Upper Middlebrow

Upper Middlebrow


Episode 7: Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Part One, or “Nitrates, Nitrites, Nitrotes, and Nitrutes”

January 13, 2023

Bagg proposes Dukes would live in Dovetail in this scenario, and the UMBs set off to untangle this ambitious and elaborate neo-nano-steampunk plot. We note Stephenson’s obsessions with chaos v. order, hypocrisy v. moral relativism, and his love for characters whose ethnicity and racial identity are surprisingly matched.