I just found today's Penny Arcade, and it is totally relevant to what Bill said in the outro:
Are you a customer here?When I thought about what I wanted to say about the story, I thought of this:
In a China Mieville novel, he introduces tons of phantasmagoric and other futuristic/alternately-technological topics. The thing is, he has hundreds of thousands of words to do it in. He can draw it out so the reader is not overwhelmed. But this story had to cram it all into 6000 or so words (I didn't count), and so there was really no time to breathe or think or absorb each piece of this future world before another one was dropped on our heads like that corner of the overhang that always, ALWAYS drips on you after a storm no matter how much you try to walk around it. (Clearly there's a problem with the overhang at my house.) But with so much stuff crammed into this story, it was too difficult to follow the technology and the plot gets a little lost in that.
I will not make any slug jokes. I'm not sure there was enough background in the story anyway for there to suddenly be slug-locomotives for long-distance passenger trains. I mean, sure, I know fossil fuels probably got too expensive or ran out, but I think we needed to be told that.
I also kept thinking that DC was going to show up again, either as the Boss or as the hijacker, but he never did. It felt like a Chekhov's Gun. I don't recall ever hearing a satisfactory ending to Moulin Rouge's association with him.
So, overall: I didn't really care for the story.
I felt the reading was a little flat. The narrator's voice didn't change pitch very much, and while I had no trouble discerning characters, it didn't help with the pacing or the tension. It was like an internal monologue... on the outside.