@cstross Whenever someone (usually Cory, yes), writes a book in this style with "ideas", I remember the age of the bio-warfare thriller novel in the 90's and then I see our latest pandemic and I can't escape how those authors took themselves really seriously and didn't get in their fiction the "clown factor" or the "Cohen brothers factor" of people being also unpredictably stupid and plans going awry because humans gonna human.