First of all, this book is a terrific technical achievement - stories within stories that refer back to themselves.

Each story is so different that I needed a few pages of each to get traction. But wow, I did get sucked in.

There are several persistent themes (slavery; the evils of corporate greed) that overall paint a bleak portrait of our world--past, present, and future. There is humor; there is mystery; there is postapocalypse...the protagonists of these stories persevere, although I can't quite say that I felt uplifted by the book's end.