I had to work at suspension of disbelief for a lot of details in hopes that the little oversimplifications would ultimately serve bigger truths. I'd say it usually gets there, asks big questions, and tells an engaging story on the way.

I couldn't resist trying the little javascript program in the chapter headers, but was disappointed to find it's buggy. If the puzzle is debugging, I do too much of that already. It clearly won't do anything but print some pattern of # characters. If it ran without errors I might be tempted to see if it can be modified to decode some underlying message.