I'm pretty sure this is the third book. I have been reconstructing the chronology by remembering what job I had when I was reading these books. Well circa 2011 I worked at the IT department for a school, and I would frequently smoke weed, read a book, and then fall asleep on the couch until someone came in at 2 AM because their hard drive failed and they didn't back it up. And I definitely remember reading this book around that time: laying on that disgusting purple work couch while marveling at the weird future this book depicts.

"Genre fiction! Genre fiction! It's not even Stanislaw Lem!" There are many things that can make a book good: good ideas, good characters, good milieu, good themes, good voice, good turns of phrase... The combination of many of these factors can make a book great. Neal Stephenson's strengths have always been in his ideas, themes, milieus, and to a certain extent his voice. But The Diamond Age is special to me among any science fiction I've read. In fact I have reread it several times. Its themes are unique.

It describes a world of material abundance thanks to nanotechnology, its name coming from the fact that diamond--thanks to its repetitive crystalline structure--is easier to produce than glass. Windows are made of solid diamond, people eat synthetic printed food, every surface can easily be printed to have a display. In fact, one of the main characters is a wealthy engineer because he invented chopsticks with advertisements playing on their surface.

That's not what is interesting about this book. The main theme, and it's not something I've seen repeated in other fiction, is cultural evolution. This future is dominated by landless "states" called phyles (proper nation states with borders still exist, but are functionally weaker than phyles, which appear to have grown out of corporate entities). In this book, these phyles are a stand in for different cultures with enclaves in major cities across the world. And the climax of the book is about the creation of a new culture. Ham handed imagery is used to relate sexual reproduction to cultural transmission and evolution. Well, I say ham handed, but I have never heard anyone discuss this aspect of the book before.

Although all good science fiction has a sociological dimension, this is the most sociologically rich science fiction I have read. Now, this book has its weaknesses. If you ever read Snow Crash you will already be familiar. Neal Stephenson seems unable to end a book. The plot just doesn't have a satisfying resolution. And characters are flat (although not by science fiction standards).

Anyways, how did this book change me? Concurrent with my reading of The Society of the Spectacle, this book changed the way I viewed human culture. I would revisit it again when I started to read books on cultural evolution, including George Basalla's Evolution of Technology. I began to view culture as an evolutionary process, with human beings as the lucky species that culture got to uplift and domesticate. These themes will return.