The Rapture of the Nerds

Doctorow, Cory, and Charles Stross. The Rapture of the Nerds. Tor, 2012.
In The Rapture of the Nerds Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross are out on the kind of lark that only they could create. You have Doctorow’s skepticism about the Internet of Things and Stross’s Kafkaesque satire of bureaucracy on full display. And when they get together to lampoon American religious bigotry and hypocrisy, they pull all the stops. Here’s the premise: Hugh is a neo-luddite Welsh potter, whose parents have given up their meat bodies for a virtual life in in space. Poor Hugh is drawn into the center of things when he is put on a jury to evaluate the effects of off-planet technology on terrestrial society. Hugh is an absolute innocent in machinations show more that are his worst nightmares. Rapture holds up very well on rereading. show less

It's been a half-century or so since the advent of the Singularity, and most of humanity now exists as disembodied simulations in a solar system-spanning computational cloud. Huw Jones is one of those still stubbornly clinging to a low-tech meatspace existence, but that existence gets badly disrupted when he's selected for a jury empowered to decide whether the Earth should adopt or reject a weird piece of technology sent back by the uploaded masses, only to discover that he himself has been infected with, well, a weird piece of technology sent back by the uploaded masses.

It's a fun book, at least if you have a particularly geeky sense of fun, which I do. There's lots of wild imaginings, lots of silly jokes and sly references. I will show more say that by the time I got to the halfway point, I was starting to think, OK, this has been entertaining enough, but it feels like it's all flash and no substance, and another 150 pages of this is probably going to be entirely too much. But then, for the second half of the novel, things shifted a bit, not dramatically, but just enough to make me wonder if the two authors had split the writing just there at the midpoint, and I found myself actually engaged in the story, as well as entertained by all the creativity and ridiculousness. I did find the resolution a bit anticlimactic, or at least a bit too abstractly presented to be satisfying, but overall I enjoyed the novel for the crazy, nerdy romp it was. show less

Living on a ragged and ruined Earth, after most of humanity has uploaded itself into a thought cloud surrounding the Sun, Huw Jones mostly just wants to get drunk, work on his ceramics, and grouse about his long-gone parents. Then, one day, Jones gets swept up in a public inquiry about whether a new technology should be allowed to enter the reservation that is Earth. While Huw had looked forward to this process as an opportunity to vent his frustrations about his up-lifted parents, our protagonist soon finds himself in an infuriating adventure that is by turns dangerous and mind-boggling, and where he might just be forced to grow up and get a life. If you've read Doctorow or Stross in the past you have no good reason to avoid this book; show more this is unless the prospect of the singularity enthusiasts getting a few swift kicks you-know-where puts you off. show less

This was completely insane, but that's kind of what I expect when reading something from Cory Doctorow, especially when he teams up with Charles Stross. Though I love this narrator (I did it on audio) and I think he did a great job, this type of super-dense, advanced technology story might be easier to understand when you can easily backup and re-read sentences or entire paragraphs. Some of it definitely went right by me while I was driving or doing dishes.

If you're looking for something serious, this is not it, but at the same time it's not juvenile. The ideas are amazing, it's the delivery that makes it over the top ridiculous (in a good way, for me at least). Also extra points for multiple references to the Hitchhiker's Guide.

I have read and enjoyed a few Stross books before, but never any by Doctorow, so was looking forward to this one.

Huw is infected with a technovirus, and his hope to be part of a tech jury defending against the singularity patent office is cut short. He is dragged over to America, which has a really odd version of the church there, and returns to the jury knowing he is the last hope for the universe.

It is packed full of ideas, from parallel memories, uploaded humans, gender changes and a mix of sophisticated tech and steampunk tech. All good stuff, or so you would think, but the characters and the plot really didn't work for me. Some of the time I wasn't completely sure what was going on, and I didn't really get the whole point of it in show more the end. show less

There's a slight paradox with this execution of this book which might thrill or annoy the lot of it's readers: It reads like a Heinlein juvenile upgraded to all the geeky post-singularity hacking terms we can take a swing at.

Huh?

Specifically, I think of [b:Have Space Suit—Will Travel|20417|Have Space Suit—Will Travel|Robert A. Heinlein|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1425593094s/20417.jpg|1984753] if we'd substituted a kid with an engineering project with a real-meat man in a completely digital society, get him embroiled in Objectivist Religionists (BIG LOL there), several courtroom dramas filled with some really zany characters such as a judge who is a dalek, and ends up with a galactic singularity overmind checking us over and show more using this poor sod to determine if we, as a species, deserves a chance to keep on living.

Fairly simple story and it reads very quick, but the best part (or the worst, depending on your tolerance for geeking out with tech and post-singularity societies,) has got to be the world-building and the ideas, with the satire being a distant third. :)

I personally love singularty stories. And if you need a description, just assume that all matter has been turned into computers and we've all been uploaded as pure minds to live in any kinds of realities we desire, then you'll have a pretty good feel for it.

But where's the conflict? Oh, it's all mental and ideological and sometimes even territorial as long as you can wrap your mind around major causality loops when you tamper with the fundamental forces of matter. :)

In other words, this is a simple story with a dense layer of computronium and satire wrapped around it like bacon around a nice juicy steak.

Not that it doesn't have it's flaws, of course, but if you like this kind of thing, you really shouldn't miss it. :) show less

This was a weird story that I wasn't sure of, until the last 3rd of the book. After the Singularity, most humans have uploaded themselves into the cloud and are off-world. Huw is one of the ones that remain dirtside. Somehow he is tapped to speak for humanity to keep an alien intelligence from destroying and absorbing our world (think Vogon contructor fleet). It was the odd post-cyberpunk fare that I'd come to expect from Doctorow. A decent listen.