Non-fiction and science fiction.
The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is science fiction in the best sense. Like Lovecraft or H.G. Wells is science fiction.
It’s about society after nanotechnology, when items are created by assembling items from a feed. One’s wealth is one’s bandwidth of atoms.
Anyone who’s ever read Neal Stephenson knows that he knows a lot about a lot of things. And he writes a story that explores all elements of this society.
Nations have disappeared, replaced with tribes of people who share similar cultural values.
Money as we know it has disappeared, obviously.
The Ascent of Money is about financial history. Niall Ferguson examines finance in historical context:
Stephenson invents a world where these principles are uprooted. And Stephenson knows a lot about financial history. He makes that obvious.
One of the things Ferguson examines is how China got so powerful. He looks at the interactions between the Victorian culture that interacted with China, and the Confusion culture that adopted Victorian economic ideas.
Stephenson examines this with two tribes:
the Victorian tribe, a bunch of people who emulate the rigid Victorian social structure, especially in the educational system, and one of the dominant economic/political force in Stephenson’s world, and
the Costal Republic, a bunch of people who emulate the rigid Confusion social structure in, especially in the legal system, and the other dominant economic/political force in Stephenson’s world.
Stephenson applies the principles and the history that Ferguson describes to a world Ferguson could not have imagined.
He also points out that we do not need money. We need money because we have scarcity.
Essentially, Ferguson wrote a financial history of the world, and Stephenson wrote a financial history of an imagined future.
To extend a steak & wine pairing analogy I introduced last time, I would say:
the steak is The Ascent of Money, the main course, the meat of it, and
the wine is The Diamond Age, the loosened-up imagination, the crazy things you talk about after you experience it.
