The Diamond Age [Paperback]

Decades into the future, near the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians, by making an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer". Seattle Weekly called Stephenson's Snow Crash "The most influential book since ... Neuromancer." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A brilliant, tricky, twenty-first-century version of Pygmalion (Guardian )

A wealth of hip, social and technological riffs, stories-within-stories and not a few good jokes. Invest (Time Out )

The Quentin Tarantino of postcyberpunk science fiction. Stephenson has upped the form's ante with rambunctious glee (Village Voice )

A new era in science fiction. People will walk around slack-jawed for days and reemerge with a radically redefined sense of reality (Bruce Sterling )

Establishes Stephenson as a powerful voice for the cyber age. At once whimsical, satirical, and cautionary (USA Today )

The future is small. The future is nano . . .

And who could be smaller or more insignificant than poor Little Nell - an orphan girl alone and adrift in a world of Confucian Law, Neo-Victorian values and warring nano-technology?

Well, not quite alone. Because Nell has a friend, of sorts. A guide, a teacher, an armed and unarmed combat instructor, a book and a computer: the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is all these and much much more. It is illicit, magical, dangerous.

And it isn't Nell's. It was stolen. And now some very powerful people want to get their hands on this highly desirable object. Nell is about to discover that the world can feel very small indeed . . .

Neal Stephenson is the author of the three-volume historical epic 'The Baroque Cycle' (Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World) as well as the novels Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age (winner of a Hugo Award), Snow Crash, Zodiac, Anathem and Reamde. He lives in Seattle, Washington.