Yeah, that's a fair accusation. Part of the problem is of course that it's hard to have a novel where you only notice the primary conceit if you don't understan

Yeah, that's a fair accusation. Part of the problem is of course that it's hard to have a novel where you only notice the primary conceit if you don't understand what the narrator is explaining. :-) Like, since perfect synthesis is undetectable; it just sounds like what you're hearing is straightforward common sense. You only notice the process when it fails. So for sure, the book could have played with that a lot more, especially since Siri's tools are meant to be broken towards the end, when he's implied to be penning this. I think there's bits where the book suggests that's what's going on ("I can't tell you what it means, only what it says"), but it never came across well to me. But then again, maybe that's just how a failure of synthesis would look. Like, you still want to understand what the book is saying, but if the mechanism is working it's invisible, and if it's not working, then you're still relying on it working to produce the thing you're reading. So it's just inherently hard to shine a light on the thing itself with itself, which of course plays into the central theme as well. Ie. because Siri is implied to not be fully conscious, it's hard for him to catch himself in the act of translating for us readers. (Of course we may say that a book designed to be hard to read is still hard to read.)