If ever there was a book that didn't need an extra 85,000 words...

But, warts and all, still one of my favorite novels ever.

But the other recipients of the Primer both do something it's just that this novel isn't about them, indeed maybe the point is that their paths diverge so enormously. Princess Nell is exactly what Nell intended from the get go. We don't see Elizabeth and Fiona's first interactions with the Primer, it seems safe to assume they do not begin by escaping from a terrible castle since their lives are comfortable and there's nothing to escape from.

To the reader perhaps it seems like Fiona doesn't amount to anything, but we're not shown very much about it, and it may well be that to her this is every bit as much what she wanted out of life as Princess Nell's outcome. All we know about Elizabeth is that she joins CryptNet. The novel never even tells us (beyond hints) what CryptNet is about. It tells us what CryptNet claims to be doing, and it tells us that nobody believes that.

You could read it as the other two girls fail, but I'd argue that from what Elizabeth's grandfather says at the start, and what the Constable tells Nell later, we can see that the grown-ups have a sense that actually conforming to somebody else's expectations is exactly what they don't see as a path to success. All the parents want what parents so often want - younger copies of themselves, but that's stupid. Nell isn't what Tequila (or Bud) wanted, Fiona isn't what Hackworth wanted, and Elizabeth plainly isn't what her mother and father seem determined to make of her, which suits her grandfather down to the ground.

Cryptnet and Dramatis Personae were both intriguing, mysterious organizations that were written to imply there's much beneath their surfaces the plot only touched.

I secretly dream of a distributed republic.

William Gibson books are all about the ending I find. The beginnings are positively disorienting most of the time. The book with the best ending I've ever read was Musashi. The entire book is building up to the finale which is almost unbearably dramatic. But it starts pretty slowly.

The Magus is a book with a well connected beginning and end, almost seamless if you like. Although it employs a trick to make this happen, where the first person narrator is possessed of preternatural insight into what is going on, which streamlines the story. But Fowles is a pretty exceptional writer.

The idea that rich people have access to more compute power in the cloud, and can experience more compute cycles per minute (and thus have more experiences in a metaverse!), is exactly how I see a dystopian universe based on cloud computing developing. When I read that part in the book, it blew my mind.

One of the men sacrificing his life is described in a way to tick off a diversity checkbox, for example.

I stuck around because the cosmological ramblings reminded me of Anathem, and while the ending became Animorphs, I couldn't follow him into REAMDE.

I just keep Anathem and Diamond Age in mind when folks discuss Stephenson. Those have my favorite moments. Someday, I may venture into his past works.