[ExI] Raptured into confusion

Giulio Prisco giulio at gmail.com
Mon Sep 10 06:09:58 UTC 2012


I bought the book and I am reading it. I read everything by Stross and
Doctorow. The first few pages are very fun.

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 9:05 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki
<rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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