Well said. The setup clearly was an (IMO schlocky) parody of the genre. The meat of it: neuro-linguistic hacking, the raft, the devastating gun called “reason” that was all superb and faithful to the genre.
And in the real world there's the Earth model that heavily influenced Google Earth, and the librarian's "intelligence without consciousness" conversational style is looking pretty damn prescient right now.
I found the main neuro-linguistic hacking plot to be incredibly campy; it certainly took some of the core concepts of the genre and dialed them up to the point where one could argue it was parody.
I found it deeper than most concepts in the genre, the core of that plot is one of the most impotant questions in contemporary philosophy - the realtionship between thought and language.
