The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)

Decades into the future near Shanghai, nanotechnologist John Percival Hackworth violates the moral code of the neo-Victorians, his tribe, by creating an illegal copy of A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. This state-of-the-art interactive device was commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild and designed to educate girls to think independently. Hackworth made his copy for his own daughter, but it is stolen from him. Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetes—members of a poor, tribeless underclass. When Harv and his gang rob Hackworth in their neighborhood streets, Harv gives Nell the Primer. After his crime is discovered, Hackworth is expelled from neo-Victorian society and pursued by Protocol Enforcement agents and a Mandarin crime lord. He searches for a figure called the Alchemist. Nell's and Hackworth's paths converge with another seeker whose fate is tied to the Primer—a woman connected to a vast, subversive information network with the power to reshape humanity's future.