Exploring the Facts and Fantasies in Neal Town Stephenson’s ‘The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer’

Literature enables people to think out of the box and connect with new ideas. At the same time, it takes us back and helps us know more about the life led by our ancestors. As a great foundation of life, literature fosters the overall development of the people and the society through inspiring stories, motivating tales and futuristic writings. We live in a world of technological advancements and Science Fiction stories are the profound ways to introduce extrapolation and speculation in literature. Built on a strong foundation of realistic concepts, sci-fi stories develop a futuristic world of limitless possibilities. Sci-fi stories take us to an exciting world where one witness unimaginable applications of science and technologies. Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer well-known for writing science fiction, cyberpunk and postcyberpunk stories. He belongs to a prestigious family of scientists and engineers. His father was a biochemistry professor and his paternal grandfather, a physics professor. After completing his studies from Boston University, he started working as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company specialized in developing spacecraft and space launch systems. Currently, he is serving as the chief futurist for Magic Leap. He also cofounded Subutai Corporation, a company dedicated to developing interactive fiction projects. The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Town Stephenson. The novel’s protagonist is named Nell, who is a thete, meaning a person who is not a member of any of the phyles. The entire plot is set in a future nanotech world where three forms of tribes or phyles exist, known as the Han, the Neo-Victorian New Atlantis, and the Nippon. The Diamond Age details some of the applications of nanotechnology such as chevaline, smart paper, etc. This journal is an analysis of extrapolation and speculation used in the sci-fi novel, The Diamond Age, written with an aim to explore different facts and fantasies created by the author.

Envisioning Empire in Bacon, Hooke, and Cavendish

This chapter examines Francis Bacon’s fictional ‘new world’ discovery narrative, The New Atlantis (1626), and its influence on Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666). It begins by showing how Bacon’s dream of a visually rooted imperial empiricism gives shape to Hooke’s observations, both physical and textual, of the ‘new world’ revealed to him by the technology of the microscope. It then turns to Cavendish’s utopian fiction as another new world narrative in this tradition and argues that in this work Cavendish directly responds to the visually charged imperialistic empiricism of The New Atlantis and Micrographia. Where Bacon and Hooke posit optically enhanced vision as a means through which particular humans could both discover and ‘improve’ nature to meet their own ends, The Blazing World, in keeping with Cavendish’s own vitalist philosophy, celebrates the knowledge of non-human animals and holds out intersubjectivity in place of objectivity as the most fruitful means of engaging both human and non-human nature.