Thirty-one years ago Neal Stephenson put most of my desk in a novel.

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, 1995:
• A matter compiler builds an object from a design. Mine is an A1 Mini.
• The Feed pipes raw material to the compilers. Mine comes on a filament spool.
• Mediatronic paper plays moving images on a thin sheet. Mine is a hacked photo frame.
• The Primer is a book that adapts to the child reading it. The original copies had live human actors, ractors, behind the voices. The quarter-million copies made for the Mouse Army girls ran with no ractor at all. That's the version I run now, as agent bots.

In the book, people sort into phyles, tribes built on shared culture, not borders. The neo-Victorians, the Han and the Nipponese are the big ones. Anyone with no phyle is a thete, getting by on free Feed goods and odd jobs.

His new one, D: Heavy Water, came out yesterday. It's WWII spies racing for deuterium, not a Diamond Age sequel. He's at Powell's tonight.

He called the tech. Did he call the tribes too?