I tap out of nine out of every ten works of science fiction I start, the four main reasons being i) horrendous prose ii) huge amounts of expository dialogue iii) excessive padding and iv) Hollywood nonsense.

I do think this is a shame because in my experience pretty well all of them have been doing /something/ interesting, have some philosophical or scientific slant on a particular issue or idea, or even just a cool imaginary world; sadly only a few writing in this genre can convey anything in a way that even begins to break out of very received methods of representation or narration.

This novel was not completely free of any of these flaws, and for the first half I was very much being carried along on the strength of its world-building (terrible phrase), the exact contours of which I'm not in a position to outline here but suffice to say, it feels like a real society; it feels like the one that we're in, but worse, due to the specific ways in which nanotechnology, under capitalism, will likely make it. At around the halfway point though, the plot, the characters, the ideas Stephenson had spent 250 pages building up started to dovetail and I found myself beginning to care very much about what happens to the characters in this book.

Two things occur to me thinking about the novel in retrospect, first that Stephenson's achievement in pulling everything together was pretty staggering, second that a lot of the raw materials he chose to get where he wanted to go were unintuitive, and the resultant awkwardness is not unrelated to many of the novel's low points but, overall, this is a tremendously enjoyable book that in many ways is probably going to prove quite prescient, and in the ways that it will not are nice to think about.