I love Neal, he is one of my favorite authors, but let’s be real - he very often has trouble landing the plane, and his third acts get wonky and disjointed. Picking apart the specific language of this critique feels a little shallow on his part.

I used to be a cyberpunk fan when i was a teenager (i grew out of it as an adult.) and every time i hear these tech bros talk about one of these novels i get the feeling they don’t have very good reading comprehension or that they didn’t read it at all. Worse of all the seem very enthusiastic about recreating the distopias depicted. Or what their lizard brains retained of the distopias depicted.