Building Harlequin's Moon

I picked up Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper's Building Harlequin's Moon. I'm only a third of the way through it.

Impressions:

1. It reminds me a bit of the brainstorming I was doing the other week, without the aliens.
2. It sets up a situation where you can almost understand why people create an abomination: slavery. Until, of cource, the protagonist gets sold down the river.
3. It also has a theme of a society that has found that it can not safely advance its technology anymore. If the technological singularity exists and is to be feared, then this is a theme we need to think on.