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. ( )

This was pretty great. Even if it did make me feel like a geek well past her sell by date. ( )

To put it mildly, a disappointing, boring and stupid waste of an excellent title from the 2 high priests of the singularity. With a name like Rapture of the Nerds, you would expect a decent satire or deconstruction of the quite frankly rather stupid & utopian concept of the singularity.

Instead we get a few mild pokes at it and weak attempts at humour that fall flat, some of which surprisingly and I suspect inadvertently come across as painfully stupid racial stereotypes. Otherwise it's just a tramp through the same tired stereotypes & cliches.

Stross can write a decent book when he is on form and his Cthulu Mythos stuff is top notch, but his singularity books have always been his weakest. And this is the weakest of those.

And if this is typical of Doctorow's fiction then I won't bother reading any more of it.

It reads rather like they read someone using the term on reddit (or BoingBoing, if anyone apart from Doctorow still uses it) and thought they'd better get something out using the term before someone else wrote the book. Or maybe just ruin the term for everyone. ( )

Meh. ( )

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 that are his worst nightmares. Rapture holds up very well on rereading. ( )