The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations

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The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations

by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross (Goodreads Author)

3.31 of 5 stars 3.31 · rating details · 871 ratings · 195 reviews

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 areunhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of m...more

Hardcover, 351 pages

Published September 4th 2012 by Tor Books (first published September 1st 2012)

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Mar 30, 2013 Alan rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Microchipped meatbags and sophisticated simuLuddites

Recommended to Alan by: Theme, and this one posthuman time-traveling gorilla...

You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? lt takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb. And you, you Scotch-drinking steak-eater in your Relaxacizer chair, you’ve just barely lighted the primacord of the fuse.
—"Day Million," from 1966, by Frederik Pohl

Hapless Huw Jones is a pathetic protagonist, a Welshman (his nationality actually becomes important later, even i...more

You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? lt takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb. And you, you Scotch-drinking steak-eater in your Relaxacizer chair, you’ve just barely lighted the primacord of the fuse.
—"Day Million," from 1966, by Frederik Pohl

Hapless Huw Jones is a pathetic protagonist, a Welshman (his nationality actually becomes important later, even in his post-national world) who has chosen to live a Nineteenth-Century lifestyle, which only makes him about three centuries behind current. Huw works clay with his hands, throwing pots and mugs and such, painting them with glaze and then firing them in a kiln. He's not even close to Day Million but this still makes him, even among the biological humans who remain on Earth, a remarkable reactionary.

For Huw, that throwback among throwbacks, lives after the Singularity has occurred—when most human beings (as well as their AIs and quite a few of the more intelligent animals) have already uploaded their essences to the swarm of tiny interconnected computers that's been constructed out of the other solid bodies in the Solar System. Earth revolves alone, pinpointed (in a vivid image from the book) by a solitary beam of sunshine that follows it in its orbit. The rest of the Sun's output is intercepted, used to power the clusters of computronium that host the Solar System's teeming trillions. Earth is, these days, something of a museum, if a neglected and little-visited one.

But every museum has its vandals... and some supposedly-uplifted intelligences aren't all that mature. They periodically transmit society-shattering inventions and concepts to Earth, and it's up to Earth's rather disorganized governments to intercept, evaluate, and erase these transmissions—or at least eradicate the results after the fact—if they're determined to be too Earth-shattering.

Which is where Huw comes in. He's been called to jury service, one of those randomly (?) chosen to determine whether the social cost of allowing the cloud's latest brilliant idea to propagate Earthside is too great. If only he hadn't been recently infected by a hazardous species of bioware...

Those Dawners really made fast decisions. You wouldn’t catch them wasting a full minute setting up a business.
—"Slow Tuesday Night," by R.A. Lafferty

Now, I like Charles Stross a lot. I'm not so enamored of Cory Doctorow, who is usually too didactic for me, but I was still willing to take a flyer on this collaboration. And on the whole it worked for me. I'm not sure how they wrote this, though. I suspect they traded volleys of "can you top that?" and "how will Huw get out of this one?" via email, smoothing out the results after the fact. It's really hard to tell where the Stross ends and the Doctorow begins, at any rate.

The Rapture of the Nerds may not, at its heart, be as new and forward-thinking as it purports to be... but it was still a fun and dizzyingly fast-paced excursion into a bizarre, but hopeful, future. And that's a good thing.(less)

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Feb 10, 2013 David rated it 2 of 5 stars

I thought "Little Brother" was great, so I was prepared to adore RoTN. Sadly, I don't have that much love for it.

Most of the book reads like a bargain-basement "Illuminatus Trilogy" (Shea and Wilson). Doctorow and Stross throw a tremendous number of ideas at the wall, not bothering to see whether they stick, or whether in fact they are even internally consistent (cyborg disassembler ants are so bad that they take apart doorways in seconds, but a quasi-medieval society can survive on top of them...more

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Dec 30, 2012 Liam Proven rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Vintage stuff. Nobody throws you headlong through the windscreen into our possible future like Stross and Doctorow; this short novel combines the best of Charlie's gonzo technophilia and Doctorow's cynical humaneness.

