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A review by scotoma
The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross
4.0
Most writing collaborations I’ve seen, especially when they come from two authors I like individually, have been disappointing, often watering down the unique qualities of each writer to find a middle ground that is less interesting than each writers style on its own. TRotN is probably the first time where I’ve seen the opposite happening, two (in my opinion) damn good writers who managed to perfectly complement each other. The often more optimistic and benign mode of Doctorow mixed with the more vicious and pessimistic tone of Stross, offering a humorous take on the singularity whose comedy has an extremely sharp bite unusual for Doctorow, yet still shows some measure of hope and goodwill that is often entirely missing in Stross’ fiction.
In many ways, it seems like a big middle finger to the singularitarians, a bookend to Stross’ own Accelerando and an antidote to its future-obsessed and almost Heinleinian-übermensch-type main character Manfred Macx. While Doctorow himself never really wrote anything directly about the singularity, except maybe in some shorts, his depiction of post-scarcity societies aimed at the same target audience, and together with Stross seemed to ride on a similar wave of third- or fourth-wave hard SF enthusiasm, until it all ebbed away.
Huw Jones, our hapless hero (similar to Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams THGttG) wounds up in events he doesn’t actually wants a part in but is forced to participate, to save at various point Earth or what remains of the human race. Never the driving force, but rather the puppet of shadowy players, who hide behind many layers and use him as a ping-pong ball in their existential as well as philosophical battles.
There’s rarely a moment of rest, everything spins faster and faster and stakes get raised to almost insane levels until it looks like it couldn’t go farther or get worse, but then it does. Originally started as a single story collaboration that got a sequel and then later a third to finish of a whole book, it’s a tour-de-force that, like Accelerando, has an extremely high idea density and tries to show of its cleverness in almost every sentence. That said, unlike Accelerando, its infused with humor and level of self-awareness almost completely absent in the former work, which makes it, not better, just different (also much funnier).
When Accelerando came out, lots of people fell prey to the whole technological singularity belief system and took it as axiomatic dogma. Accelerando didn’t even make it look good, merely glossed over most of the terrors it invoked. TRotN hammers those terrors home from every page, shows just what we have to lose if something like the singularity would really happen and just how helpless all of us would really be, how little power we would have to deal with it or shape those events. Some of the people who follow the Kurzweil-cult imagine themselves at the top of a wave of change, just like Rand-cultists imagine themselves as John Galt instead of the billions of nameless randos who were his victims.
For all of that, this is a pretty entertaining, fast read that masks most of its intention by never preaching outright and allows you to enjoy it just as a wild ride if you chose to do so. Even if you don’t care for the subtext, it has lots of clever science fictional ideas and knows how to make them work as part of the story.
I wasn’t expecting much from the book (as I said in the beginning, most of the collaborations I’ve read were pretty meh), but its probably one of the best surprises I had in recent times.
In many ways, it seems like a big middle finger to the singularitarians, a bookend to Stross’ own Accelerando and an antidote to its future-obsessed and almost Heinleinian-übermensch-type main character Manfred Macx. While Doctorow himself never really wrote anything directly about the singularity, except maybe in some shorts, his depiction of post-scarcity societies aimed at the same target audience, and together with Stross seemed to ride on a similar wave of third- or fourth-wave hard SF enthusiasm, until it all ebbed away.
Huw Jones, our hapless hero (similar to Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams THGttG) wounds up in events he doesn’t actually wants a part in but is forced to participate, to save at various point Earth or what remains of the human race. Never the driving force, but rather the puppet of shadowy players, who hide behind many layers and use him as a ping-pong ball in their existential as well as philosophical battles.
There’s rarely a moment of rest, everything spins faster and faster and stakes get raised to almost insane levels until it looks like it couldn’t go farther or get worse, but then it does. Originally started as a single story collaboration that got a sequel and then later a third to finish of a whole book, it’s a tour-de-force that, like Accelerando, has an extremely high idea density and tries to show of its cleverness in almost every sentence. That said, unlike Accelerando, its infused with humor and level of self-awareness almost completely absent in the former work, which makes it, not better, just different (also much funnier).
When Accelerando came out, lots of people fell prey to the whole technological singularity belief system and took it as axiomatic dogma. Accelerando didn’t even make it look good, merely glossed over most of the terrors it invoked. TRotN hammers those terrors home from every page, shows just what we have to lose if something like the singularity would really happen and just how helpless all of us would really be, how little power we would have to deal with it or shape those events. Some of the people who follow the Kurzweil-cult imagine themselves at the top of a wave of change, just like Rand-cultists imagine themselves as John Galt instead of the billions of nameless randos who were his victims.
For all of that, this is a pretty entertaining, fast read that masks most of its intention by never preaching outright and allows you to enjoy it just as a wild ride if you chose to do so. Even if you don’t care for the subtext, it has lots of clever science fictional ideas and knows how to make them work as part of the story.
I wasn’t expecting much from the book (as I said in the beginning, most of the collaborations I’ve read were pretty meh), but its probably one of the best surprises I had in recent times.