The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

The Diamond Age belongs to a set of works in science fiction, film, and popular culture that are a reaction to cyberpunk, a genre of science fiction that coalesced in the 1980s. Stephenson’s work takes the conventions of the genre and reimagines them in a world shaped by nostalgia for the Victorian Age.

Cyberpunk literature is usually set in the near or mid-distant future. These futures are frequently dystopian ones in which big, multinational corporations own technology that has changed day-to-day life and how the economy works. These changes usually do not benefit end users of the technology. Both the powerful and the powerless rely upon interfaces that bridge the gap between individuals and between humans and technology. These interfaces may include modifications to the human body to use the technology more effectively. An interface might also be a much more powerful iteration of the World Wide Web known as the metaverse—a term Stephenson coined to describe a fully immersive virtual world. The protagonists in these works usually start or end their character arcs as “punks”—they are motivated by a desire to subvert the reigning power structure on an individual or societal level.

The world of The Diamond Age is ravaged by 20th-century wars that pose existential threats to humanity. The mass of people, unable to compete with automation, work in gray or black economies built on corruption or in low-paying service jobs. In the time of the novel, the coupling of nanotechnology with a secure, anonymous network allows for financial transactions that cannot be monitored by nation-states, leading to the collapse of governments. The collapse of old forms of societal and political organization leads to chaos and to more existential threats like nanotechnological wars. People respond to the chaos by establishing new kinds of order. Some join phyles (tribes built around affinities or shared values) like the neo-Victorians. The neo-Victorians pattern their society on Victorian England, when repressive social and sexual mores, a global empire built on colonial relations of power, and technological innovation were forces used to beat back disorder.

During the actual Victorian Age, technological innovations like the steam engine, which led to the development of faster transportation and communication, did indeed lead to more industrialization and material goods, but the wealth created by steam never trickled down to the working class. Instead, income inequality increased, and writers like Charles Dickens (author of Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and many other works) showed the overwhelming human misery that resulted from this inequality.

Steampunk is related genre that may be considered a subgenre of cyberpunk, but steampunk works are frequently set in a “what-if” past in which anachronistic technology reshapes the Victorian world as we know it. The Diamond Age is clearly set in the future, but the novel takes on characteristics of steampunk because so many of the major characters are or aspire to be neo-Victorians in order to join the prosperous Atlantis claves (communities or enclaves). Hackworth, for example, has a bowler hat that is typical of the dress of a Victorian gentleman, but the hat is “smart”—it can interact with the environment in ways that simple wool cannot. His pocket watch, another material object associated with the Victorian Age, is also enhanced with powerful nanotechnology.

Stephenson gradually strips Hackworth of these accoutrements and values over the course of the novel, suggesting that there is something essentially corrupt and damaging at the heart of this nostalgia for the Victorian Age. His work is thus a critique of utopian fantasies about the power of technology to better the lot of humanity and also of cyberpunk and steampunk as genres.