more human than human?

Schismatrix, by Bruce Sterling. In a sentence, I think it’s like the Lord of the Rings for posthuman narratives, in the sense of, it was the original gangsta progenitor for those themes. Deus Ex, the Rifter trilogy and Blindsight, Dresden Codak, I would suspect sprang one way or another from seeds from Sterling’s writing. Using a singular character in a population spanning the solar system, he runs through a gamut of identities that includes too many variations of what humanity-could-become to count, and moreover the permutations and evolutions of those across literal centuries. Not quite a character study, but not just world-building-with-a-narrator, either...I’d go so far as to say it takes the posthuman theme and applies it to itself, making a, say, post-character study? Heh, ok, the label doesn’t work, but one gets the idea, I hope. Aesthetically, it probably is a bit too meandering and almost directionless-seeming at many points for most casual scifi readers, but a cyberpunk or hard science fiction fan will appreciate it, I think.