The book falls into several discrete parts, interleaved with touchingly, amusing blatant commercial plugs to buy the damn' thing if you are reading the free ebook, as I was on my old Sony ereader. Kindle, schmindle. (Apparently it took heroic efforts to get Stross' publisher to per...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Katy-Del rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read Rapture of the Nerds in one sitting. The book takes place decades after a "technological singularity" which has allowed much of the population to upload their minds to a computerized cloud that surrounds the inner part of the galaxy in a cloud of nanobots, or something. Much of these ascended post-humans ignore the remaining humanity on the planet, but occasionally ideas and plans for new technology are communicated to humans. These items of questionable origin and intention are put on tr...more

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Nov 04, 2012 Eric Herboso rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: soft-science-fiction

Post-singularity scifi is always weird, but Doctorow & Stross do an excellent job of describing the weirdness rationally in a way that feels more scifi than fantasy. It's definitely a fun read, though I doubt I'd ever choose to pick up the book a second time.

While the largest defect of the novel was (for me at least) an inability to really empathize with the main character, the most visible defect was certainly the sheer number of obscure references packed into the book. Those not moderately...more Post-singularity scifi is always weird, but Doctorow & Stross do an excellent job of describing the weirdness rationally in a way that feels more scifi than fantasy. It's definitely a fun read, though I doubt I'd ever choose to pick up the book a second time.

While the largest defect of the novel was (for me at least) an inability to really empathize with the main character, the most visible defect was certainly the sheer number of obscure references packed into the book. Those not moderately versed in physics, philosophy, computer science, poliical philosophy, science fiction culture, and (of course) the singularity, will undoubtedly miss out on several references the authors make within. Whether it's Nightcrawler or daleks, Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov or Ayn Rand, this novel never stops calling back to outside ideas that most people will not be fully up to speed on, even as the plot relentlessly moves forward.

The profundity of obscurity in most of these references can only be intended as a way of letting the authors reward those readers who catch each reference again and again in an ever-increasing paroxysm of positive reinforcement that makes the reading of this book more akin to playing a video game than visually scanning a physical text. While I can't fault Doctorow & Stross for achieving what they've set out to do here, I can object on the ground that I'm not particularly into this kind of reference-intensive writing. I don't even like it particularly when James Joyce does it in Ulysses, so I hope it's understandable why I dislike how it is done here.

As such, I have decided upon giving this book a mediocre score. Not because it is mediocre per se, but because the area in which it excels is one that I'm just not all that impressed by. I can recommend this book only to those people that are into Joyce-style reference gang-bangs of pop culture mixed with science and philosophy alongside really, really weird post-singularity scifi. If you're into that stuff, read this. If not, stay away. And if, like me, you are slightly interested but not particularly amused by the FLCL-style hijinks, then it might be worth a read, even though it'll never be on your favorites list.(less)

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Oct 29, 2012 Jeffrey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012

Much of this book is the fun, wild ride it's meant to be. But Stross's voice is too strong here (frankly, Doctorow's is barely discernable), and as someone who's now read several of Stross's own novels, I have to say the unceasing cleverness of that voice has become almost totally grating. That said, it genuinely is clever, and quite often funny, and with my teeth a bit on edge, I still enjoyed the work overall. The prose is nothing to write home about, but is at least generally in service to th...more

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Oct 27, 2012 Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps some familiarity with the term 'technological singularity' would have been helpful before reading this book, but being introduced to the concept through vicariously experiencing the unstable, ever-shifting environments the books protagonist must navigate makes it a philosophical/emotional exploration of what turns out to be an increasingly popular science fiction premise.

The action in this story occurs after the 'singularity' - the world which results from the unleashing of 'greater than...more

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Oct 19, 2012 Patrick DiJusto rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

Not quite a sequel to Accellerando, it seems to be set in the same universes.

The worst part of the book, (and I do mean the WORST part; it practically ruined the whole book for me) was the authors' cutesy game of cramming the text with as many SF references as possible. Someone drinks Diet Slurm, they dine on Megatherium, and toward the end of the book, without out any fuss, the stars go out. Since part of the plot deals with the end of the universe, I was expecting -- and dreading -- a restaur...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Burgoo rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012

How do you talk about life in a world that has fundamentally changed? That’s the challenge that faced Doctorow & Stross. Their solution is to provide us with a luddite protagonist, Huw, who is almost as much of an outsider as the reader. Much like Arthur Dent, Huw is propelled through a series of misadventures that provide Doctorow & Stross with the opportunity to riff on both the singularity and contemporary culture.

