Okay so I'm only at like the first chapter but I honestly can't tell if the stupid little bildrungsroman bit about the midwestern tech bro turned feudal lord is intended as satire.
Choice bits:
...(he) found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behaviors were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.
...while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others.
Honestlt I'd assume satire but coming from what I know about Stephenson I'm really not sure.
Is it really that bad (I never even heard of this author till today)?
It's not that the content is excessively terrible or problematic, it's that the first part of the book is a perfectly good, self-contained story, and then there's an "epilogue" that is almost an entire novel on its own that is almost totally unrelated to the first part of the book. It wasn't so much that it was bad as much as a totally bizarre choice.