her four toy friends) onto archetypal folk tales stored in the primer's database. Later Miranda's storyline is taken over by her boss, Carl Hollywood, after Miranda disappears in her quest to find Nell.ĭiamond Age also includes fully narrated educational tales from the Primer that map Nell's individual experience (e.g. A third storyline follows actress ("ractor") Miranda Redpath, who voices most of the Primer characters who interact with Nell and essentially becomes Nell's surrogate mother. X, the black market engineer whose compiler Hackworth used to create the copy of the Primer, and each man attempts to exploit Hackworth to advance their opposing goals. Hackworth's crime becomes known to Lord Finkle-McGraw and Dr. The Diamond Age is characterized by two intersecting, almost equally-developed story lines: the social downfall of the nanotech engineer designer of the Primer, John Percival Hackworth, who makes an illegal copy of the Primer for his own young daughter, Fiona, and Nell's education through her independent work with the Primer after her brother Harv steals it from Hackworth. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them what they need to know to survive and develop. The most important quality to achieving an interesting life is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status quo.
The Primer is intended to steer its reader intellectually toward a more interesting life, as defined by Lord Finkle-McGraw, and growing up to be an effective member of society. The story follows Nell's development under the tutelage of the Primer, and to a lesser degree, the lives of Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw and Fiona Hackworth, Neo-Victorian girls who receive other copies.
When she is four, Nell's older brother Harv gives her a stolen copy of a highly sophisticated interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion, in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, &c., commissioned by the wealthy Neo-Victorian "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw for his granddaughter, Elizabeth. The protagonist in the story is Nell, a thete (or person without a tribe equivalent to the lowest working class) living in the Leased Territories, a lowland slum built on the artificial, diamondoid island of New Chusan, located offshore from the mouth of the Yangtze River, northwest of Shanghai.
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