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Charles Stross
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Cory Doctorow
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The Rapture of the Nerds Paperback – 12 April 2013

by Cory Doctorow (Author), Charles Stross (Author)
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Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the 21st century. Earth has a population of roughly a billion, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Young Huw, technophobic, misanthropic, has been selected for Tech Jury Service, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and some truly awful moments on bathroom floors.
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  1. Print length
    336 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Titan Books
  4. Publication date
    12 April 2013
  5. Dimensions
    20 x 2.3 x 16.2 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    1781167443
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1781167441
  8. See all details
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Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
378 global ratings

Top reviews from United Kingdom

Danielle Lovesey
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and strange
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 January 2014
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This is a real get you thinking imaginative book worth the read it's fun and entertaining but is also intellectually fascinating the idea of a heaven created by man it's bizarre and brilliant loved it
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4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 October 2018
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A nice romp through our earthly & simulated future. Not up with Strosses best; Doctorow lightens things. Still well worth a punt if you're a fan of either author.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Ok but overlong
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 June 2013
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A reasonable tale, but I felt it dragged a bit at times. Although some bits, eg the ending, seemed skimped on.
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Tom L
4.0 out of 5 stars and I was not disappointed.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2015
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A well written book with interesting concepts too. A bit of a sideways look at all the singularity / rapture novels out there - very much what I expected from these authors, and I was not disappointed.
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Liam Hogan
4.0 out of 5 stars A fix up that doesn't quite.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 February 2017
There's a lot to like in this, particularly in how it starts. As a vision of a luddite's view of time after the singularity, the first section starts brightly with buckets of humour and general weirdness.
And then it kind of loses its way.
The second section doesn't quite live up the first, even though the religious hotbed that is America and the supercolony have great potential. Partly because Huw is such a passenger, and his ambassador does little to help until the end, (and why then, but not earlier?) it feels a little to much of a leaf at the whim of ripples and eddies.
And then the final cloud based section, while also fun at parts, seems to avoid the whole point of the singularity - where are the supercomputers? Other than the genii, it seems a very clunky humanist cloud. Maybe ANYTHING ever depicted in a cloud is likely to fail, though authors do seem to want to keep trying...
Reading up on the history, this was two longish stories with an added one to flesh it out. It shows. Less so that it is the work of two authors, this may have added to the ideas rich nature of it, though not perhaps helped it reach a solid enough structure.
So, while I enjoyed reading it, it certainly didn't live up to the promise of its beginning, which is a real shame. I wavered between 3 and 4 stars, and then decided it had had far more 1 star votes than it deserved, so went high.
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Alex
3.0 out of 5 stars Transhumanism by way of Hitchhiker's; starts well but fizzles out
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 July 2016
The Rapture of the Nerds owes a lot to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: a misanthropic everyman protagonist, an episodic structure with an anarchic disregard for plot, and unfortunately an overdone finale.

Compiled from two short novellas and a lengthy chunk of new material, it's the opening sections that are the most fun. Huw is a technophobic Welshman who spends his days spinning pots while much of humanity has ascended to an interplanetary collective consciousness. The new posthuman race can't leave well enough alone and insists on bombarding its lessers with incomprehensible revelations that could turn out to be anything from cosmic practical jokes to physics breakthroughs, and perhaps both at the same time. Huw cons his way onto one of the juries responsible for evaluating a new innovation, stumbles into a multifactional anarcho-conspiracist fiasco that defies description, and tries to find his way back to an ordinary, sane, human life.

In true Adams-esque fashion, it's really just an excuse to ping-pong between colourful settings and characters that make a coy commentary on our relationship with science and technology. Whereas Hitchhiker's dealt in science fiction cliches and high-brow metaphysics, Rapture is focused on present-day internet culture, body modification, science fetishism and our timeless need for self-improvement. Wild new ideas are introduced casually and without un-needed explanation; the Huws of this world will grok the meaning from context, while others will reach for their tablets and look up hot new concepts in human evolution.

It's at once thought provoking and deeply amusing, and brings its ideas to life through the bureaucratic structures and modestly unhinged characters who alternately pursue, ensnare and rescue Huw. There's little regard for conventional ideas about plot and character development in this part of the book, with one particularly farcical section seeing the hapless misanthrope frogmarched into and gallantly extracted from the same impending doom three times.

Unfortunately the new material, comprising about half the book, just isn't fun. Characters lose their personalities and distinctive voices altogether, and events begin to revolve almost exclusively around the mechanics of the new posthuman scenario, throwing up double-crosses and betrayals-but-not which frequently need pages of tedious exposition to untangle. There are some cute ideas here, and some honest efforts towards character development, but they don't come together into either a meaningful whole or (more appropriately) a series of engaging vignettes. It's a downhill slide towards a conclusion that is heinously predictable and rote.

