The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations

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Tor Publishing Group, Sep 4, 2012 - Fiction - 352 pages

A brilliant collaboration from the two defining personalities of post-cyberpunk: Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross.

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.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
11
Section 2
17
Section 3
21
Section 4
23
Section 5
27
Section 6
40
Section 7
42
Section 8
57
Section 12
114
Section 13
127
Section 14
178
Section 15
181
Section 16
185
Section 17
196
Section 18
227
Section 19
298

Section 9
93
Section 10
99
Section 11
106
Section 20
300
Section 21
335
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

CORY DOCTOROW is a coeditor of Boing Boing and a columnist for multiple publications including the Guardian, Locus, and Publishers Weekly. He was named one of the Web's twenty-five influencers by Forbes magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. His award-winning novel Little Brother was a New York Times bestseller. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.

CHARLES STROSS, author of several major novels of SF and fantasy including Singularity Sky, Accelerando, Halting State, and Rule 34, is widely hailed as one of the most original voices in modern SF. His short fiction has won multiple Hugo Awards and Locus awards. He lives in Edinburgh.

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