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A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer; a Propaedeutic Enchiridion in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, etc..
Have many people out there read this book?
I recently finished it. I was very moved by Nell's story in the real world, and delighted by Nell's stories in the primer. I wish I could tell stories like that to my children.
I personally got frustrated whenever the attention left Nell. I didn't care about the other storyline nearly as much.
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*grins* I really enjoyed that book. I remember getting it right around the time we bought my daughter a leap pad and having 'the future is now!' thoughts . I also preferred Nell's storyline though the rest of the book certainly kept my attention.
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Is there any explination of why and how Nell's primer was connected to the primers of the Mouse Army?
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overall I liked it (finished both it and snow crash a few months ago)
I think I agree with your implied doubt on that part mph, when the mouse army stuff started up I thought it was more of a stretch than most of the rest.
My main complaint that is just more a gripe with Stephenson's writing is just that it's always hard to get into the story at first since he plunges you straight into the lingo and existence of a reality far stretched from our own. It bugs me that so often I have no idea what a certain word or phrase means in his writing, but oh well... it's the price you pay for otherwise fascinating ideas.
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I actually like Stephenson's style in that regard. He doesn't explain what something is when you first meet it, so you're a little confused for a bit, but it becomes clear pretty soon.
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well, yeah, the lingo isn't bad per-se because you do pick up on it eventually. That part mostly just makes it harder than normal to get started.
The second part was really meant to be more a penchant for choosing odd/archaic words more often than seems necessary in many situations, but again, it seems to be his writing style... <shrug>
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This is my favorite Stephenson book, though I agree the last fifth or so is weak. Much better, IMO, than Snow Crash that darling of internet posters
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The only reason I read Diamond Age was because I enjoyed Snow Crash so much, even though I didn't really expect to.
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Yeah, Diamond Age's ending is kinda weak. Zodiac has the best ending of any of Stephenson's books I've read.
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Huh. I've never heard of any of these books or the author. Sounds interesting, though, and I'll see if we can find them here.
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quote:Is there any explination of why and how Nell's primer was connected to the primers of the Mouse Army?
I haven't read the book in a while, but IIRC, it was something the dad put in the code when he was creating it. I don't remember anything more specific than that.
Loved the book. Wasn't as quick a read as Snow Crash(which I loved), but definitely very fullfilling. I loved Nell's character. And the image of her and the mouse army towards the end was fantastic.
Cryptonomicon was my favorite.
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quote:IIRC, it was something the dad put in the code when he was creating it. I don't remember anything more specific than that.
When Nell's copy was created, Hackworth only intended for there to be two copies ever -- one for his daughter, and one for Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw, for whom it was comissioned. I don't remember anything said about those two being designed to be connected to each other (and the subsiquent copies) at all.
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I remember a scene when Hackworth is commissioned to give them something to avoid his jail term, and he has to make some alterations to what he gives them for the high number of copies needed. He also makes another alteration that connects the other copies to the main original.
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quote:At this point, John Percival hackworth, almost without thinking about it and without appreciating the ramifications of what he was doing, devised a trick and slipped it under the radar of the Judge and Dr. X and all of the other people in the theatre
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I agree that the ending was weak. I liked Nell and her book a lot, too. I think his premise that hard AI is impossible was wrong. Humans are biological machines, and they support intelligent life. Obviously the software could be ported to other hardware. I read not long ago that Richard P. Feynman made an appearance in the book, which is odd, because I totally don't remember him from it, and I'm a huge fan of his, so I'd think I would.
When they followed the character of Nell's dad (stepdad?) (the sleazy guy at the start) I really disliked that part. I don't like being inside the head of creepy people. I liked a lot of the hard-sf type stuff in there, but the societies never really were convincing to me.
I thought the idea of Nell's book was great, though, and I'd love to see something like that made someday. Children all totally deserve to grow up well-educated and loved. If they all were given books like that at birth, then it would be extremely cool. I want one myself, in fact. It didn't make sense to me that the mouse army's books didn't have the same effect on them that Nell's had on her. I wonder what an army of all generals would be like. Probably pretty awesome.
His technology was interesting but not believable to me. More fantasy than sf. Still, extremely clever and readable until the end which was pretty lame, imo.
quote:It didn't make sense to me that the mouse army's books didn't have the same effect on them that Nell's had on her.
well they all had to be altered, and had to lose some functionality to make it more generic and able to be used by hundreds of thousands of children, right? I really am vague on the specifics though, someone who knows the book better may be able to answer these questions more thoroughly.
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quote:Originally posted by Strider: pg. 179(paperback edition)
quote:At this point, John Percival hackworth, almost without thinking about it and without appreciating the ramifications of what he was doing, devised a trick and slipped it under the radar of the Judge and Dr. X and all of the other people in the theatre
Does it say what that trick was?
quote:I think his premise that hard AI is impossible was wrong.
I don't think that was a premise of the book at all. The premise was that hard AI had never been developed (yet), and that they stopped calling what they had AI and started calling it Pseudo Intelligence.
quote:Obviously the software could be ported to other hardware.
It is not obvious at all. If it were, then the experts in the field would all be in agreement on this point. They are not.
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The cult/sacrifice/AIgod/etc pretty much slowly went -- zzzzz-zzzzz...no matter how much the "action" -- to nowhere that scifi authors haven't gone to often and better. But everything with Nell was captivating, new, and felt fast-paced.
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quote:Originally posted by Tatiana: I read not long ago that Richard P. Feynman made an appearance in the book, which is odd, because I totally don't remember him from it, and I'm a huge fan of his, so I'd think I would.
Huh, interesting, have to keep an eye out for that when I reread it sometime soon... Feynman liked drumming, maybe he appears somewhere with the Drummers?
