@futurebird I… struggled with it. Before I started I was like "I promised myself I wasn't gonna read any more Neal Stephenson" but I read it anyway and by the time I was done I wasn't sure if I regretted it. It contains both some of my favorite single bits of any Stephenson story, and also some of the least plausible (in terms of people behaving in ways I do not believe a person would behave) bits of any of them. (Oddly, the parts I liked were also human-nature-related, rather than science.)