There’s a paradox at the heart of this book. While its tone is light an...more

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Sep 30, 2012 Boris Limpopo rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Doctorow, Cory e Charles Stross (2012). The Rapture of the Nerds. A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. 2012. ISBN 9781429944915. Pagine 352. 13,77 €

Il primo romanzo (o uno dei primi, e comunque il primo che ho letto io) sulla Singularity, o meglio – come recita il sottotitolo – sull’umanità della post-singularity.

La Singularity, o Singolarità tecnologica come la traduce in italiano Wikipedia, è legata all’idea che il progresso...more

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Sep 27, 2012 Psychophant rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: humour, near-future, electronic, not-owned, reviewed

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This is a book that normally I would not have read, but I was travelling, and the free book was convenient, so I read it moderately quickly. The two authors are trying to channel Douglas Adams into the XXIst century, with uneven success. Unfortunately they also have an agenda to present the singularity as a religion rather than a historical directive (which I agree wholeheartedly with, up to the alternate name, the nerd rapture) and they are willing to compromise almost anything to promote it.

T...more

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Sep 18, 2012 Gwen Nicodemus rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ridiculously awesome Easter eggs, descriptions, and curses

The mass majority of the human population uploaded into a cloud and floats around the solar system doing whatever. "Only" a billion humans remain on Earth, which is sort of a reserve, or a zoo, for those who don't want to upload. Against uploading, he's also so much a technophobe that he doesn't even use electricity in his house. He applies for technology jury duty; he's hoping to minimize technological damage to the planet. He did not pl...more

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Sep 13, 2012 Rachel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

This book totally blew me away. (Not unexpected, given that it's Cory Doctorow. Charles Stross's voice is also helpful, and he gives it a nice British feel.) The protagonist, Huw (who?), is mostly minding his own business, trying to act like life isn't so different after the singularity, which has caused most people (including his parents) to upload into a digital worlds in the space around earth, having used up the moon and inner planets to construct physical storage. The uploaded entities--upg...more

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Apr 24, 2013 Alex Sarll added it

Charles Stross is, in a few months, going to be Britain's best science fiction writer. Cory Doctorow is a very smart guy and a good columnist whose fiction has generally left me cold, seeming a little too ready to show its workings. And the first of the three component stories here, 'Jury Service', suggests that the two of them writing together will make for the wrong sort of matey self-indulgence - it's all tech buzzwords and madcap techno-picaresque, like somebody's running a bad simulation of...more

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Feb 25, 2013 Christopher McKitterick rated it 4 of 5 stars

I have heard the argument that this book feels like Doctorow and Stross competing to see who's cleverer, but in fact that works in the book's favor. They both do their best to write the cleverest, most thoroughly imagined trans-/post-human work I've read to date, and for that it's worth the occasional eye-rolling while reading. Huw's (the main character) single-minded drive to live simply and to a certain aesthetic clashes with everyone else's plots and schemes, leading Huw deeper and deeper int...more

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Dec 01, 2012 Quinn rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I hope to give this a more "formal" review after I'm done with exams. (Long) summary though:

- This isn't a book where you're likely to care about spoilers, but there are minor/implied ones in this review.
- I like reading books about simulated reality vs real reality; it's why I loved the Idlewild trilogy, which apparently no one else has heard of. There are some decent takes at times here. there is also so much shit that doesn't make sense that the cardinality of the infinitude of plot holes is...more I hope to give this a more "formal" review after I'm done with exams. (Long) summary though:

