a Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations
Hardcover, 349 pages
English language
Published Sept. 17, 2012 by Tor.
Welcome to the Fractured Future
It's the dusk of the twenty-first century, and the Earth has a population of a billion or so. For the most part, we're happy with our lot. Those who aren't have emigrated off-planet, joining one of the swarming densethinker clades of the inner solar system. These posthuman consciousnesses have mostly sworn off dealing with their still-human cousins, but their minds wander sometimes . . . and when that happens, they casually spam Earth's networks with 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 get bored with 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. Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been …
Welcome to the Fractured Future
It's the dusk of the twenty-first century, and the Earth has a population of a billion or so. For the most part, we're happy with our lot. Those who aren't have emigrated off-planet, joining one of the swarming densethinker clades of the inner solar system. These posthuman consciousnesses have mostly sworn off dealing with their still-human cousins, but their minds wander sometimes . . . and when that happens, they casually spam Earth's networks with 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 get bored with 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. Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury.
And he'll do his best . . . despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.
A satisfying Singularity narrative full of nerdy in-jokes. If you don't care for jargon, look elsewhere.
Every word a gem. Read it.
You get the feeling that the authors were having a ball writing this book. There is a sense of loving craft invested in maximising the absurdity metric on each and every sentence.
Sometimes you can pack too much good into a very small space.
When you do this, an explosion is probable.
The explosion is not as good as if you had just packed fewer things into that space.
Good strange things that I like:
Gender swapping protagonist
A hacker's exploration of transhumanism
Resource constraints in the virtual world
The inevitable myspacification of virtual worlds
The ethics of forked virtual characters
What it would feel like to modify your own thought patterns
Zeppelins
Post Rapture societies and who would stay behind
And oh so much more. This novel is so fizzy with amazing things that it bubbles away, leaving almost nothing behind. And that is not as good as it could be.
Still, worth reading.
It was special.
Took me forever to read. Mostly due to changing jobs and schedules, but also just because it took a lot of effort to digest. Was really expecting a Doctorow book, but it felt a lot more like stross.
I'm not really sure I processed most of it, especially really the very end.
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 and breezy, the density of the ideas presently can make for a challenging read. This book is absolutely not for everyone. Doctorow & Stross take potshots at every sacred cow within range (and they make sure that there are a lot of them), so if you’re a person who is easily offended, you won’t like this. Their prose is packed with allusion and references …
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 and breezy, the density of the ideas presently can make for a challenging read. This book is absolutely not for everyone. Doctorow & Stross take potshots at every sacred cow within range (and they make sure that there are a lot of them), so if you’re a person who is easily offended, you won’t like this. Their prose is packed with allusion and references to a wide variety of topics. Again, this textual density is not something that everyone enjoys.
Why read it then? At its best, The Rapture of the Nerds allows two of the brightest minds in contemporary SF an opportunity to play in a huge sandbox. There are as many ideas on a single page as contained in most entire novels. If you like that sense of immersion in a world of fantastical ideas, you will enjoy the time you spend in this world.
At times, it feels like the two authors ate competing to write each other into more and more bizarre predicaments. But that is part of the fun.
