Lucinda Carlyle is a combat archeologist, and good clan member. The Carlyle clan control what is effectively a Stargate network of bridges between worlds. Lucinda heads up the team exploring a world rather different from the rest - disaster strikes - and she spends the rest of the book coping with the results.

Although not "comedy" I am reminded of Sheckley and Lem's books where an explorer goes through different societies - possibly as an allegory which I am too thick to work out. Or maybe you just take it all at face value. The post-singularity universe is littered with the remains of cultures from old Earth - all of whom had some reason to have survived the singularity. There are the communist DK, the Japanese Knights of Enlightenment, the Carlyle clan, the America OffLine (who sound like Amish farmers), and the Runners and Returners. The Carlyle's are hard Scots, people you don't want to mess with on a Saturday night. To explain much more would give away too much but the book is largely about the interplay of these groups with almost token characters representing them.

We have almost every trope in Science Fiction represented. Hyper intelligent computers, ships with silly names, space ship busting laser weapons, FTL travel, VR, resurrection of dead people from their recorded personalities, the list is endless.

My only complaint is that MacLeod *may* have shot himself in the foot by spelling the "scottish" speak phonetically."