[ExI] Raptured into confusion

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

I just bought the Stross & Doctorow opus, "The Rapture of the Nerds",
enticed by promises of "devices that could conceivably exist in six,
sixty or six hundred years' time" on the cover. Didn't it get
discussed hereabouts recently?

Well, anyway, as you may guess, it's a story about the singularity
except you do get more than you bargained for. It has bits of
Rumsfeld-bashing and Sarah Palin jokes - custom-made to disclose the
authors' tribal affiliation and the exact time they wrote it. There is
the obligatory Great Flood reference, ubiquitous in latter-day sci-fi,
from David Brin to Peter Hamilton - when will these writers catch up
with actual science? According to the famed climate activist, James
Hansen, the Manhattan island was supposed to have been flooded around
2004, but don't worry, it's gonna happen, like, any time now. Then
there is a minor goof with using a serotonin reuptake inhibitor to
cause depression.

All this is just warm up - the denouement comes when the protagonists
find themselves stranded in a nano-tech-ant-infested South, inhabited
by the book's villains, the evangelist extropian Christian fanatic
murderous witch-burning Objectivist Ayn Rand worshippers.

Really?

I heard that the true-blue partisans tend to see people outside the
pale as a blurred, gray mass of hateful automatons but, seriously,
conflating extropians with evangelists goes beyond the line of duty.

Charlie, your brand of humor works great when leavened with the
macabre but falls flat when used to channel contempt. Go back to the
Laundry, clean up your act, maybe you can get some whuffie.

Rafal