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3.18 AVERAGE
3.18 AVERAGE
A good story that was somehow teeth-grindingly annoying to read.
I picked this up because I liked "Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom." This book had enough interesting concepts to keep me reading, but the prose was a slog. Not sure if it's a common feature of Stross's writing, but it was so overindulgent and crammed with technobabble that it had me groaning every other sentence. That's probably partly the point, but it's super irritating.
dark
emotional
funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
lighthearted
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I'm starting to get the feeling the Singularity subgenre only really has one good book in it. It's an amazing and powerful idea, but most of the novels based around the idea simply don't do it justice. That's partly because the actual implementation of the singularity would be incomprehensible for us mere humans, but I don't know whether than is really a good enough explanation for the silliness that these books tend towards.
Stross & Doctorow's Rapture of the Nerds has a bunch of interesting ideas in it, but in lots of ways those are rehashed from previous books in the genre. The characters are the usual wild and wacky types you get in a singularity novel, battering up against forces for more powerful than themselves and fighting to retain their humanity in the face of an overwhelmingly digital world. But the plot of the novel tended towards the deus ex machina and the Chosen One trope, so it was quite unsatisfying and occasionally annoying.
Stross & Doctorow's Rapture of the Nerds has a bunch of interesting ideas in it, but in lots of ways those are rehashed from previous books in the genre. The characters are the usual wild and wacky types you get in a singularity novel, battering up against forces for more powerful than themselves and fighting to retain their humanity in the face of an overwhelmingly digital world. But the plot of the novel tended towards the deus ex machina and the Chosen One trope, so it was quite unsatisfying and occasionally annoying.
Another reviewer on Goodreads called this book "a zany romp," and then added that she does not LIKE zany romps. Me, I like a zany romp. I liked The Gone-Away World and Year Zero. I very much liked Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Rule 34.
But there's not enough zany here to make The Rapture of the Nerds a truly funny book, and there's not enough challenging mind-bendy new concept stuff to make it a truly challenging book, as, I will say, most of Charlie Stross's and Cory Doctorow's books... are. Wow that's terrible syntax.
For example, the concept in Doctorow's Magic Kingdom was an economy based on esteem and reputation. That so worked, and it was so fascinating. Rule 34 was a cop story involving quantum porn. So entertaining!
Rapture of the Nerds postulates a post-singularity world, in which computational capacity is equal to anything that can be imagined, and so reality is an immensely mutable construct. You've got the Superman problem here - if anything is possible, what's to stop anything from happening - and it winds up being kind of tedious watching the authors trying to throw up roadblocks and wrinkles.
Certain moments are transcendent, true - round about page 170 I was enjoying myself as much as I have reading any of the books referenced above - but then the plot thumps around a corner and the protagonist finds himself to be irrelevant again, and the reader is left wondering why she is reading about this guy again.
Anyway, you can usually look to these authors to be both challenging and funny, but unfortunately, this one dies of exhaustion before it can make it to either shore.
But there's not enough zany here to make The Rapture of the Nerds a truly funny book, and there's not enough challenging mind-bendy new concept stuff to make it a truly challenging book, as, I will say, most of Charlie Stross's and Cory Doctorow's books... are. Wow that's terrible syntax.
For example, the concept in Doctorow's Magic Kingdom was an economy based on esteem and reputation. That so worked, and it was so fascinating. Rule 34 was a cop story involving quantum porn. So entertaining!
Rapture of the Nerds postulates a post-singularity world, in which computational capacity is equal to anything that can be imagined, and so reality is an immensely mutable construct. You've got the Superman problem here - if anything is possible, what's to stop anything from happening - and it winds up being kind of tedious watching the authors trying to throw up roadblocks and wrinkles.
Certain moments are transcendent, true - round about page 170 I was enjoying myself as much as I have reading any of the books referenced above - but then the plot thumps around a corner and the protagonist finds himself to be irrelevant again, and the reader is left wondering why she is reading about this guy again.
Anyway, you can usually look to these authors to be both challenging and funny, but unfortunately, this one dies of exhaustion before it can make it to either shore.
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Eh. Honestly, most of the other reviews cover it. I lost all my patience READING the book, I don't really want to have to struggle through the meta-data of talking about it. It does get better in the last half, though, and once you find the cadence of things, that helps as well. I mean, it's a book about post-humanity living through the singularity, written by Stross and Doctorow. (Which is a weird combo, and if you're familiar with either of them, you can sort of see where each author is slotting themselves in.) It's only slightly less gratuitous than wading through Spider Jerusalem's unfiltered brainweasels.
This is book that needed to be read when it came out. It feels so dated. Not just because of the technology, which is going to happen and can be ignored, but the political references supposedly in the future, and the language around trans people. I made it about 3/4 of the way through and skimmed the rest.
adventurous
dark
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes