[pirateking]

Haven't read the book yet (as I just heard of it from the post), but sounds interesting. I am also currently working on a piece of fiction with some similar themes, and was wondering if you could share some thoughts on how you manage references to real world entities and technologies in the story? What sort of balance did you find between history, science, and fiction?

[jsundman]

I guess I would say that the story is the important thing, not the themes or real-world references or whatever. It's a novel, so above all, the story has to be compelling and the characters have to be believable and at least somewhat interesting.

With regard to real-world people, places and things, I was just aiming for verisimilitude, to make the setting (and the science and computer science) believable to people who knew the territory.