I can't be too down on the book given that the opening two novellas are so enjoyable, and they're sufficiently self-contained that I can just ignore (or cut off...) the back half. Don't say I didn't warn you though.
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Top reviews from other countries

beheldocean42
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in Canada on 14 May 2015
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liked it
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R. Elder
5.0 out of 5 stars Funny satire, wild ride
Reviewed in the United States on 27 April 2013
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This was a fun read. Satire full of interesting cultural details. Takes the idea of AI moves it to the a literal cloud. What happens when our cloud is judged by yet further 'advanced' clouds and what do you do if you are just meat? Many angles and ideas, at times it felt heavy handed or a bit over the top, but was always thought provoking.
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Axel
5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent and funny
Reviewed in Germany on 28 October 2012
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For the content of the book refer to the description above - for my opinion: I loved it. It was fast, very intelligent, surprising and very entertaining without being to plain and easy. It rewards readers who are familiar with the idea of the singularity, but anyone can read it. It is more Charles Stross then Cory Doctorow imho if you are familiar with both authors. I enjoyed it and hope they are going to work together again.
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alex
4.0 out of 5 stars I liked it, but I usually enjoy cyber/sci-fi books that ...
Reviewed in the United States on 31 July 2014
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This was a silly book. I liked it, but I usually enjoy cyber/sci-fi books that are a little more serious in tone. You could tell the author was influenced by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It had some neat sci-fi ideas that really helped me continue on with the book.

I'd say that my biggest complaint is that I just didn't care for the main character. The "world" could have been painted better, as it's so outlandish you can't really compare it to anything real. The book was too busy being silly to do that. I guess the author wanted to keep things moving along, which I was thankful for.

The concepts in the book about transhumanism, however, were absolutely fascinating. That made it well worth the read for me.
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darkguardian2
3.0 out of 5 stars A Sci Fi Gumbo Full of 'Member Berries
Reviewed in the United States on 9 April 2024
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First, it’s in British English mixed with technical jargon which made it a chore to plow through the first half of the book. “The Rapture of the Nerds” immerses readers in a future where the digital Singularity is on the verge of taking off. We follow the character of Huw Jones. I can’t really say the person is a protagonist since everything that happens to Huw isn’t of his own doing. Along with a IoT teapot housing a holographic genie reminiscent of Robin Williams’ Aladdin, Huw stumbles through a post nuclear war landscape, where radioactive fallout covers North America and NORAD computers still target aircraft.
The novel’s dual authorship—Stross and Doctorow—creates a dysfunctional dichotomy. It’s as if one wrote the opening chapters while the other penned the second half.
Reading the first 200 pages was like a very turbulent flight with technical babble and scientific terms only those in the field will understand.
The second half of the book was a smoother ride.
I would advise those reading to Ignore the tech details and focus on the plot and action.
Many of the references are obscure, others lost to time unless you were around during the late 90s. There were many cultural references crammed in that overwhelmed the story and didn’t really flesh out the world.
There’s the devilish coincidence: 199405 Lucifer, a case number tied to Donald Trump and his clandestine handling of secret files in Florida. The book’s 2012 publication date makes this reference eerily on the nose and must have been a post edit after the fact.
As Huw reports to New Libya for a tech jury duty—weighing the fate of technology and information—the reader depends on Huw to show them his world and what’s happening. How can we know what’s happening when even Huw is lost? Libya and South Carolina form the backdrop, and a TV Judge Judy character performs for invisible cameras in a closed session. Sci-fi IPs are constantly references through the narrative, named or parodied in never ending ‘member berries.
Along with the references are every hot-button topic of the time. Including pronouns, assisted suicides, cloning, advanced bioengineered nanites, and complete brain uploads. Yet, curiously absent are any references to big cities and governments.
There is infrastructure, internet, crypto currency and even television but how and for who. We instead travel through third world areas and back swamps of America’s South, a world something like the video game Deus Ex: Invisible War.
Radical groups hold the reins in most areas with their extremist values,
Christians govern the US, while Marxist Muslims rule New Libya.
The story takes off with a signal of alien first contact, Similar to Carl Sagan’s “Contact”. and how to respond to it. Huw is dragged through the whole situation with little choice in the manner. He has his gender changes without his knowledge, and taken to a Matrix like levels of existence which requires him dying. He’s brought back to reality only for the reader to question if it’s really real when his natural unaugmented body is somehow hacked
Yet, in every jam, a savior appears, untangling Huw’s mess. His teapot genie (djinni) strings him along and getting him out of tough spots but not before stringing Huw along before giving the solution he had all along.
Huw wants to be human. (S)he insists on eating, sleeping, and making pots, even when it’s not unnecessary in the “Matrix.”
If you get through those the first 202 pages, it’s worth a read.
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