Sigh. Yeah.
It's a quite a reasonable spy story, and I was enjoying that element of it a lot before my brain butted in, but when the basics of your world are build so shoddily ("How are you paving your roads?" is a fairly fundamental question), the rest of the high concept stuff that was praised as very interesting in reviews just sort of lacks a foundation.
I will probably limp along for another little bit and eventually dump it when the library calls to claims its own.