This is a confused and confusing book. In terms of story, Marusek is either an experimentalist or completely inept. And story is the lesser part of this book anyway. It's more like a subset of completely different stories are told as part of an intertwining narrative, but instead of everything coming together at the end in a way you might understand, it just falls apart again after people and events swirl briefly around each other near the very end.
As far as characters, some are interesting and believable, others are just flat and boring. And half the story is spent with one character, who, in the end, ends up dead and unacknowledged. So in short, this book isn't about story or characters, it's about his fantastic vision of the future and technologies and what how humans respond to life in the face of those technologies.
If this had been done as a series of short stories where he simply demonstrated some new concept and explored the ramifications of that on human existence, this would have been a much better book. Some of the concepts he brings up are breeding whole races of clones to fill certain niches, the affect of artificial intelligences on societies, nanobot weapons, a government that becomes opaque to oversight because doing so would make it vulnerable to attack, and how people would choose to be if they were free to reshape their bodies as they wished.
Marusek does have some truely interesting ideas. He just doesn't have an interesting book. I wish it had been done better because this could have been almost as good as John C. Wright's The Golden Age trilogy. Too bad, it's just another forgetable piece of sci-fi exploration.
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