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The Rapture of the Nerds
Wednesday, January 9th, 2013 06:06 pmI'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."( Read more... )
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.
