Neal Stephenson's Nanopunk Hillbilly Elegy
A book about culture, that isn't.
It’s not well remembered now, but way back in the dim and misty times known as “the late 1990s,” Neal Stephenson was best known for a groundbreaking novel about a near future of fractured nations, bloody violence, and a confusing ending.
It was called The Diamond Age.
Snow Crash looms larger in memory, but in 1996, four years after Crash, The Diamond Age was seen by most reviewers as the better book, a more mature work that took an idea tossed out and deployed largely as satire in Snow Crash (franchised everything, including government!) and deployed it to more serious effect.
It was also part of the brief and glorious nanotech SF boom of the 1990s, when books like Blood Music and Queen City Jazz and Queen of Angels were seen as the successors to cyberpunk, when every nerd worth their salt knew about Eric Drexler and had at least skimmed a copy of Engines of Creation.
But Stephenson, while he certainly was going to tell you aaaaaalllllll about how nanotech assemblers worked, was ostensibly interested in culture, and the clash between cultures.
Sort of. Let’s say Stephenson thought he was writing about culture.
I am not the person to engage with how Stephenson writes about the book’s Chinese characters, Chinese culture, and Confucianism, (though I would be really interested to read that) so let’s take a look at how he writes about the book’s main western anglophone characters.
In The Diamond Age, government has fractured into “phyles,” geographically distributed quasi-governments that are, usually, based around shared cultures or heritage of their members. Many of the largest phyles are derived from modern nations/cultures, including India, Japan, and China (split between the capitalist Coastal Republic and the deeply Confucian Celestial Kingdom), and New Atlantis, the most prominently featured of the groups.
The New Atlantans are neo-Victorians. Their tech is up-to-date, but their society has deliberately chosen to go full 24/7 Victorian cosplay. They repeatedly insist they have adopted Victorian ideals and mores, apparently in reaction to the “decadence” of the late 20th/early 21st Century. (This apparently includes women being largely ornamental and confined to roles as wives, teachers, maids, etc. Seems like that might be a recruitment problem to me, but what do I know?)
The weirdest thing about Stephenson’s conception of the neo-Victorians is when he suddenly goes on a rant very early in the book about Solid Midwestern Values.
One of the important minor characters is New Atlantan “equity lord” Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle McGraw who was raised in Sioux City, Iowa, homeschooled, where “he probably learned more on his summer vacations than most of his peers did during their school years.”
“During his early teens, a passenger jet had made an improbable crash-landing at the Sioux City airport, and Finkle-McGraw, along with several other members of his Boy Scout troop who had been hastily mobilized by their scoutmaster, was standing by the runway along with every ambulance, fireman, doctor, and nurse from a radius of several counties. The uncanny efficiency with which the locals responded to the crash was widely publicized and became the subject of a made-for-TV movie. Finkle-McGraw couldn’t understand why. They had simply done what was reasonable and humane under the circumstances; why did people from other parts of the country find this so difficult to understand?”
This is followed up a bit later by a similar anecdote about a flood in Ames, Iowa, where Finkle-McGraw is going to college and the locals all pull together and there’s no looting to the surprise of “reporters from the coasts” and “The Los Angeles riots of the previous year provided a vigorous counterexample.”
“Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.”
Okay, that’s a lot of smug to take in by page 21.
(I should note here that I am deeply unsure to what extent Stephenson endorses these views. You could argue that this is a sort of hypothesis – something he’s eager to test, possibly to destruction. You could argue that he’s a quasi-libertarian and that a thread of technocratic elitism and contempt for softer forms of knowledge runs through his work; see also the Randy vs. G.E.B. Kivistik verbal showdown in Cryptonomicon. You could say something about the death of the author and move on.)
After that declaration of intent (nobody ever accused science fiction in general of being overly subtle) we get a story that is ostensibly about a clash between New Atlantis and Confucian China, but with some weird wild cards of emergent artificial cultures in the mix too.
But while the book is ostensibly telling a tale of culture, below the surface, the spectre of class lurks, though Stephenson never draws it to the surface to have a good look.
The majority of characters in the book are white, western, and Anglophone. They fundamentally belong to the same Anglo-American culture, but Stephenson does some heavy lifting to suggest that the divides between them not simply economic, but of personal belief and initiative.
