Mad Times

Subtitled “or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”. The “Diamond Age” part of the title refers to an era ushered in by the perfection of nanotechnology and the ability to build diamonds (or nearly anything else) from raw elements and the parallel ability to use that tech to make stuff (like windows) out of diamond. The book has two primary narrative tracks. The first centers on John Percival Hackworth, a master programmer of nano computers. He is commissioned to build a computer in the form of a book which is optimized to interact with young girls and give them the kinds of experiences that will make them independent and capable women. The commissioned object is for the granddaughter of his wealthy patron, but another copy finds its way into the hands of Nell, a little girl with a drug addicted mother, an absent father, and a seemingly less-than-bright future. And Nell is, of course, the other primary character.

The technology in the book is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic. It’s really cool, but it’s hard to see how it would work.

Last time I read it my suspension of disbelief was strained by the idea of Victorian social mores coming back in a high-tech society, but for some reason I found that part easier to take this time. Not sure if that’s because the world has changed to make the idea more plausible or if I just got that particular skepticism out of my system.

This is my favorite Stephenson novel for its combination of tight plotting, revolutionary philosophy, fully drawn characters, and cool stuff.

Same box as last week (different cat).

You can’t swing a wooden stake in the fiction section these days without impaling a vampires-in-the-modern-world book. This one is distinguished by the fact that its vampire protagonist was turned while following his duties as a soldier in Iraq. Then he came back home and became (what else?) a private investigator. Goth meet noir. And if those aren’t enough genres for you, it’s also going for humor and sex in addition to the military, supernatural, and PI flavors. The result is a melange as unpalatable to me as the blood-based meals the protagonist subsists on.

Sequel of sorts to Kushner’s Swordspoint, though Becky read this without having read that and managed just fine. As the book opens, our heroine Katherine is learning that in order to settle a lawsuit that is crippling her family she must go to the city (unnamed as in the other books set there, but fans (and the author) have taken to calling it Riverside) and, train as a sword fighter in the house of her uncle, the Mad Duke Tremontaine. Got that?

Katherine is mostly excited by the prospect of going to the city at first, but as she learns just how serious the Duke is about the sword fighting, things become much more ambiguous for her. She does manage to make a friend as soon as she arrives in the person of Lady Artemisia Fitz-Levi. But they are soon divided and Lady Fitz-Levi has complications of her own to deal with as we see in a parallel narrative thread.

Despite the other story lines, the book is primarily the tale of Katherine’s coming of age. She starts changing on the first page of the book and keeps on refining herself all the way to the end. What makes the book irresistible is that nearly every other character in it is busy going through their own changes at the same time. I can’t recall ever reading a book where so many essentially minor characters were so well drawn and given their own little arcs to follow.

This richness of characterization includes the character of the city itself which Kushner clearly adores. The city and its culture are similar to the typical fantasy setting, but Kusher manages to distinguish it well enough that what would be anachronisticly modern attitudes instead seem perfectly natural. In particular, this society has virtually no stigma on sexual relationships between members of the same gender. And while that is a significant factor in the lives of a number of the characters, I just drew more attention to the fact with that sentence than Kushner does in the whole book.

If I have a gripe with the book at all (and I barely do), it is that Kushner perhaps loves her characters a bit too much and so their trials are resolved, if not painlessly, then with somewhat implausible neatness.

An Argentinian mathematics student goes to Oxford in England on a scholarship. In addition to coping with living in a foreign land, he is soon coping with being closely acquainted with a series of murders.

The murder mystery is fairly pedestrian. What’s fun is the relationship between the student and the logic professor Arthur Seldom. There’s some shared background between the two in the mathematics and Seldom’s facility with Spanish, but through the course of the book they build something deeper and more complex. The book is written as if recounted years later looking back on the events and this nostalgic point of view colors and distances the events of the story. It feels quiet and restrained in a way that even though the book is set in the late 20th century makes it feel almost timeless.

The murders are early on identified as the work of a serial killer and the final resolution is refreshingly free of the cliches of that genre.

The server move has been delayed so I’m going to post some stuff…

Mad Times is moving to a new server sometime in the next week or so (probably over the weekend). Hopefully everything will go smoothly, but if the site suddenly appears in safety orange type on a lemon yellow background or (more likely) fails to appear at all in the next week, take it as a sign that you need to spend more time outdoors and I’ll get things back to normal as soon as possible.

The ribbon (actually the webbing from an old bike helmet) attached to the stick is Theo’s current favorite toy. His pillow is a spiky “zoom groom” brush, also a current fave.

Peaches was my sister’s cat, given to her by her room mate/landlord when she was a little kitten. Sis moved home and then back out again and as often happens in such situations, Peaches stayed with my folks. They had the sad duty today of deciding that Peaches’ health had gotten bad enough that she wasn’t going to get better.

You were kind of a psycho, Peaches, but we’ll miss you anyway.