A bizarre book. Before I get into my criticisms about it, I'd first like to say that despite all my negative comments about it, it's still an eminently readable book.

Biggest flaw is obviously the warped world view, which is much more disturbing here than in your average Tom Clancy book. Before you even start reading a Clancy novel, most prominent example being "The Red Storm Rising", you know that the americans are basically saints sent upon the earth, and the russians and other foreigners satan's spawns sent to wreak havoc on innocent civilians. But in this book, Stephenson goes to great lengths to try to give the impression that he's not like that at all. But that only makes it worse, as the underlying current of "us americans/brits are the standards by which all others shall be judged" is much more annoying and harder to shrug away than the obvious tricks Clancy uses. At times, the book reads more like a WWII-era propaganda material for the allies, which demonizes the Japanese and Germans.

There are plenty of other flaws too, like the incessant stereotyping of everything, the comic sidekick parts assigned to minor nationalities like finnish people, the fact that he wrote a 900+ page book and didn't bother to do enough research to get some very basic facts about Finland's participation in WWII correct, his infuriating attempts to display how hip he is by showering the reader with unnecessary technical details about computers and programming that often are just plain wrong to anyone who actually knows something about this stuff, like me, his refusal to use the correct names for IBM and Linux, instead calling them ETC and Finux, while still using the correct names for plenty of other corporations and operating systems, etc etc etc.