A cyberpunk satire of capitalistic culture wrapped around a plot based on neurolinguistics. The protagonist (literally Hiro Protagonist) is written as an iconic hero (a hero that doesn't undergo any significant changes over the course of the story) rather than a transformational one. This seems to bother some readers, but is unsurprising knowing that the book started out as a graphic novel project, a medium that often features iconic heroes.

Published in 1992, the book appears to be set around the year 2000 based on clues given by the apparent ages of characters compared to their background. The book is obviously dated at this point, but it wasn't too jarring for me.

I did have some issues with the book. It took me a while to figure out that the story is jumping between two different time periods for the first few chapters. Non-obvious time skips are becoming a new pet peeve of mine.

More importantly, while the main female character is generally well written, there is a very problematic scene near the end of the book where the character becomes incredibly horny in a situation of duress, and is so affected by it that she forgets very important things. So, an age-inappropriate relationship (she's 15 and he appears to be about twice her age) where the female doesn't have any real choice, but she gets so horny that she doesn't mind and actually loses higher thought processes. Yeah, no problems there.

If you leave that out you're left with a comic book style action adventure with some long ramblings on the nature of neurolinguistics as they relate to ancient Sumeria and binary machine language.