Reuters: “Sci Fi Channel has teamed with George Clooney to develop a miniseries set in a futuristic civilization. ‘Diamond Age’ is based on Neal Stephenson’s book ‘The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer,’ which the author will adapt for the six-hour TV version.”
That novel was one of those books that hit me with the force of absolute revelation, I so much fell in love with it: somehow I hadn’t read Snow Crash, don’t know why (have since remedied the situation, also a great lover of Cryptonomicon), picked up a used copy of “The Diamond Age” and it was just THE MOST PERFECTLY SUITED TO MY TASTES EVER novel. B/c I was teaching and writing about advice literature, and I love that main character, and I love futuristic-but-not-quite-science fiction, and something about it just mysteriously and particularly gripped me in the way that happens when you read the right book at the right time. In fact I fear that between that and “The Difference Engine” I must over the subsequent year or two have perplexed several academic job candidates on the literature-technology-modernism axis by lingering obsessively on questions about neo-Victorian ideology…
Jenny: I too count THE DIAMOND AGE as my favorite Stephenson book, despite its inept ending. Humorous, humanist, quasi-Victorian, and with some unforgettable imagery (such as the wall of advertisements with all of the advertisements screaming to be heard — a truly terrifying idea). I’m hoping that Stephenson can bring the same focus to his teleplay as he did with the book, particularly since I found what I read of the Baroque Cycle to be plodding.
I realized I couldn’t tackle the Baroque Cycle for the same reason I didn’t want to read Mason & Dixon: the eighteenth century is my livelihood, I really cannot read eighteenth-century pastiche for fun especially when it is full of pseudo-comic anachronism/incongruity…