Publisher Description
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.
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“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
About the Authors
Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and author science fiction and nonfiction. His writing has won numerous awards, including three Locus Awards, two John W. Campbell Awards, three Prometheus Awards, two Sunburst Awards, the White Pine Award, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, among others. He has served as Canadian regional director of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is coeditor of the blog Boing Boing, and he was named one of the web’s twenty-five “influencers” by Forbes and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a contributing author to Wired magazine, and his writing has been published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Globe and Mail, the Boston Globe, Popular Science, and others.
Charles Stross is
the author of the bestselling Merchant Princes series, the Laundry series, and
several stand-alone novels, including Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Saturn’s Children.
Born in Leeds, England, in 1964, Stross studied in London and Bradford, earning
degrees in pharmacy and computer science. Over the next decade and a half he
worked as a pharmacist, a technical writer, a software engineer, and eventually
as a prolific journalist covering the IT industry. His short fiction began
attracting wide attention in the late 1990s; his first novel, Singularity Sky, appeared in 2003. He
has subsequently won the Hugo Award twice. He lives with his wife in Edinburgh,
Scotland, in a flat that is slightly older than the state of Texas.
About John Lee
John Lee is the winner of numerous Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. He has twice won acclaim as AudioFile’s Best Voice in Fiction & Classics. He also narrates video games, does voice-over work, and writes plays. He is an accomplished stage actor and has written and coproduced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit. He played Alydon in the 1963–64 Doctor Who serial The Daleks.