Early in the book, we have Bud, a “thete” who belongs to no phyle whatsoever. Bud is a petty crook, famously introduced in the first line skating “over to the mod parlour to upgrade his skull gun.” Bud is a racist bully, dumb as a rock, a low-level drug dealer, and explicitly descended from North Florida trailer trash. He’s unceremoniously executed by the Chinese authorities after a violent mugging, and the focus shifts largely to his daughter, Nell.
When Nell comes into possession of the Primer, an artificially intelligent compendium of knowledge designed to raise a small child practically on its own, she begins a trajectory that would be very familiar to readers of the Victorian literature from which The Diamond Age takes many of its cues. She’s going to Gain a Valuable Education, and thereby Improve Her Station, and Pull Herself Up By Her Own Bootstraps etc.
Stephenson is saying – or many of the characters within the book believe – that culture can be acquired, and therefore someone like Nell, with appropriate influence, can transition from the low, grungy, stupid thete culture to the hard-working, wisely-investing, education-valuing, not-having-children-out-of-wedlock culture of New Atlantis.
If that sounds familiar, it's because it’s how Americans have talked about class for decades, maybe centuries – they refuse to believe it exists, and blame it on education or personal initiative or beliefs. Thetes, hillbillies, rednecks – when middle-class and rich white Americans talk about poor white Americans, absent the ability to overtly or subtly suggest race is the “problem,” they try to draw these lines of culture.
Stephenson’s book came out in 1996, at the cusp of a particular point in the perception of cities and rural areas in the United States. The staggering drop in the crime rate that was to continue into the 20th century was already underway, but it wasn’t clear yet that it would be sustained. Cities like New York were getting cleaner and safer for tourists and starting the march towards widespread gentrification, but the perception built up over decades was still one of grime, graffiti, and muggings. It was still possible to say “solid Midwestern values” and not be sarcastic. And it was two years before the epidemic of deaths of despair began driving down life expectancy for older, rural white Americans, largely across the Midwest and south; it was more than a decade before it would be noticed.
Was Stephenson, who was deliberately aping some elements from British Victorian novels, aware of how he was using class in the book? Maybe. Bud’s racism is mirrored in the more genteel racism seen in some Neo Victorians. New Atlantis buys both servant labour and the work of skilled craftsmen from people outside its phyle, essentially outsourcing the entire lower half of its class structure.
The book does end on the sort of unsettling note (see: name of newsletter) that I like in science fiction. The actual clash of cultures comes down to a violent draw, the world left on the cusp of a potential revolution in the way nanotechnology is used – but it’s held in abeyance. The neo-Victorians are defeated, and Nell does not join them and become a Proper Lady of any kind. (She becomes the sword-wielding white saviour leader of an army of girls raised by similar magic books; it’s Neal Stephenson.)
But for a book that tries hard to be radical about technology, society, and culture, 24 years on, it’s the conservative and even reactionary views on class that make it more a companion of something like Hillbilly Elegy than a real neo-Victorian novel.
(Note: I joked on Twitter the other day about Stephenson being a modern day Robert Heinlein, and I think I stand by that, for good and ill. People forget that the reason why Heinlein was popular in his day was largely down to the fact that he had a straightforward but eminently readable style, before it was overtaken by his urge to lecture at every available opportunity and then some. Stephenson is more flashy, but like Heinlein’s, his books are pretty fun to read between the blocks of solid exposition.)
Further Reading
Hey, if you want to read books about culture, there are certainly a lot of other more subtle options in science fiction.
One of the most recent is Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, about diplomacy, murder, and the cultural gravity a vast stellar empire has over a tiny nation-state on the periphery.
Martine’s book also reminded me solidly of John Barnes’ A Million Open Doors, which features Nou Occitan, one of the greatest book length slow reveals in science fiction. Give it a read, you’ll see what I mean. Also: another culture clash based on diplomacy rather than warfare.
Lois McMaster Bujold is more often seen as a space opera/adventure novelist, but her deep work on character includes a lot of deep thinking on how they’re enmeshed in their cultures. Miles Vorkosigan is never, ever going to really escape his Barrayaran upbringing, and Bujold turns that into the tightly-coiled mainspring that drives him, and much of the series. If you haven’t read them, they’re great.
I regret to say that I have still not read nearly enough Ursula LeGuin, but she’s still the lodestar of anthropological SF. Her Hainish Cycle books pretty much defined the classic “lost colony world” type of SF novel.