Status Updates From The Diamond Age: or, A Youn...

Another cassic Stephenson: "Fiona..., so self-conscious about her still linear figure, still devoid of the second derivatives that add spice to life."

The Drummers' disturbing ceremony calls to mind a similar (though less incendiary) scene in Oryx and Crake, complete with technicolor "glow sticks", lol.

So far so good, this is classic, heady Stephenson, and I'm loving it: steeped with visceral metaphor and mathy similes, a future extrapolated (sometimes farcically) to 11, and moderately paced before the spine crease, with different character groups set up to converge at some point and all tied to the titular primer, which is not so much a Macguffin as a mirror darkly.

OMG Hackworth's imagined ingredients for the bottle of McWhorter's Original Condiment.

I love how, in all earnestness and reverence, Judge Fang refers to KFC as The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel. Because of the Colonel's Confucian goatee.