Charles Stross

Cory Doctorow

A tale set at the end of the twenty-first century finds the planet's divided hominid population subjected to the forces of a splintery metaconsciousness that inundates networks with plans for cataclysmic technologies, prompting an unwitting jury member to participate in a grueling decision.

A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations

The Rapture of the Nerds

Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century. Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth’s networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there’s always someone who’ll take a bite from the forbidden apple. So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth’s anthill, there’s Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors. Rapture of the Nerds is a brilliant collaboration by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, two of the defining personalities of post-cyberpunk science fiction.

A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations

Colleen

1 Star

I started reading The Rapture of the Nerds last year, but it was not engaging so I put it aside for several months. I finally forced myself to finish it. While it had an interesting concept, the writing was bombastic, the plot was chaotic, and character development was pretty much nonexistent. 

"The system from the outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matryoshka brain nested Dyson spheres built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets. The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar system has largely sworn off its pre-posthuman cousins dirtside, but its mind sometimes wanders nostalgiawise. When that happens, it casually spams Earth’s RF spectrum with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems.”
If that paragraph does not grab your attention, then you probably should not read this book. Because the whole damn thing is written like that. It’s a clusterf*ck surrounded by a dense miasma of pretentiousness and confusion. And it certainly did not help that the book is coauthored and written in present tense: two things I am not fond of.

The book is set in a cyberpunk post-singularity world. I cannot tell you much more than that because I honestly never gained a good grasp of what the hell was going on. Almost everything is built of “smartmatter” which can be easily manipulated into almost anything. With a few clicks, your smart bathroom could brush your teeth, cut your hair, or give you gender reassignment surgery. So you really don’t want to hit the wrong button on the toilet.

Anyway, the story dumps you in with no background information. Seriously, the worldbuilding was horrendous – like you got roofied and woke up on another planet but everyone treats you like an idiot if you try to find out what happened. I was ridiculously far into the story before the authors deigned to give even the most cursory of background information. I had no idea what was going on. And I really did not enjoy feeling so disoriented. I was grasping at straws the entire time trying to figure things out. The short version? There was someone named Huw who was technophobic and utterly lacking in personality. He got jury duty, and then somehow ended up being the only person who could save the universe. I have no idea how or why because his skill set was as lacking as his personality. The other characters were just as flat. The writing was self-indulgent and lacked cohesion. And the plot was chaos followed by deus ex machina. This certainly was not “mindbendingly entertaining” as the cover advertised.

Maybe somewhere in there was a message about humanity, but I certainly could not find it. This definitely was not the book for me.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 1 Star
Writing Style: 1 Star
Characters and Character Development: 1 Star
Plot Structure and Development: 1 Star
Level of Captivation: 1 Star
Originality: 2 Stars

A brilliant collaboartion from Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, two defining personalities of post-cyberpunk SF—now repackaged with a new cover! Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century. Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander...and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple. So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.

A Novel

John Whitney

Has the kind of pell-mell, everything all at once flavor of Transmetropolitan, or if you took the entire hitchhiker’s guide series and tried to cram it all into some 350 pages. Also tries to incarnate and redeem Rand at the end as perceiving that modern interpretations of objectivism have gone wildly astray, which I disagree with on the basis that they’re a natural outgrowth of objectivist ideals and objectivism is a garbage ideology.

Cindy Lieberman

Quirky, funny and thought provoking. A post-singularity look at what it might mean to be human or, rather, hominid, when most of what makes us "us" can be digitized and uploaded to the cloud.

The Rapture of the Nerds A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations

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