The Rapture of the Nerds

July 16, 2012
Doctorow (Little Brother) and Stross (Rule 34) take a comic tour of a post-Singularity solar system where posthumans dump digital junk on the “pre-posthumans” who cling to terrestrial life. Huw Jones, a Welsh potter abandoned by parents who ascended to the interplanetary smartcloud, receives a summons for jury service, where he will decide what of the posthumans’ donations is worth taking and what’s too dangerous to touch. He soon falls into a “flash conspiracy” involving a hanging judge in a Dalek-like wheelchair, a wannabe transhuman, and a sybaritic conspiracy theorist. Huw is chased to North America, where he becomes female with stereotype-laden results, dodges fundamentalists and intelligent anarchist ants, and is unexpectedly uploaded and made the solar system’s ambassador to the ominous galactic Authority. Moving at light speed with a light touch, the novel mixes up a frothy cocktail of technological speculation and a wide variety of geeky in-jokes (unobtanium, Vogon poetry, “all the way up to 11”).

August 15, 2012
Obviously, the title must be understood in two senses: How rapturous is it that two titanic figures of geek culture collaborated for this trippy, technobabble-laden tale of the Singularity (aka the technological Rapture)? Billions of humans have abandoned their meat bodies and uploaded themselves into the cloud surrounding the Earth, where they engage in esoteric amusements, spamming the incarnated with bizarre inventions and concocting Byzantine political schemes. Their pawn is Huw Jones, a cranky, neo-Luddite Welsh potter whose larynx, accustomed to the complex glottals of his native tongue, is ideally suited to host the sophisticated communications array of their ambassador. The ascended humans' machinations convey Huw to a Libyan courtroom run by an insanely dictatorial judge; a Charleston, S.C., inhabited by fundamentalists, an underground cult of kinky hedonists and an invading Hypercolony of cyborg ants; and finally the cloud itself, where the continued existence of humanity...depends on Huw's reconciliation with his estranged parents. The novel offers a technologically updated, if less emotionally resonant, discussion of the digital mind/body conundrums explored by William Gibson and Charles Platt 20 years ago, and Tony Daniel 10 years ago. Even though Earth's fate hinges on Huw's relationships, they don't have much depth to them--which may be intentional. In particular, Huw's alleged love for the transhuman, Bonnie, never truly comes into focus; the authors are far more adept at illustrating Huw's incredible self-involvedness and immaturity. Although this book is clearly meant to be broadly humorous, a little less petulance from the protagonist would have made this absurdist sci-fi quest a more absorbing read. Fun, but one might expect more from these two.

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August 1, 2012

This collaboration between two renowned sf authors exemplifies what is best in post-cyberpunk fiction, in all of its barely controlled chaos. Huw, a human throwback in a mostly post-human world, wakes up hungover in a friend's bathtub with a new roaming biohazard tattoo. Familiar with such complications on a now-toxic planet, Huw signs up for what should be a routine tech juror assignment, only to find himself chosen as the human host of an alien ambassador. The plot tangles exponentially from there, involving frequent gender reassignments, a crash landing in the Neverglades, reality show judges, fundamentalist post-Rapture Americans, and genies who are wizards at financial trading. VERDICT While the cultural references fly fast and furious and the doublespeak is not for the uninitiated, the creativity, hilarity, and sheer verve of the comic conundrums will win over the staunchest technophobe. Consider this adventure of multiple dimensions a backdoor into a post-technological singularity world, which will appeal to Doctorow's (Little Brother) and Stross's (Singularity Sky) many fans.--Cathy Lantz, Morton Coll. Lib., Cicero, IL

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2012
Doctorow and Stross, two of the sf genre's more exciting voices, team up to produce a story that is mind-bendingly entertaining but almost impossible to explain. Near the end of the twenty-first century, Huw Jones, an ordinary man, is called to tech jury duty (tech juries evaluate new technologies to determine if they are safe for use); he winds up in possession ofor perhaps possessed byan alien entity, on the run from the authorities, and nearly killed by some backwoods religious fundamentalists; eventually, he has his consciousness translated to electronic form, where he battles another iteration of himself in a simulated landscape to save the world. That's the bare bones of this wildly imaginative story, which plunks readers down in a completely foreign environment and challenges them to assimilate it on the fly, with the story in motion. Peppered with references to pop-culture staples (The Matrix, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), and drawing on concepts from hard sf, cyberpunk, and video games, the novel is a surefire hit for genre fans, especially those familiar with the works of its coauthors. Fans of Adam Roberts' elegant, intellectually challenging sf will also be on firm ground here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)