Oh, the ideas are good, certainly. I'd have rather they'd been delivered in a much better novel half as long, though—which is, I suspect, as long a story as Ste

Oh, the ideas are good, certainly. I'd have rather they'd been delivered in a much better novel half as long, though—which is, I suspect, as long a story as Stephenson could have managed from that promising beginning without wrecking it. It would have been less irritating if none of the story had been good, really, but that first section is great. I don't think it's very good hard SF, either. It does so much that its explorations of the social implications of the advances—which are the whole point of fleshing out an entire novel from the "gee, wouldn't it be cool if we could X?" concepts that the book is full of, rather than writing the short essay or even (these days) tweet that would suffice to explain them as well as the book does—are underdeveloped and/or feel false. The density of these drops off quite a bit early in the book, too, leaving little to chew on but the confused characterization and the increasingly unsatisfying story.