Title: The
Rapture of the Nerds
Author: Cory Doctrow and Charles Stross
Series: N/A
Published: 12 April 2013 by Titan
Length: 336 pages
Source: Publisher
Summary: Welcome
to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.
So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.
So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.
Review: Huw is a
Welsh technophobe. In a world where most people have uploaded to the cloud, he
is one of the few(ish) remaining on Earth. Called to do jury service, judging
whether or not a new invention will make the civilisation happy or not (or not essentially being will it
destroy us), he goes. Also, he discovers that somewhere along the line, he got
infected and something wants to use him and..i’m not sure.
I was looking forwards to this. I’ve flicked through Cory
Doctorow’s Little Brother and liked what I saw, and I read his contribution to
Steampunked and loved it. this collaboration should be good, right?
And then I started reading.
OK, the first few pages made sense as set ups and then characters start
cropping up and changing gender and I’m not sure what happened to the
plot. When I say characters cropping
up, I mean Sandra being at her house, and then Huw leaving the house to go to
jury service, and then Sandra showing up at the jury service with no
explanation of what she’s doing there or how she got there or anything. This
happens repeatedly.
Huw is a boring character who doesn’t do much. A little more
interesting is the doctor whose name I forgot. The cast is very varied in terms of beliefs and attitudes, but
it doesn’t work for me and flow.
The whole cloud uploading, changing houses, products of
snakes and things and such-all this futuristic technology was a bit beyond my
ability to imagine.
I have absolutely nothing against genderfluid characters,
but somewhere along the line Huw (who up until that point had been referred to
as male and showed no signs of wanting to be referred to as female) starts
getting feminine pronouns. Also, I don’t think that “acquire” is a word best used in tandem with “gender dysphorria”.
There’s a lot of technobabble throughout. However, hardly
any of it is explained and it’s hard to imagine and follow.
I’m not going to talk about the plot because as far as I
could tell, I couldn’t make one out.
This book tries to be Hitchhikers, you can tell. The
randomness, the futurism, the references to things like Doctor Who and other
pop culturey things. but it doesn’t work becasue I can’t follow the plot at all.
Overall: Strength 1 tea to an impossible book.
