Yep, enjoying reading it. Though 1/3 of the way through, after 3-6 hours of reading (been home for 7, dinner and rpg.net took some time, I didn't track how much.)

I realized that Ariane Emory approaches psychohistory the way Eric Drexler suggested dealing with protein folding, or programmers deal with the Halting Problem: you can't solve the general case, but you can use building blocks you can solve. Programmers write code they can mostly analyze (some languages [Haskell] are easier than others [C, Intercal]), Drexler wanted to find peptides with known interactions, Emory builds societies out of azi and their children. (I'm pretty sure that was in Cyteen but is more urgently explicit here.) What will a bunch of wild humans do? Hard to say. What will a bunch of azi you've designed from the ground up do? A lot easier, plausibly.

Reseune is still an unpleasantly autocratic place to live. It's a lot nicer than it was for most of Justin's adult life, but the basic premise is still a weird cross of the military, the NSA, and a company town. Security supposedly trumps the desires of genius scientists to be free, free!