Did someone say hard sci-fi?? 
Here's a line or two from the paragraph I'm reading right now:
'What if you were an observer, though, who had no causal structure? A self-aware pattern appearing by chance in the random twitches of a noise machine, your time coordinate dancing back and forther through causally respectable 'real time'? Why should you be declared a second-class being, with no right to see the universe your way?'
There's pages of stuff like this, and almost no plot, and as I said, no characterization to speak of. Richard K. Morgan or Iain Banks he's not. But it's thought provoking, and the science is apparently solid. I'm enjoying it on the whole.
