The one that interweaves three stories: physicist and serial killer Michael Keaton in the contemporary world, plus cyborg pirate ship Seria Mau Genlicher and virtual-world junkie Ed Chianese in the far future.

A-plus for worldbuilding, here. Far-future worlds are tough; half of them are implausibly similar to contemporary life, and the other half are so different they're incomprehensible, but Harrison doesn't fall into either of those traps. I loved the far future and the way he turns so many sci-fi cliches on their heads. Every theory of star travel works, even the ones that contradict one another. Aliens come from another galaxy and take over the earth, and they're really deeply incompetent at it, and eventually they fade into irrelevancy and leave only a bunch of malfunctioning bureaucracy to show they were in charge. Astonishing, worldchanging technologies are chiefly used for drugs and porn.

The primary characters are believable, but really radically screwed up. Mostly I'd say the book eventually gives you plausible reasons why these people are such basket cases if you stick with it long enough, but it can be rough going to hang with a serial killer for three hundred pages waiting for someone to tell you what the hell he thinks he's doing.

And I'm afraid that they're so very screwed up that the transcendence they achieve just doesn't stick, for me. I believed it while I was reading it, and it made me happy, but after a day away from the book, I went, "Nah. They won't keep it."