27 Fantastika Journal | Volume 2 | Issue 1 | July 2018 POST-CYBERPUNK AND THE POTENTIAL ONTOLOGICAL EMANCIPATION OF CYBERSPATIAL EDUCATION IN NEAL STEPHENSON’S the diamond age Michael Kvamme-O’Brien Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995) is a Science Fiction novel inspired by the Cyberpunk genre. It is set in a future post-national world of competing ethnic enclaves separated by fragmented ideological interests. Molecular nanotechnology has transformed society, allowing for the creation of matter compilers which construct material goods using energy and molecules supplied by the Feed, in turn supplied by the Source. The Source is controlled by the Neo-Victorians in Atlantis. A potential utopian alternative to the Feed, the Seed, is dreamt up by Neo-Victorian engineer Hackworth. If built it would provide unlimited resources. The Seed’s designs greatly interest the Chinese, who have suffered under Neo- Victorian hegemony. The novel’s protagonist, Nell, lives in the Leased Territories, an enclave zone between Atlantis and Shanghai. Her home environment is deadly, her mother abusive. Nell eventually runs away, journeying through various enclaves. She inds a nanotechnological book called the Primer which tells her educational stories about “Princess Nell.” Through the Primer’s education, Nell becomes an elite Neo-Victorian gentlewoman, and leads an army of Chinese girls to protect the material interests of the Neo-Victorians. The novel borrows some of Cyberpunk’s genre-speci ic mot ifs as deined by Br ian McHale in Constructing Postmodernism (1992), like using cyberspace as an embedded “microworld” and using a dystopian future setting (249). As in other Cyberpunk texts, cyberspace offers the protagonist a way to transcend harsh social conditions. The novel is marketed as ‘Post-Cyberpunk,’ and while the ‘Post’ implies movement beyond certain genre-speci ic l imitations of Cyberpunk, the label is loosely deined. This article outlines the ontological status of the ‘Post’ of Post-Cyberpunk as it appears in The Diamond Age by extending and adapting McHale’s deinition of Cyberpunk, while placing the text within Northrop Frye’s Romantic framework. The capitalised terms ‘Romantic/ism’ will be used to refer to Frye’s deinition of Romanticism as a new mythology, and the lower case ‘romance’ to imply the worldness of medieval romance, which Frye argues is just one manifestation of long-duration Romanticism. Deining Post-Cyberpunk In Constructing Postmodernism, McHale suggests Cyberpunk contains motifs of “worldness” which connect it to “mainstream postmodernist ict ion” (247). These are “motifs of the centrifugal self; motifs of death, and the motifs of death both individual and collective” (247). The Diamond Age adopts the Cyberpunk