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. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick 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.
The Rapture of the Nerds is a brilliant collaboration by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, two of the defining personalities of post-cyberpunk science fiction.
About the Author :
Cory Doctorow is an award-winning science fiction short-story writer with more than 15 published stories. He was a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. CHARLES STROSS is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has won three Hugo Awards for Best Novella, including for the Laundry Files tale "Equoid." His work has been translated into over twelve languages. His novels include the bestselling Merchant Princes series, the Laundry series (including Locus Award finalist The Dilirium Brief), and several stand-alones including Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Saturn's Children. Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped catastrophes, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stakeout) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing, he tried to change employers just as the bubble burst) to technical writer and prolific journalist covering the IT industry. Along the way he collected degrees in pharmacy and computer science, making him the world's first officially qualified cyberpunk writer.
John Lee has performed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the Globe Theatre in San Diego. He is the author of the plays Blood and Milk, Hitler's Head, Passchendaele, Clean Souls, and Frankincense.
Review :
"Doctorow and Stross take a comic tour of a post-Singularity solar system where posthumans dump digital junk on the 'pre-posthumans' who cling to terrestrial life...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."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
"Mind-bendingly entertaining...The novel is a surefire hit for genre fans. Fans of Adam Roberts' elegant, intellectually challenging SF will also be on firm ground here."
-- "Booklist (starred review)"
"This collaboration between two renowned sf authors exemplifies what is best in post-cyberpunk fiction, in all of its barely controlled chaos...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."
-- "Library Journal"
