Once the action in the book gets going, everything moves faster, but concepts and philosophical lines of thought are still being introduced. They make sense and don’t require as much thought because Stephenson laid the foundation so very well in the early sections. Still, I have to wonder if I would have benefited from reading the whole book at the pace I went through those first 120 pages; if I had not let the action distract me from the philosophy. It’s a book that I will read again and that I believe will get better with repeated journeys through it.

Stephenson takes the idea of speculative fiction seriously. He has a bit of an explanation at the beginning and a glossary at the end, but you can choose to forgo reading either of those before reading the body of the book. (I did.) Of course, that means that for the first 120 or so pages, it took me 3 times as long to read a page as normal. I was stopping every 20 pages or so to think about what I’d just read. I needed to sort through the language being used as well as the new concepts being introduced.