Oh boy, was this book awful. I love Stross' work, but this book was over the horizon. It is actually a series of connected short stories (which I did not know till reading the wiki entry) and it was just impossible to make heads or tails of. It was like reading a foreign language where you don't know enough of the words. Stross' creativity ran away with him, and sentence after sentence has more new nouns and concepts than are explained. It's either a crossword puzzle or Jabberwocky most of the time, and you just can't figure out what is going on. Again, terribly creative, but as a practical matter unintelligible.
Shame - because I've loved the other series. But this was just impossible to understand. But, having read the wiki entry, I now realize that I didn't have the structure I needed to follow it. Maybe that would have made a difference.
