You guys saw Tron clips without me?

Man, did I pick a bad day to be Fluish.  Yes.  I have coined that phrase.  Fluish is officially a word. 

So, it sounds like I missed quite a bit.  Well, I’ll do my best at giving final opinions of The Diamond Age from what I have and what I got from many of you as to what happened in last evening’s class. 

First off, I stand by my original point.  The Diamond Age is heavily influenced by what came before.  I go back to this point because I’ve been doing some research into the Cyber-Punk motif and have found even more examples of how the book is not, as the critics would like us to believe, “staggeringly inventive” (Kirkus Review), “the top echelon of cyberpunk” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) “the most influential book since William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer” (Seattle Weekly), or “masterfully conceived” (San Francisco Bay Guardian).   Now, I will be charitable.  When discussing this book with a cyberpunk author and friend, Neuromancer was brought up.  What was also brought up were the number of books that have followed.  Yes, this book might land in the Cyberpunk Top 10, but it’s the bottom of that last.  You know, number 9 or 10.  So, I suppose we could see it as the top echelon of cyberpunk.  But that doesn’t seem to do justice to what else is out there.  Fora book that reminds us very heavily that there are many other forms of media, it was as if none of the critics of this book wanted to bring up that it takes off from other modes and other means.  Yes, it is cyberpunk.  And very good cyberpunk at that.  But I fail to see what hasn’t been done before.  Holographic and terraformed islands of fantasy creatures?  Star Trek called it the holodeck.  Guns popping out of skulls?  I believe I saw things like that in Terminator I, II, and III.  Nanites and machines that can reprogram the body and force mankind to do whatever is deemed necessary?  That was called The Matrix.  Oh, and again, there’s Star Trek.   And what about Nell?  Nell isn’t something new and exciting.  She’s cyberpunk Alice and she’s going right through that looking glass.  Or better yet, Dickens The Old Curiosity Shop Little Nell.  Yes, this is actually an allusion, but still…  And look at Bud.  I hate to say I found this particular criticism on Wikipedia, but I did.  Yes, I know it can’t be trusted, but it makes a very good point here, in a statement that Bud is drawn right out of cyberpunk stock-characters.  “He is a career criminal (though not a particularly skilled or high-ranking one) with various surgically implanted devices to aid him in his ‘work’. Stephenson attempts to establish The Diamond Age as a “post-cyberpunk” book by killing this character early on, while acknowledging the influence of that genre.”  So, yeah.  There’s that.  Or, another thing.  How incredibly steampunk is this book?  What is steampunk?  Steampunk is the anime-invented, now spreading to mainstream, concept of creating a Victorian world where cyberpunkesque (another invented word) rules apply.  Technology is more advanced, but the society is Victorian.  Yet, The Diamond Age steals credit for something that the Japanese were writing about as early as Final Fantasy II in ‘86.  The old White Wolf roleplaying game series Mage had two groups fighting for supremacy of the world.  One was the stylized, often Victorian wizards living a punk-like existence in a rundown world and the other was the Technocracy, a shadowy, hidden group of people trying to instill one world order over everything.  Often they had mechanical implants built right into their bodies.  In fact, one picture from the early ’90’s release of the rule book shows a man with a gun popping out of his head.  So…  while I loved The Diamond Age, I must say outright, I don’t buy the hype.