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. 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.

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a sci-fi story centered around a young girl named Nell. The four-year-old Nell is a thete, meaning a person who is not a member of any of the phyles. The entire plot of the novel is set in a post-nation-state world of the future, and the peculiarity of such a world is that it is dominated by the advances in nanotechnology. The concept of nations has been shattered in this world and people are classified into specific groups known as phyles based on their skills and affinity towards computer technologies.
The protagonist in the novel, Nell once receives a copy of an interactive book 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: A propaedeutic enchiridion' from her brother Harv. As both Harv and Nell belong to the lowest class in the society with no access to education, they live in the leased territories of the Diamondoid Island of new Chusan, Shanghai. John Hackworth, an  There are three real-life technologies which require a special mention here. They are smart paper, matter compiler, and mites. The book clearly acknowledges the contributions made by the well-known nanotechnologists like Feynman, Drexler, and Merkle. The interesting part of the book is that it amazingly explains human interactions with these technologies.

Smart Paper
Electronic paper or smart paper has an appearance similar to that of ordinary paper and has a thin film transistor display that reflects light instead of emitting the light. This e-paper uses plastic substrates for display and is very flexible to use. Even under direct sunlight, the images In the real world, Matter Compiler is a novel framework that is required to design an arbitrary molecular structure based on a pick and place mechanism. The main function of a matter compiler is to correctly interpret the user-defined software instructions and to arrange atoms in a specified order to produce an article or a product.

Mites
One of the potential applications of nanotechnology is the development of Nano drones.
In the sci-fi novel, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, Neal Stephenson described a cool and smart technology known as Nano drones or mites. In the story, mites can do many extraordinary things. They can do street surveillance, make the sky microbe-free, work as an artificial immune system, enter into the human nervous system, etc.
Nano drones possess incredible powers and have great applications in our society.
Controlled by delicate sensors, nano drones can easily fit into your palms or even smaller than that. Some drones are designed to fly inside the houses and some are for street surveillance.
These unmanned aerial vehicles also have serious applications in the medical and military sectors. Drones can be used in the diagnosis and treatment of various human diseases, deliver healing molecules to remove the fat inside the human arteries, military rescue operations, etc.
We can also see that there are concepts that are unrecognizable in many ways and are too far from reality. In between the fascinating adventures made by Nell and the execution of plans There are three types of phyles mentioned in the story, namely Han, the Neo-Victorian New Atlantis, and the Nippon. People who are not members of these three groups are known as Thetes. The protagonist of the story, Nell is a thete and comes from a deprived society.
The phyle, Han consists of Han Chinese, the Neo-Victorian New Atlantis consists majority of Anglo-Saxons. They also accept people who share their same ideology, mainly Indians and Africans whereas; the Nippon phyle consists of Japanese people. Economic Protocol (CEP) upholds and supports the right to personal property and stringent laws are designed to punish people causing problems for the economic capability of other individuals.
The people who are not the members of any of these phyles or tribes are considered as second-class citizens by Common Economic Protocol (CEP). Many factors contribute to their second-class citizenship like economic conditions, no or less access to education, etc. The basic needs of thetes such as food, water, clothing, and shelter are made freely available to them under the strict instructions of CEP.

Conclusion
We can see an honest effort from the writer, Neal Stephenson to extrapolate from current events and speculate some incredible themes. The way three different storylines converge in the end drives readers into a fantasy world. In a nutshell, we can say that Neal Stephenson maintains ambivalence towards the consequence of futuristic technologies mentioned in the novel.