....AHHHH!!!!  I mistakenly thought you were referring to the Ltd Ed of LotR!

Strange & Norrell has now had the Folio treatment. I noped out of the signed version yesterday cos fuck paying £375 when it’s not actually a Limited Edition. It sold out in like 5 minutes though.

Will order it unsigned normal for £150 though.

Yeah as experimental as the narrative is, the relationship between them feels kinda pedestrian? Which makes it a lot easier to read to be fair and it's less of a criticism and more of a "this could have been more interesting if either character in the relationship felt a bit more genuinely alien."

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Snow crash is one of my favourite books, but for some reason I’d never read this - the book Stephenson followed it up with. It gets a lot of hype as an ‘underappreciated classic’, but … somehow I don’t see it. I found it a bit of a let down.

We’re far in the future. So far that you get that discombobulating thing at the start of the book, where the language feels a bit alien and you want to chuck it in the bin for trying too hard with all the made-up words and tech. But stick with it and things start to flow better. In this future humanity has invented matter compilers and the ‘feed’ to fuel them. So we’re in a post-scarcity world. Anybody can make anything, in an instant, if they have the blueprint (and the funds). And it’s all built at the atomic level, rearranging building blocks from the atmosphere.

To deal with this life of plenty, people have abandoned nation-states and reorganised society into ‘phyles’ - or tribes, if you like. The biggest being essentially based on ye olde Victorian Empire and ye even older Chinese Empire. Which is probably the most annoying side of the book, with its reliance on stereotypes and social mores.

So that’s the world. What’s the plot?

The leader of the Victorian steampunk wannabes has a young daughter. And he has a theory that the life of privilege doesn’t set anyone up for success. Being mollycoddled results in a lack of original thinking and entrepreneurial spirit. So he devises a plan to give his daughter a better education. 

He gets the finest engineer in the land to design an interactive teaching book. ‘The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer’. Which will imprint itself on the girl who first opens it - his daughter - and basically act as a nanny, a teacher, and a spiritual guide, all in one. Think of it as a personalised Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Obviously, this goes wrong. The engineer pirates a copy for his own daughter. Then gets mugged. The mugger gifts the book to his little sister. So we have a street kid from the roughest side of the tracks receiving the ultimate education.

Adventure ensues.

All this makes The Diamond Age sound good. But really, reading it is a slog. The tribes/phyles and the mannerisms they demand really make it drag. Add to that half of the book is written in the style of the Primer - a young girl’s adventures in an imaginary fantasy land, much like Alice in Wonderland but without the inventiveness and weirdness.

I liked the ideas here, but not the execution. 

In Stephenson’s defence though, it really picked up in the third act. Once the girl was grown-up, and the disparate parts of the world (and the plot) came together, it rocked along at a fair old pace. Bloody revolution, practical application, and a heroine who grew into a superhero of sorts. But there were also some very casual, offhand treatments of horrendous sexual violence that felt a bit queasy. So, y’know. Swings and roundabouts there.

I’m giving this the old Edge [7]. I didn’t really love reading it, but I’m glad I did. The story in there was a good one.

I’ll try and make it. But doubt I will. Too lazy.