ooh yes I forgot it had them! they were good... the eulogies, millitary tech ads, statistics and laws all sharing the same space was strong, tho I did think it kind of meant the footnotes didn't necessarily have one sense of paratextual purpose... think that's partially just bc you've got the limits of the print format, I suppose, they'd have had to have gotten dead creative w the layout to split them all up. I guess also making them all footnotes created the sense that they're all 'small print' and a skippable bit of extra information; the ads are technically optional, but have an insidious presence you can't get rid of (although they fade away by about the halfway point of the book iirc...), the legal histories and statistics are trivia rather than anything which is being deployed effectively, etc. yeah they were really cleverly done.

Oh fab, thank you!

I wasn't sure if it comfortably counted as SFF since its genre is so hard to define!