David’s Reviews > The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer > Status Update

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.

Lol, I just love Neal's math-inflected prose. If you're going to skewer your target with 3 figurative spears, might as well make 'em orthogonal and go for the nerd cred: "Spear number three; now Hackworth's pounding heart sat at the origin of a bloody coordinate system plotted by Lieutenant Chang, conveniently pinned and exposed for thorough examination."

To my dear imaginary followers: may your holiday gifts be wrapped in freshly compiled "thick, glossy mediatronic paper bearing animated Christmas scenes: Santa sliding down the chimney, the ballistic reindeer, the three Zoroastrian sovereigns dismounting from their dromedaries in front of the stable."

Didn't get in as much Thanksgiving reading as I wanted, lol.

What a word: gallimaufry!!

Starts off almost exactly like Snow Crash with a visceral first page, and I'm all in.