The Rapture of the Nerds

[lethargic_man]

I've been reading The Rapture of the Nerds, by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, which I have been eagerly looking forward to since I first heard of it. As the title implies, it's about the Singularity, or rather the relationship of baseline humanity to a developing Matrioshka brain, a subject Stross's novel Accelerando skirted, by diverting the action away from the solar system during the critical period. The Rapture of the Nerds skirts the subject too—it's a difficult thing to tackle directly—but does so in a significantly closer orbit than Accelerando. Nevertheless, for those who read this kind of thing, there's little in the way of groundbreaking new ideas: reading it, I was thinking, "That's out of Greg Egan's 'Reasons To Be Cheerful', meanwhile he took that from Ken Macleod..." Plus, there's a nice twist on Contact. Nevertheless, it's a fun read, in places lots of fun:

The surviving missiles stab towards them and there's a musical chime from the countermeasures control panel. [...] "You've got mail!" the countermeasures system announces in the syrupy tones of a kindergarten teacher. "Facebook-Goldman-AOL welcomes you to the United States of America. You have 14,023 new friend requests, which you will receive after this message from our sponsors. Your hen wants milking, your goat has been turned into a zombie, there are 14,278,123 new status updates, and you have been defriended 1,974,231 times. There are 5,348,011 updates to the privacy policy for your review."

Bonnie thumps something on the panel, muscles like whipcord standing out on her arm as she glares at the oncoming missiles. Huw backs away. She might actually be a communicant, he realises in absolute horror. She might actually have a Facebook account! She's mad enough.... These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

The novel is the sequel to their decade-old novella "Jury Service", so I dug that out to have a reread, only to subsequently discover "Jury Service" is actually now the first section of the novel.

Part of "Jury Service" is set in Libya; it's interesting to see the changes that have been made following the toppling of the Gaddaffi regime: not only have references to the man himself been expunged, but the People's Magical Libyan Jamahiriya has become the Magical Libyan Jamahiriya Renaissance. It reminds me of the changes Charlie had to make between the writing of The Atrocity Archive in 2000 and its publication: Charlie wanted a reference to an Islamic fundamentalist who wanted to strike a great blow against the west but hadn't really achieved much, but his choice of name was overtaken by subsequent events:

'They deported him for excessive zeal,' Angelton says heavily. `Turns out he was marshalling resources for Usamah bin Laden's school. Do I need to draw you a diagram?'

'Guess not. What does bin Laden teach?'

'Originally management studies and economics, but lately he's added suicide bombing, the necessity for armed struggle preceded by Da'wa and military preparation in order to repel the greater Kufr, and gauge metrics for raster-driven generative sephiroth on vector processors. Summoning the lesser shoggothim, in other words.'

By the time the novel was published, Osama Bin Laden was no longer a terrorist wannabe; so autopope substituted the name of Yusuf Qaradawi into the above passage. Let that be a lesson to all who believe everything they read and would have concluded that Bin Laden (or Qaradawi) originally taught management studies and economics.

The novel is a little oddly structured; after "Jury Service", which obviously had to be self-contained as originally written, the novel goes into an action-heavy second part in America before moving on to a third part in the virtual reality of the Cloud that asks lots of deep, deep philosophical questions. Actually, I was turning the pages so fast, due to wanting to find out what happened, that I didn't really give that third part the attention it deserved, so I think I might go back and reread it.

I wonder if the different feel to the divers parts of it reflects work by the different authors. Certainly I've noticed one piece of evidence of such: the narrative is inconsistent between use of "arse" (a Briticism, probably written by Charlie) and "ass" (an Americanism, probably written by Doctorow). Possibly the answer lies hidden in the backlog of Charlie's blog, but I've got better things to do with my time than head off trawling for it.