In contrast to most Prometheus nominees, The Diamond Age seems to have little ideological content. It does have moral content, but the focus of that content is not on the value of freedom or private property, but on the value of loyalty and discipline. Several of its major characters belong to a culture deliberately modeled on the Victorian Era, and a conversation early in the novel tells us that this culture is viewed as undisciplined by many of the world’s other cultures—for example, by the neo-Confucians of the Han. So where’s the libertarianism?

As it turns out, something like libertarianism appears to be built into the infrastructure of Stephenson’s future world. Midway through, we learn that one of its historical données is that unbreachable privacy has made the nation-state obsolete by making taxation impossible.

In its place, we find a mixture of “signatory tribe[s], phyle[s], registered diaspora[s], franchise-organized national entitie[s], sovereign politie[s], or other form[s] of dynamic security collective” held together by a set of rules, the Protocols, and a body dedicated to their enforcement but not claiming any form of sovereignty. “Economic transaction” is defined broadly here; it includes theft and even mayhem and penalties for both is confiscation of assets or forced labor.

The sole purpose of the Protocols is to enable economic transactions to take place between members of different cultures according to a coherent system of rules. Moreover, it appears that membership in these organized bodies is largely an individual choice. There are references to neo-Victorians having taken the Oath, and to other groups having recruiting policies. There is even a First Distributed Republic that appears to reflect the libertarian ideas of our own time.

In short, whatever disciplines and rigidities people have imposed on themselves come much closer to being their own choices than in our time, and in that measure Stephenson’s future comes closer to being libertarian. It still has darker elements, ranging from terrorist gangs to the abandonment of a quarter of a million infant girls by Chinese parents unwilling to support them due to aquifer depletion, but the overall feeling is more like the relative peace and prosperity of the nineteenth century.

Within this framework, Stephenson poses a problem that faces any ethical movement: while the neo-Victorians themselves largely adhere to their code because they have personally become convinced that the alternatives are undesirable, their children will have to grow up and enter it and follow it out of simple conformity to tradition—and thus will lack both real understanding of their own customs, and the creative drive of their parents. As a solution to this problem, one of his characters devises the novel’s marvelous invention, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, from which it takes its title.

The inventor, commissioned by a nobleman to make it for the nobleman’s granddaughter, attempts to create a bootleg copy for his own daughter; this copy itself is stolen and ends up in the possession of a poor girl growing up in the slums of Shanghai, whose education becomes the center of Stephenson’s narrative.

But why choose to live within such constraints at all? For Stephenson’s characters, the answer is simple: life without constraints, as in the late twentieth century, was intolerable, both because it prevented individual accomplishment and because it exposed people to other people’s destructive behavior. (At one point the students in a girls’ school are exposed to simulations of a Victorian workhouse and a late twentieth century American slum, and conclude that the first is much less unpleasant.)

At one level, this is a novel about technology: pseudo-intelligence, nanomachines, and all their implications. But at a deeper level, it is a novel about culture. Stephenson directly challenges some of the commonplaces of our time, showing us a future in which the equality of all cultures is regarded as an outmoded delusion; cultures that support scientific rationality, self-discipline, and the accumulation of capital are better than others and deserve the wealth and happiness that results.

Stephenson carefully makes the point that this is not a question of gender or racial difference: the nobleman who starts the project, an eminently successful neo-Victorian, is in fact a Korean orphan raised in Iowa, whereas the poor little girl growing up in Hong Kong is of white American ancestry—but he questions the cultural egalitarianism that emerged in the 1920s as an overreaction against earlier racism, and the anomie that results from it. This is by today’s standards a radical idea, perhaps an intolerable one, and it is a pleasure to see an author reclaiming the role of sf as a literature of social criticism in which such ideas can be presented freely.

This is not the only pleasure Stephenson offers. There is the setting, a world seen through both panoramic views and intricate details in a way not equalled since Stand on Zanzibar. There are vivid characterizations of people from diverse social classes and cultures. There is the re-creation of nineteenth century fictional modes, from the children’s fairy tale to the novel of education to the swashbuckling romance, reflecting the return to nineteenth century values and virtues that is a central theme of the novel. Stephenson offers so many pleasures that you may not notice how much he makes you think—exactly the intended effect of the fictional object The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, which thus becomes an image of Stephenson’s own fictional project, a self-referentiality that perfectly sums up the style of The Diamond Age.