It would be disingenuous to give this 5 stars, because although I thought it was excellent, I'm fairly sure I should've done some preparatory reading before tackling this. Charles Stross has officially made me feel dumb. The complexity of the data in this book (and, if this is any indicator, in all the following books) is daunting to someone of my layman-level comprehension. Magic-as-math, math-as-magic, and I'm over here feeling underqualified to read this. :)