Princess Nell [LWN.net]

Princess Nell

Posted Apr 8, 2012 11:14 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: A report from the Peru OLPC deployment by filteredperception
Parent article: A report from the Peru OLPC deployment

It's a frustratingly familiar structure for Stephenson. When I got to the inevitable (in the sense that I've come to expect it from the author rather than it was necessary to the narrative) attempted rape in his current novel I just sort of sighed and turned the page.

Still, I really like Diamond Age and the Primer is a fun (albeit technologically very distant) idea. But even with the Primer actually Nell is utterly reliant upon the protection of her brother, the judge and his assistants, and the citizens of a local Victorian enclave. Giving deprived children a networked computer is not step one.

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Princess Nell

Posted Apr 8, 2012 13:06 UTC (Sun) by mstone (guest, #58824) [Link] (2 responses)

> It's a frustratingly familiar structure for Stephenson.

It's a frustratingly familiar reality (CDC report, WHO report) that we are also working slowly but steadily in our own small ways to fix.

> Giving deprived children a networked computer is not step one.

Two thoughts:

With problems of this size, there may be no single "step one"; instead, there is your step one and my step one, hopefully followed by our step two.
Actually, giving kids powerful things to think with seems like a pretty darn reasonable place to start to me...

Princess Nell

Posted Apr 9, 2012 5:36 UTC (Mon) by filteredperception (guest, #5692) [Link] (1 responses)

"
> It's a frustratingly familiar structure for Stephenson.

It's a frustratingly familiar reality (CDC report, WHO report) that we are also working slowly but steadily in our own small ways to fix.
"

Since I started the dig, I'll clarify- I have no problem with fictionalized rape, for these reasons, playing a large role in a lot of novels. But having it done to the _main protagonistsa_ in a bildungsroman/child-to-adult-growth-epic, without blatant foreshadowing, i.e. as a shocking ending, is what I object to in a catcher-in-the-rye critique sort of way. I'm deluded enough to have written my own scifi novel where the protagonist gets skullf'd by Dick Cheney, but I mention it in chapter 1, so that readers can just toss the book asside if thats not their thing. Having Stephenson, such an A+++ author throw that in, only at the end, after a truly amazing and prophetic, and intelligent novel about nanotechnology, written in 1993-ish just ticked me off a bit. Of course there is the chinese judge torturing a character named phyrefox to get his information about the elusive CryptNet in the beginning, but still- raping your protagonista shockingly at the end of a long, great tech-fiction book... eh.... Seemed like something I'd only do after being tortured by the Chinese government into writing a totalitarian-apologist novel with the theme that protecting your daughter from the oncoming uneducated horde is a good reason to discard democratic free-speech in favor of a social contract heavy on a foundation of state sponsored torture.

Princess Nell

Posted Apr 13, 2012 16:24 UTC (Fri) by cdmiller (guest, #2813) [Link]

Interestingly Friday, by Heinlein, begins with the protaganista rape, although she's past or at the end of her bildungsroman stage.