- This isn't a book where you're likely to care about spoilers, but there are minor/implied ones in this review.
- I like reading books about simulated reality vs real reality; it's why I loved the Idlewild trilogy, which apparently no one else has heard of. There are some decent takes at times here. there is also so much shit that doesn't make sense that the cardinality of the infinitude of plot holes is *definitely* greater than aleph-null.
- Gosh, it's incredible that they allegedly took seven years to write this book and did approximately no research on trans people or on Charleston, South Carolina.
- They must have spent all of that time finding blatant references to awkwardly shove into the book. Lucky me that I didn't recognize most of them. I did kind of assume that several obvious and less-obvious plot points referenced Mieville's _Embassytown_ but that hasn't been out that long, so maybe they both referenced something earlier.
- Or maybe the commercial-interlude claim that the book took seven years is actually just another of the many obvious and less-obvious Biblical references and Not Intended To Be A Factual Statement? The book certainly reads like it was cobbled together in two weeks on Google Drive.
- Which is arguably not a bad thing, because it's a very quick read.
- There's the same sort of grating smugness to the authorial voice at times that I absolutely despised in Scalzi's _The Android's Dream_, which has some similarities to this book, although this book is much more interesting than Scalzi's trash, and has the advantage of characters.
- I kind of feel like Sandra Lal, the trans character whom we first meet, was introduced just to give Doctorow and Stross a fig leaf to "play around" with gender Banks-style, which they make a central plot point, and then Lal was pretty much discarded and I left with no idea whether she is or isn't responsible for anything. Also an excuse to use the t-slur a lot in a series of really bad jokes when Huw has to wear a burka.
- Though they don't seem to need excuses to use the r-word with abandon in the cloud section, as apparently they were asleep when Lauren Potter told them it wasn't acceptable, particularly with no goddamn point to it.
- Unless the point was tied to deliberations about who's "borderline" Asperger's or "not autistic, just" -- the geek community is largely a bunch of people totally insecure about their autism, afraid of the caricature they know and seeking to distance themselves from it by turning viciously on the people who are one rung down on the same ladder, including themselves if they slip.
- A Bujold character on another 'intelligence' slur: "You use that word a lot. Makes me wonder who used to whip you with it."
- End for now.(less)

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Oct 08, 2012 Dan rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

A book with some really thought provoking concepts for sure. I had to stop reading a few times and think about the role of emotion and how we deal and process it a few times when I was reading this book. There are some mind melting meta-cognition moments in it, but those are the fun part.

The not fun part? I kept getting the feeling like I had skipped a page or something. Most books I don't have to go back and reread, but this one was like that at times. I would go back and re-read things and as...more A book with some really thought provoking concepts for sure. I had to stop reading a few times and think about the role of emotion and how we deal and process it a few times when I was reading this book. There are some mind melting meta-cognition moments in it, but those are the fun part.

The not fun part? I kept getting the feeling like I had skipped a page or something. Most books I don't have to go back and reread, but this one was like that at times. I would go back and re-read things and as it turns out, I didn't miss anything.

The last time this happened: the last time I read Charlie Stoss. Don't get me wrong. I like him and have bought a lot of his stuff. But after reading a number of his books, I am always left with a similar feeling. The concepts are great. The characters are interesting. But it is like the editor went in and deleted out things randomly and Charlie didn't go back and make sure the story still made sense. I know it is co-written, but it is also not like the whole book was like this. The funny thing, the whole time I was reading it, I thought the book was written by Neil Gaiman and Doctorow. So to me, this isn't a case where I pre-judged it in some way. I only figured it out when I got to the end and realized that I had it wrong.

Not that these are real spoilers, but just in case someone cares I'll tag the following notes as spoilers:

(view spoiler)

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Sep 20, 2012 Sarah rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc-or-review-copy, read-in-2012, scifi, tor

The Rapture of the Nerds really didn’t take me long to read. It truly is an enjoyable book that is well worth your time, for the humor and descriptions alone. However, the first half can be rather plodding, confusing and lacking in substance. The second half is where the plot and deeper themes really start to hit home and everything starts to tie together nicely (where plenty of “Ah ha!” moments happen). When I finished the book I realized I really only had one complaint. While enjoyable, the hu...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Eric Snyder rated it 3 of 5 stars

The idea of the singularity has been around for decades, championed by such notables as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, among other writers and futurists. The idea of the singularity as something that doesn't work nearly as well as these futurists expect is certainly a more amusing thought. Setting such a thought as a farcical novel was a great idea, but the book falls a bit flat. The plotting is slow at first; 25% of the book could have been removed if it came out of the first half. A lot of the...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Jason, Amy, Jennie

Shelves: alternate-history, being-human, cthulhu, evolution, fanfiction, godwin-s-law, headology, metatexts, science-fiction, singularity

Smart, fast, and Robert Anton Wilson-esque, if you replaced Wilson’s occult fascinations with paranoid internet tropes and utopian longings. Our POV EveryWo/Man techno-phobe, Huw, gets dragged along like Rincewind on a mission to Save Humanity – err, whatever that means post-uplift, post-singularity – that s/he profoundly resists being part of.

