The Rapture of the Nerds by Stross, Doctorow published
September 9, 2012
Science fiction author Charlie Stross announced Friday on his blog that The Rapture of the Nerds: A Tale of The Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations, a new science fiction novel co-authored by Cory Doctorow, has been published by Tor Books.
The book is available now from Amazon and will soon be available for free download under a Creative Commons license.
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.
Comments (8)
by alliwant
Great use of language, amazing imagery just in a few brief excerpts. Must have.
by Starheart
It’s interesting to note how fiction of this caliber always features the equivalent of an Amish equivalent protagonist to make the fictional world at least somehow relatable to the audience.
Me? I personally think that what most writers miss is, paradoxically, the evolution of interpersonal communication. We’ve already reached the limitation on communicating in words and symbols by making video calls accessible wordwide, and the only progress possible therefore is to no longer communicate in words and symbols but rather share ideas and opinions in a more direct way rather than approximation of the true meaning. In a way, this indeed will be an assimilation and the resulting meta-society could be said to have a consciousness of its own. What will it do to such staples of social interaction as expressing emotions or lying is quite hard to imagine from our perspective. Maybe we will indeed experience the shattering of our individual ego barriers, much like it was eerily yet beautifully portrayed in the cult anime, End of Evangelion.
by Giulio Prisco
Charlie may not be as optimist as most transhumanists about the timeline of development of uploading, machine intelligence etc., but he certainly doesn’t deny their feasibility in principle. His critique of transhumanism is mostly political.
by Khannea Suntzu
Boss, Charlie and Doctorow sell books.Stories. These have plot devices and constructed narratives to “work”. A story is something you have to put together and like plumbing it needs to be screwed on tightly. Statements made in these books may be educational and illustrative (Rainbows end surely was, I am basing my presentation in SF for the better half on that) but they remain “stuff they want to sell”. With all due respect clearly. You can’t apply measurements of optimism or pessimism on these books – a happy future wouldn’t;t appeal to the primate hardwaring and won’t get sold.
by sparsethinker
Stross and his intellectual peers have, correctly, concluded that they would appear terribly unsophisticated and downright sheeple-like if they “believed” in something. (Science isn’t a belief, look it up.) Very well.
The Singularity and all other advancement, pre and post, happens if it happens. Believing in it or any speculatech, doesn’t make it possible, but it doesn’t make it impossible either. Whereas, thinking something is impossible is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I, for one, am doing my best and utmost to bring the future here sooner, no matter what people of his kind choose to believe. If I listened to them, I wouldn’t.
Privately, they may think the promise of technologies collectively know as the Singularity, is a plausible scenario, though perhaps not as soon and as rapidly as all of us would like.
Regardless of his public distancing (well, he never may have been close) from the nerd “rapturists”, I still have to highly recommend Accelerando. If it doesn’t make you “believe” in a more advanced future, almost nothing will.
by Khannea Suntzu
Odd. The story these guys describes is not much different from what the developed world is doing to the Kalahari right now. These authors are just extrapolating how ruthless the combination of numerical and technological superiority can be to “the backward”.
Left behind indeed.
by smb12321
Interesting that Stross is not a Singularity believer. He has repeatedly criticized the economic and political leanings of many advocates for their libertarianism and market vs state orientation. He thinks many predictions are wrong – uploading, machine intelligence and most importantly, machine psychology (thus no bootstrapping or spreading of intelligence in the universe).
by Khannea Suntzu
I seem to recall his statement that as a Science Fiction writer he doesn’t see much sense in thinking about Teh Singularity, since you can’t make much coherent statements about it from the inside. The best (most captivating? Not sure..) Singularity fiction comprises throwbacks reacting in slapstick ways to how weird this stuff would get. However that’s still a spectator spots, right?
Maybe the best way to describe the Singularity is as being devoured by Cthulhu. You may be screaming once it happens, but after the moment The Devoured always end up howling in eerie voices…
JOINN USSSS