I've started reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. This is the second book by this author that I've read: I enjoyed Snow Crash immensely, and The Diamond Age in many ways surpasses this earlier novel.

Diamond Age is set in the distant future, in a world where nanotechnology has become commonplace. Almost anything a person can imagine, from floating cities to chopsticks can be manufactured out of thin air by matter compilers, which are actually microscopic machines that directly manipulate atoms supplied to them by "the feed" - a sort of raw material plumbing system.

In this world, everything is survailed by microscopic flying machines. Wars are fought at the atomic level and the most obvious evidence of a major battle is the black dust of dead nanobots.

I'm a couple of chapters into the book now, and Stephenson envisions this future world as extremely stratified, with little interaction between the classes. The major premise is that an engineer has stolen (cloned) an intelligent book that was created to serve as a tutor for one of the world's most powerful and wealthy men. The book is in turn stolen from the engineer and finds its way to a very poor young girl.

So, like Sophie's World, here we have a story centered around a young girl and a book. I also suspect that, like Snow Crash, there is quite a lot of philosophy tucked away in the corners of The Diamond Age. Already Stephenson has invoked the Confucian justice system. It will be interesting to see how the story develops.

One of the annoying things about audio books is that books are often available in print for years before they become available in audio format, if they ever do. For example, audible only lists one of the several books that Jostein Gaarder, author of Sophie's World, has written, and a search there for Alfred Bester fails to find the Bester novel that I would most like to read: "The Demolished Man".