I’m sure I did not pick up 10% of the repurposing of our genre patrimony. One that particularly delighted me, as Huw is unwilling descending on what is l...more Smart, fast, and Robert Anton Wilson-esque, if you replaced Wilson’s occult fascinations with paranoid internet tropes and utopian longings. Our POV EveryWo/Man techno-phobe, Huw, gets dragged along like Rincewind on a mission to Save Humanity – err, whatever that means post-uplift, post-singularity – that s/he profoundly resists being part of.

I’m sure I did not pick up 10% of the repurposing of our genre patrimony. One that particularly delighted me, as Huw is unwilling descending on what is left of the United States:

“Hasta la vista, sinners,” drawls the missile launch computer in a thick gubernatorial Austro-Californian accent. Two pinpricks of light blossom on the verdant horizon of the gasoline mangroves, then a third that rapidly expands into a fireball as the antique pre-cloud hypersonic missile explodes on launch. The surviving missiles stab toward them and there’s a musical chime from the countermeasures control panel. Huw feels a moment of gut-slackening terror. “You’ve got mail!” the countermeasures system announces in the syrupy tones of a kindergarten teacher. “Facebook-Goldman-AOL welcomes you to the United States of America. You have 14,023 new friend requests, which you will receive after this message from our sponsors. Your hen wants milking, your goat has been turned into a zombie, there are 14,278,123 new status updates, and you have been de-friended 1,974,231 times. There are 5,348,011 updates to the privacy policy for your review.”
Bonnie thumps something on the panel, muscles like whipcord standing out on her arm as she glares at the oncoming missiles. Huw backs away. She might actually be a communicant, he realizes in absolute horror. She might actually have a Facebook account! She’s mad enough. ...These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.” (102-03)

It’s like Arthur Dent descending on Magrathea. For a new age. And Slartibartfast has been replaced by – oh, that would be telling.

Ayn Rand makes several appearances and is surprisingly effective, even though the authors are careful to let us know that she’s unpleasant, her followers are self-absorbed dingbats, and “if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn’t be here—the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I’m going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won’t bring her up again if you don’t.” (321)

Well worth the time.
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Nov 21, 2012 Mick rated it 1 of 5 stars

Bah. Got 70 pages in before I got fed up with cuteness and lack of depth. Stross is really interestingly smart and thoughtful about the near future, but his characterization is an afterthought. The way people will BE in the future is barely part of his thinking. And Doctorow has more of the day-to-day of human thoughts and feelings at his command, but it comes out in this book as cleverness and 'coolth' without any deeper sense of who any of these people are.

Also, a character sees another chara...more

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Oct 31, 2012 Jose Solis rated it 4 of 5 stars

Este libro comenzó como dos historias cortas publicadas con varios años de diferencia: Jury Service y Appeals Court. Ahora, los autores escribieron una tercera parte, llamada Parole Board para darle una conclusión a la historia, y unieron las tres en una sola publicación. La historia es muy entretenida, básicamente trata sobre Huw Jones, un tipo común y corriente que se ve envuelto en situaciones cada vez mas insólitas en un mundo donde ya ocurrió la Singularidad tecnológica.

Huw es firme oponent...more

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Oct 16, 2012 Gevera Bert rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Sep 17, 2012 Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, theme-religion, maybe-reread-sometime

I was seriously poised to say something like "Great story. I hated it." for roughly the first half of this book. It's very gonzo and action-movie-ish. The thematically interesting, thoughtful parts aren't deployed until about halfway through. The first couple parts are like a really, really long prologue. I was seriously thinking of abandoning the book.