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I just watched a cool documentary with Richard Feynman on google video.
mph, it didn't say in that section what the trick was. Not sure if it talks about it again later, or if you're just supposed to assume he set up this connection between all the primers.
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Notice that the primer didn't have the same effect on all those who had one - Nell's led her to become the startling young woman we all love, Elizabeth became disinterested in hers and joined Cryptnet, and Fiona became more and more lost in the stories of her Primer, withdrawing from reality (that is, until Daddy Hackworth comes back into the picture). I don't think the mouse army was unrealistic at all - a large group of unwanted, disenfranchised young women, properly guided by Hackworth's tweaks, would probably welcome Nell as their leader.
I loved Diamond Age. The begining had me skeptical, as I'm not really a fan of traditional cyberpunk (am I the only one who doesn't think Neuromancer was amazing/pardigim-shifting/whatever?), but I too loved all the parts that had to do with Nell, especially her stories.
quidscribis - you need to read this book. It is pure awesomeness.
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You may not like Neuromancer, but I don't think saying that it wasn't paradign shifting is all that tenable.
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I agree Dog. I read Neuromancer and enjoyed it and all, but it never really grabbed me like any of Stephenson's books. And I actually almost stopped reading it part way through, because it was taking me a while.
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quote:Originally posted by Bokonon: This is my favorite Stephenson book, though I agree the last fifth or so is weak. Much better, IMO, than Snow Crash that darling of internet posters
I loved, loved, loved Snow Crash. Never mind that the first chapter was more of an adrenaline rush than most action movies, I actually took Sumerian in grad school, so it was wicked cool to see it being used in a book.
And let's face it. Calling the main character of your book Hiro Protaganist takes cojones.
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My brother and I were talking about Snow Crash and how cinematic the whole thing seemed. We were musing about why nobody has made a movie based on it when we realized that if anybody tried, it would suck really bad.
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I love that about Stephenson, that he'll write these long, complex books with serious and nerdy stuff in them, but also with things like, in The Baroque Cycle, things like "He certainly hadn't expected a member of the Spanish Inquisition." The goofy stuff sort of ambushes you.
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someone will have to say if/how Feynman is in the book (I'm very skeptical). I certainly don't remember any mention of his name anywhere, and most anything else would probably be a stretch to consider him actually being in the book rather than just some character that somewhat resembles him.
As for the mouse army connection, it's certainly quite possible that Hackworth snuck in some programming that linked their books to Nell's (and maybe even all of the girl's, but only nell took advantage of it) but it still seems too much of a stretch for me. Why would he have done it?
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quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: My brother and I were talking about Snow Crash and how cinematic the whole thing seemed. We were musing about why nobody has made a movie based on it when we realized that if anybody tried, it would suck really bad.
<nod> Some things have a natural medium. M*A*S*H was a great movie, an even better TV show, and a godawful book (series of books, actually). The movie I get to see in my head when I read Snow Crash is better than anything on film could ever be.
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quote:As for the mouse army connection, it's certainly quite possible that Hackworth snuck in some programming that linked their books to Nell's (and maybe even all of the girl's, but only nell took advantage of it) but it still seems too much of a stretch for me. Why would he have done it?
Maybe his purpose was to allow himself to connect with his daughter through the primer, which he did while a drummer. Before I had assumed that as a supercomputer drummer he had just hacked into his daughter's primer, but now I'm thinking that this was the secret he added, and that this addition allowed the new primers to also connect up to Nell's.
The difficulty with with theory is that Nell's primer didn't have the new secret in it.
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quote:I loved Diamond Age. The begining had me skeptical, as I'm not really a fan of traditional cyberpunk
That's the deal: Nell's dad represents the traditional cyberpunk genre. Stephenson introduces him first to represent the backdrop and influence behind the genre of Diamond Age, then kills him literally and metaphorically so that we can move on into a world that he intends to contrast and succeed cyberpunk.
Tiny hints connect the two worlds together: Y.T. is probably Miss Matheson 60 years after her appearance in Snow Crash.
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quote:"Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself. "Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said. "I was just watching the smart wheels and remember an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."
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MrSquicky - I guess I'm sitting here at the wrong end of the pardigm. I'm sure Neuromancer was startling and new when it was first published, but I've read much better, deeper, and more meangingful sci-fi that incorperates all that cyberpunk ever attempted. (Starfish by Peter Watts, for example.)
Not to say that I hate or even dislike the book - I like Gibson, and I get a kick out of the fact that he wrote it on a typewriter. And I guess I should correct myself and say that I thought Neuromancer was pretty good...I just find a lot of other cyberpunk like most "fantasy" writing; derivative, immature, shallow - cyberpunk seems to have nothing new to say about humans+computers.
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WD, Neuromancer, at the time it was published, had an enormous amount of new things to say about humans+computers. The genre that it spawned has been around for about 20 years, so I guess you could definitely say that the cyberpunk milieu, in and of itself, has lost a great deal of its novelty. That does tend to happen. However, that are still people working in cyberpunk who are doing new things with it and the genres, such as steampunk, that have grown from it. China Mieville is a particular favorite of mine who has fused a steampunk-type setting with fantasy elements. (No, seriously, go check him out. You'll thank me.)
Most writing is derivative, immature, and shallow, especially writing that has 14 year old boys as one of its main target audiences. Fantasy, as you mentioned, is plagued by this, but that isn't exactly grounds for saying that Tolkien wasn't groundbreaking.
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This will be a cool miniseries. With Stephenson penning the script it should be a true adaptation. I'm pretty excited actually. thanks for the link mph.
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. I also preferred Nell's storyline though the rest of the book certainly kept my attention.
