More like 3.5 stars. This was better than the first Zooey Ashe novel. Everyone, including Wong, probably, has settled down some and gotten comfortable with the characters and the settings and Wong has gotten all of his Trump Derangement Syndrome out of his system and tackled a big, weird theme with some actual compassion and sang froid.

The majority of the novel seemed like a little cocktail napkin love note to Snow Crash or Pattern Recognition, you just couldn't know it until Wong wrote it. In the end, it's a funny, tidy, philosophical story that's nevertheless laugh out loud funny and won't try to convince you your Libertarian neighbor secretly believes he could and should cannibalize you in the name of freedom and efficiency.

Make no mistake, though, this is Wong/Pargin. He's going to spend equal amounts of time showing and not telling, and vice versa, just not where you actually might want the words. So it's a little frustrating, and Zoey is starting to seem a little more MarySue MPDG with every passing chapter, but the jokes are good and the mystery is mysterious. The future never does, to my knowledge, get punched in the dick or anywhere else, but that does make you stop and look and want to read.