Come on. While the SciFi concepts in the book are cool/interesting... the writing itself is horrendous. My assumption is that Phillips (a physicist and software engineer) was forced to dumb down the text so that it would be palatable to a "wider audience". I felt like I was a reading a Neal Stephenson book that was written after he suffered some form of blunt head trauma.

Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys meets Scooby-Doo meets Space Balls (sans humor)