This note contains spoilers for the book.

Okay, this is way cool. This challenges Ken MaCleod and Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge. It's set in that kind of still-human part of a post-singularity society; dancing on the edge, rather.

The Festival is a wandering, somewhat rogue, telephone repairman. With human upload, quantum entanglement, and full nanotech capabilities including cornucopias (universal replicator). And numerous hangers-on, including Critics and the Fringe.

The New Republic is a regressive aristocratic society, maintaining an underclass by force.

They don't have the faintest clue what kind of fight they're picking, what their opponent is, what capabilities it has, or that God might not be on their side (the Eschaton certainly isn't).

The details of the economic singularity on Rochard's World are interesting. The revolutionarie's attempts to ride the wave are interesting.

And I admire him inordinately for not once mentioning that the Eschaton needs to be immanentized.