The Linear City is a world two city blocks across and unknowably many blocks long, with a river on one side and railroad tracks on the other.

[3] In Locus, Claude Lalumiere described it as "Di Filippo at the apex of his idiosyncratic creative energy".

[4] In Emerald City, Cheryl Morgan called it "wonderfully bizarre", noting that it is "aggressively SF in content" but "very mainstream in style", and commending Di Filippo for being "content to fill our heads with wonderful ideas and leave us to extrapolate from them."

[5] Similarly, at infinity plus, Keith Brooke praised Di Filippo's worldbuilding as "lovingly painstaking", observing that it is "utterly convincing" and "fiction of the highest order.

"[6] Strange Horizons lauded it as "(m)ythic and grand, yet intimate and moving, (with) an impressive emotional range", and observed that protagonist Diego Patchen — an author of "cosmogonic fiction" — is a "transparent doppelganger" for Di Filippo himself.