[solipsism]

"Set up to be part of a series" and "Nothing currently in the works" are not mutually exclusive. It's not uncommon for the decision to invest in a sequel to hinge on sales.

Have you read the book? There's no way someone could read this book and not think, "Yeah, the author clearly purposefully left room for this to be a very large series."

[celticninja]

I thought as much myself but shortly after finishing it I went looking through interviews and there was one from Neal Stephenson where he explicitly stated that he had no intention of doing a sequel when he was writing it, hence my initial statement. Due to the minimal information we have on the last few chapters it seemed like it was created intentionally but the author said otherwise.