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.
yeah, it's a total mess, a baffling tonal shift like it was fan fiction written by some redditor who studies physics
to be fair, the megastructures were hella cool, though... they just didn't belong in that book
That's exactly what I thought, like he wrote fan fiction based on his own writing. The concepts he describes are cool, but if he or his publisher were that set on publishing it, they should have published the first part and then took the second part and polished it into a proper follow up. As you say, baffling decision.