But the second half of the book saved it for me. It's a much more thoughtful examination of the increasingly prevalent SF theme that our physical...more I was seriously poised to say something like "Great story. I hated it." for roughly the first half of this book. It's very gonzo and action-movie-ish. The thematically interesting, thoughtful parts aren't deployed until about halfway through. The first couple parts are like a really, really long prologue. I was seriously thinking of abandoning the book.

But the second half of the book saved it for me. It's a much more thoughtful examination of the increasingly prevalent SF theme that our physical bodies are a dead end or hindrance, or at least a flawed prototype. (Start paying attention to how many SF works have life extension or immortality as a casual background, and you might be surprised.) Its conception of the virtual world of uploaded human intelligences owes a lot to Neal Stephenson, and less to Greg Egan than I was expecting.

If you can handle/laugh at humor and mockery about Ayn Rand, well, there's a very amusing payoff. (view spoiler)

At least one reviewer on GR has noted that this book is very Strossian, at least if the Halting State universe is your benchmark for Stross. Doctorow's writerly tics are harder to detect here.

(view spoiler)
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Dec 24, 2012 Nicholas rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

So, let me start by saying that this book is by two of my favorite authors. What surprised me was how clearly I could spot the transition points. Cory Doctorow has a different style than Charlie Stross, and I sometimes found the change in character tone frustrating. But not the frustration of "seeing behind the curtain" because the book manages the near-miracle of feeling very well integrated; it was the frustration of not perfectly aligning with the chosen thought process after the intentional...more So, let me start by saying that this book is by two of my favorite authors. What surprised me was how clearly I could spot the transition points. Cory Doctorow has a different style than Charlie Stross, and I sometimes found the change in character tone frustrating. But not the frustration of "seeing behind the curtain" because the book manages the near-miracle of feeling very well integrated; it was the frustration of not perfectly aligning with the chosen thought process after the intentional shifts.

Here's the thing: this is not a novel. This is a religious prediction. This is prophecy by two of the leading Prophets of the Singularity. This is "Left Behind" for the nerd crowd. And it's really REALLY good.

I can't go into detail for two reasons, a) it's so presentation specific there's no way to discuss the plot points without giving 10k words of context and b) if you're not hip to the Singularity already this is NOT a good opening primer. Charlie Stross has some great Singularity fiction, I'd start there.

This is essentially a masterclass in post-Singularity prediction, and where they lost me was in the presentation of a global human-think cloud as essentially a souped up version of meme-base meets World of Warcraft meets wikipedia. It's like Christians being told that Heaven really is just asexual winged Precious Moments angels floating on clouds and playing three notes on a cheap harp. Forever.

Also, one star gets knocked for the presentation of "The Other" as represented by a disgruntled transcendental atheist using human culture tropes instead of an actual attempt to represent something truly Other.

It's a great book if you like the subject matter, but like Stross and Doctorow's other books...I'm just not sure who I can recommend them to. They're great, some of my favorites...but so very nerd specific it will either be your thing or fall so flat it would be monomolecular.

So, for me, this was absolutely outstanding. I read it in two sessions and loved pretty much every minute of it. I disagree with some of the premise elements and some of the predictions about pan-human culture, but those predictions are exceptionally well presented. The characters are solid if somewhat chimeric (that oxymoron makes WAY more sense when you read the book) and the overall book is highly readable. If I could give 4.5 stars, this one would get it. It's just a smidgen less than perfect, and that may just be my own faith in the future shining through.(less)

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May 07, 2013 Andrew Krause rated it 4 of 5 stars

I've been a dyed-in-the-wool techno utopian for a while, loving to spend a minutes each day daydreaming about uploading my consciousness to a computer and living as a digital being, so this book was a fun treat. Less starry eyed than myself, the authors muse on what happens to those left behind, as well as what kind of world the people who currently predominate on the Internet would make given unlimited resources.

The action drags in a few places, and it's confusing to keep track of people or ma...more

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Oct 26, 2012 Michael added it

Shelves: moeglin_digital_bookshelf

Doctorow, C. & Stross, C. (2012). The rapture of the nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations. New York, NY: Tom Doherty.

