Neal Stephenson - A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

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Neal Stephenson’s dazzling novel Snow

Crash set the science fiction world on fire,

charting out the literary landscape of the

next millennium with wild abandon. Now

this acclaimed talent has again created

a singular vision of the future. Imagine

Charles Dickens writing in the 21st

century...and you begin to imagine life

in The Diamond Age.

Decades into our future, a stone’s throw

from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant

nanotechnologist named John Percival

Hackworth has just broken the rigorous

moral code of his tribe, the powerful

neo-Victorians. He’s made an illicit copy

of a state-of-the-art interactive device

called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his

grandchild, stolen for Hackworth’s own

daughter; the Primer’s purpose is to educate

and raise a girl capable of thinking for

herself. It performs its function superbly.

Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled

copy has fallen into the wrong hands.

Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetes

—members of the poor; tribeless class.

Neglected by their mother, Harv looks after

Nell. When he and his gang waylay a certain

neo-Victorian—John Percival Hackworth—

in the seamy streets of their neighborhood,

Harv brings Nell something special: the

Primer. And from the moment she opens

(Continued on back flap)

(Continued from front flap)

the book, her life is changed. She enters a

fairy tale in which she is the heroine,

challenged with traversing an enchanted

world in search of the fabled twelve keys. If

successful, she could emerge with untold

wisdom and power.

Following the discovery of his crime,

Hackworth begins an odyssey of his own.

Expelled from the neo-Victorian paradise,

squeezed by agents of Protocol Enforcement

on one side and a Mandarin underworld

crime lord on the other; he searches for an

elusive figure known as the Alchemist. His

quest and Nell’s will ultimately lead them to

another seeker whose fate is bound up with

the Primer—a woman who holds the key to

a vast, subversive information network that

is destined to decode and reprogram the

future of humanity.

Vividly imagined, stunningly prophetic, and

epic in scope, The Diamond Age is a major

novel from one of the most visionary writers

of our time.

NEAL STEPHENSON is the author of Snow

Crash, Zodiac, and The Big U.

Jacket design by Jamie S. Warren Youll

A Bantam Spectra Book

Bantam Books

1540 Broadway

New York, New York 10036

Printed in the United States of America

THE DIAMOND AGE

A Bantam Spectra Book / February 1995

SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s’ are trademarks of Bantam Books,

a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

B00K DESIGN BY CAROL MALCOLM RUSSO / SIGNET M DESIGN, INC.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information

storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For

information address: Bantam Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stephenson, Neal.

The diamond age or, Young lady’s illustrated primer / Neal Stephenson.

p.cm.—(Bantam spectra book) ISBN 0-553-09609-5

I. Title. II. Title: The diamond age. III. Title: Young lady’s illustrated primer.

PS3569.T3868D53 1995

81 3’.54—dc2O 94-30486

CIP

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing

Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is

Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam

Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BVG0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

By nature, men are nearly alike;

by practice, they get to be wide apart.

—Confucius

Moral reforms and deteriorations are moved by large forces, and

they are mostly caused by reactions from the habits of a preceding

period. Backwards and forwards swings the great pendulum, and

its alterna-tions are not determined by a few distinguished folk

clinging to the end of it.

—Sir Charles Petrie, THE VICTORIANS

A thete visits a mod parlor; noteworthy features of

modern armaments.

The bells of St. Mark’s were ringing changes up on the mountain

when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.

Bud had a nice new pair of blades with a top speed of anywhere

from a hundred to a hundred and fifty kilometers, depending on how

fat you were and whether or not you wore aero. Bud liked wearing

skin-tight leather, to show off his muscles. On a previous visit to the

mod parlor, two years ago, he had paid to have a bunch of ‘sites

implanted in his muscles—little critters; too small to see or feel, that

twitched Bud’s muscle fibers electrically according to a program

that was supposed to maximize bulk. Combined with the

testosterone pump embedded in his forearm, it was like working out

in a gym night and day, except you didn’t have to actually do

anything and you never got sweaty. The only drawback was that all

the little twitches made him kind of tense and jerky. He’d gotten

used to it, but it still made him a little hinky on those skates,

especially when he was doing a hundred clicks an hour through a

crowded street. But few people hassled Bud, even when he knocked

them down in the street, and after today no one would hassle him

ever again.

Bud had walked away, improbably unscratched, from his last

job—decoy—with something like a thousand yuks in his pocket.

He’d spent a third of it on new clothes, mostly black leather, another

third of it on the blades, and was about to spend the last third at the

mod parlor. You could get skull guns a lot cheaper, of course, but

that would mean going over the Causeway to Shanghai and getting a

back-alley job from some Coaster, and probably a nice bone

infection in with the bargain, and he’d probably pick your pocket

while he had you theezed. Besides, you could only get into a

Shanghai if you were virgin. To cross the Causeway when you were

already packing a skull gun, like Bud, you had to bribe the shit

2out of numerous Shanghai cops. There was no reason to economize

here. Bud had a rich and boundless career ahead of him, vaulting up

a hierarchy of extremely dangerous drug-related occupations for

which decoy served as a paid audition of sorts. A start weapons

system was a wise investment.

The damn bells kept ringing through the fog. Bud mumbled a

command to his music system, a phased acoustical array splayed

across both eardrums like the seeds on a strawberry. The volume

went up but couldn’t scour away the deep tones of the carillon,

which resonated in his long bones. He wondered whether, as long as

he was at the mod parlor, he should have the batteries drilled out of

his right mastoid and replaced. Supposedly they were ten-year jobs,

but he’d had them for six and he listened to music all the time, loud.

Three people were waiting. Bud took a seat and skimmed a

mediatron from the coffee table; it looked exactly like a dirty,

wrinkled, blank sheet of paper. “‘Annals of Self-Protection,’” he

said, loud enough for everyone else in the place to hear him. The

logo of his favorite meedfeed coalesced on the page. Mediaglyphics,

mostly the cool animated ones, arranged themselves in a grid. Bud

scanned through them until he found the one that denoted a

comparison of a bunch of different stuff, and snapped at it with his

fingernail. New mediaglyphics appeared, surrounding larger cine

panes in which Annals staff tested several models of skull guns

against live and dead targets. Bud frisbeed the mediatron back onto

the table; this was the same review he’d been poring over for the

last day, they hadn’t updated it, his decision was still valid.

One of the guys ahead of him got a tattoo, which took about ten

seconds. The other guy just wanted his skull gun reloaded, which

didn’t take much longer. The girl wanted a few ‘sites replaced in her

racting grid, mostly around her eyes, where she was starting to

wrinkle up. That took a while, so Bud picked up the mediatron

again and went in a ractive, his favorite, called Shut Up or Die!

The mod artist wanted to see Bud’s yuks before he installed the

gun, which in other surroundings might have been construed as an

insult but was standard business practice here in the Leased

Territories. When he was satisfied that this wasn’t a stick-up, he

theezed Bud’s forehead with a spray gun, scalped back a flap of

skin, and pushed a machine, mounted on a delicate robot arm like a

dental tool, over Bud’s forehead. The arm homed in automatically

on the old gun, moving with alarming speed and determination.

Bud, who was a little jumpy at the best of times because of his

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rINU.S.$22.95INCANADA$29.95NealStephenson’sdazzlingnovelSnowCrashsetthesciencefictionworldonfire,chartingouttheliterarylandscapeofthenextmillenniumwithwildabandon.Nowthisacclaimedtalenthasagaincreatedasingularvisionofthefuture.ImagineCharlesDickenswritinginthe21stcentury...andyoubegintoimaginelifein...

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