Neal Stephenson takes a variety of different ideas and seemingly random subjects and does his best to weave them together into a coherent tale. These subjects include ancient Sumer, religious history, linguistics, virtual reality, viruses, sword fighting, and hacking, amongst others. They are all rolled into a story set in a bizarre future where the United States as we know it is no more and our current culture has been taken to absurd, and often entertaining, extremes. The US has become best known for its ability to deliver pizzas efficiently, the federal government has ceded much of the land to corporations/franchises, and couriers ride futuristic skateboards using magnetic harpoons to attach to vehicles on the freeway for a free lift.

Unfortunately, the dysfunctional future is the best part of the story and the convoluted mixture of all those other subjects is at times a bit of a let down. Stephenson weaves together his diverse subject matter tying the ancient Sumerians to a modern day virus that is being used to destroy the hacker community but it is a long and sometimes boring road. He almost pulls it off but in the end there is a little too much focus on researching events throughout religious history that just left me uninterested. Combine that with characters that are far less engaging than the world they live in and it is hard for me to blindly recommend this one. If you are interested in the historical subject matter then you should give this one a try, but if you aren't, then it might be best to just poon a bimbo box on the freeway and ride right on by.

Jonathan Davis does a good job on the audiobook narration and he does a solid array of voices to represent the various characters.