The quality of the prose, the actual craft displayed in the writing of TFBook is... Not great.
I tried to read it but couldn't.
Merely existing does not make a book worthy of being widely read. It's insane to criticize the openclaw team for not having read it.
It was a pretty prominent work of the singularity subgenre. At least I remember it being the first one featured in this Popular Science article about the future of science fiction:
https://books.google.com/books?id=yaHf5PavpB8C&lpg=PA93&dq=%...
It was one of Stross's first books, a fixup of older short stories. He gets better.