A review by onceandfuturelaura
The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross

4.0

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 genre repurposing. One that particularly delighted me, as Huw is unwillingly 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 And Slartibartfast has been replaced by – oh, that would be telling.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.