A bit of a slough but kind of rewarding

No idea how to review this... Maybe it's for more intelligent readers than me. The ideas and scope of the book are just fantastic, but the overall reading experience was a bit of a chore. There were long bits of discourse by an AI persona and lots of 19th century poetry which were hard to interpret. Often I wasn't sure of what was going on, because some of the plot takes place in 'the datasphere' and some of the characters are just consciousnesses. A bit too abstract for my liking at times... oh and there's instant time and space travel, both of which you just have to accept at face value as there's not much explained.
On the other hand, all the stuff about the different worlds and how they were connected, the way the war developed and the stories of the main characters kept me engaged. The book is more relevant than when it was written (1990), as it makes you ponder our dependency on AI and human interconnectedness.