready, Player One?

[*Gunter: Easter Egg Hunter]

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

it breaks my heart.

I would send that photo of you on a clear blue day in SF, holding the flask. It's that bright and shining moment of perfection where everything you feel is unquestionable and more than real and so solid it flays you free of the unimportant past and cracks opens the future like a pomegranate, each bead a sweet red bit of life to come, and you know in your soul it'll all taste good from here on out.

You're holding the flask in your hands, the one thing you wanted more than anything for your 30th birthday, and it reads "fire in a bottle", and it doesn't matter that nobody else knew what it meant, only us, only us, only us, only we knew.

Later, there were moments and pauses where our love flagged. The difference was that I had to try and pay attention to the ones where it didn't: the nights of sweat, breakfasts of unneeded donuts and fritters, you in marabou slippers, us driving out to see that total tourist trap in Dragoon that was so stupid it didn't matter because we were there together snickering among the scorpions frozen in paperweights; leaving the apartment like a dream in the stewardess outfit at 4 in the mornings, sleeplessly sexy, touching down like the setting sun when you got back in the evening, rising, falling, rising again, out into the world and ovaling back to me where I waited with presents washed up on the shore of my nights at the store. In them, I saw you, and the desire I had for you.

It was you who doubted, who saw those same moments not as answers but as questions to be raised but for your own reasons, because in the end security was more important than love for you. Is it? Have you now found it a few just too convenient doors down? I can't say. I've always been secure with myself, safe in my own arms, self-contained. I still am, but you've cracked that container, and while it's all still together in my boundless soul, there's a space where you're missing, where the cold enters, depressurizing my insides when I don't expect it, and I see you through the hairline gap, and I miss you: the bangs, the full smile, eyes of dusk, charms you never even saw, but that never failed to surprise, seen as though it were always the first time. Through the heartfissure I accidently watch re-runs of the Christina channel, and what was once my favourite show now breaks my heart, and the fucked up thing of it is you don't even have to be there to do it again.

Yet I can't tell you, or send you the photo. Pride forbids it, my righteous anger tells me such offerings are undeserved, that they weren't adequate to save us in the first place, that maybe, after it all, they'll signify only to me, and are ultimately unasked for.

I wonder if one night you'll realize that more than that immediate family you love, the shoe leather father of impossibly high regard, self-declared asshole brother, sweater-vested aloofly uncaring younger brother, and especially your unwinnable mommy dearest, that for that time, I cared for you more than all of their small mouths could ever hold, and cared most of all.

And in the end, now a year later, in the wake of your unsober tear eyed unannounced visit to my parents, I'm right: love isn't enough. In the end I was the one left holding the bag, the bag filled with gifts left ungiven, gifts poured back into the oceans of unwanted things, these artfully wrapped presents that weren't just gifts -- they were years of I love yous to come, the red seeds of pomegranate that once shined and burned inside that bottle like a fire, impossible but true, if only for a moment of our lives, flowing away from you,
almost,
but not,
tasted,
given up ...
gone.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.