SUMMARY: The love child of two contemporary science fiction superstars, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, The Rapture of the Nerds follows the exotic and largely accidental adventures of a late 21st century Welsh potter called Huw Jones. On this post-singularity Earth where the distance between human and machine is a distinction without...more Doctorow, C. & Stross, C. (2012). The rapture of the nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations. New York, NY: Tom Doherty.

SUMMARY: The love child of two contemporary science fiction superstars, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, The Rapture of the Nerds follows the exotic and largely accidental adventures of a late 21st century Welsh potter called Huw Jones. On this post-singularity Earth where the distance between human and machine is a distinction without a difference, Huw is a defiantly old-fashioned pre-posthuman man, one of only about a billion people still populating the toxic planet whose former inhabitants largely have abandoned their physical bodies in favor of digital life in the consciousness cloud that surrounds the planet. Called upon for Tech Jury Service in Tripoli, Huw stumbles from one dramatic and absurd circumstance to another, playing human host to an alien ambassador, barely escaping from a gang of backwoods religious fundamentalists, and doing battle with an alternate incarnation of himself to save the world, or what’s left of it.

AUDIENCE/APPEAL: Science fiction has been a mainstay of male childhood and adolescence for decades, and most of the men I know have fond memories of Isaac Asimov, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, and the like. Many of us continue to be fans well into adulthood (Comic-Con, anyone?). Now a mainstream genre, science fiction has evolved beyond Buck Rogers over the years, and has fragmented into dozens of subgenres, some uber-geek technical, and some highbrow literary. I chose The Rapture of the Nerds based on its purported humor and adventure, its pop culture name dropping—The Matrix, Dr. Who, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—and its embrace of geeky theories or philosophies like The Singularity and transhumanism. Book club members don’t have to be immersed in geek culture to enjoy the book. My intent is to demonstrate how the genre has matured and evolved, and why book clubbers might want to give it another look.

IMPLEMENTATION: I also would recommend this title to patrons looking for science fiction, adventure, or singularity-related material.

Lantz, C. (2012, August 1). [Review of the book The rapture of the nerds by C. Doctorow & C. Stross]. Library Journal, 137(13), 69. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.asp...

(2012, August 15). [Review of the book The rapture of the nerds by C. Doctorow & C. Stross]. Kirkus Reviews, 80(16), 26. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.leo.lib.u...

Wiersema, R. J. (2012, September 1). [Review of the book The rapture of the nerds by C. Doctorow & C. Stross]. Quill & Quire. Retrieved from http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/...
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Oct 09, 2012 Matt rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: speculative-fiction

I haven't read any of Cory Doctorow's fiction so it's hard for me to say what he added here, but Charles Stross fingerprints were clear throughout. My complaint, as with so many works of this particular "post-cyberpunk" -- dare I say even "Singularity" -- sub-genre, is the emphasis on trendy techno-hipster whizz-bang prose that seems to stand in for characterization and, it feels in places, the plot.

This is a novel that relies on an exaggerated in-your-face style that was obviously done with in...more

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Apr 13, 2013 Ray Daley rated it 1 of 5 stars

Truly TERRIBLE, I've had some pretty bad experiences with Corys books and somehow they seem to get worse, the more of them I read.

For starters, it needs proofreading. LOTS of stupid mistakes in it.

Another one that I'm glad was free because I'd want a refund if I'd paid for it. The book is too surreal, too technical in places and gets very wordy and boring to the point of just wanting to stop reading any more.

The four (count them) requests that the reader considers buying the book are well overbo...more

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Jun 22, 2012 Rellac rated it 4 of 5 stars

I think the easiest way to explain this book is to ask other people to read it.
In a sense it is singularity porn, the style is flashy and witty and very funny. But it also makes you think, and hard. What actually happens in a world where we upload our consciousness to the cloud? Where you can live a trillion years in subjective time but only 10 minutes have passed in earth time?
What happens to the world, to our geography? Does uploaded consciousness let you "feel" or are the feelings just approx...more

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About Cory Doctorow

Canadian blogger, journalist and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.

He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books.

Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, Disney, and post-scarcity economics.

http://us.macmillan.com ...more

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“What you’ve got to understand, son,” says the doctor, “is it’s all the fault of the alien space bats.” — 2 people liked it

“Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic sports-star, collectible trading card game art.” — 2 people liked it

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