Starred Review: The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross - Tor/Forge Blog
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Starred Review: The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross

Starred Review: The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross

Tor/Forge Blog

Image Place holder  of - 40“Doctorow and Stross, two of the SF genre’s more exciting voices, team up to produce a story that is mindbendingly entertaining but almost impossible to explain….Peppered with references to pop-culture staples (The Matrix, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and drawing on concepts from hard SF, cyberpunk, and videogames, the novel is a surefire hit for genre fans, especially those familiar with the works of its coauthors. Fans of Adam Roberts’ elegant, intellectually challenging SF will also be on firm ground here.”

The Rapture of the Nerds, by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, gets a starred review in Booklist!

Here’s the full review, which is in today’s issue:

Placeholder of  -51 Doctorow and Stross, two of the SF genre’s more exciting voices, team up to produce a story that is mindbendingly entertaining but almost impossible to explain. Near the end of the twenty-first century, Huw Jones, an ordinary man, is called to tech jury duty (tech juries evaluate new technologies to determine if they are safe for use); he winds up in possession of—or perhaps possessed by—an alien entity, on the run from the authorities, and nearly killed by some backwoods religious fundamentalists; eventually, he has his consciousness translated to electronic form, where he battles another iteration of himself in a simulated landscape to save the world. That’s the bare bones of this wildly imaginative story, which plunks readers down in a completely foreign environment and challenges them to assimilate it on the fly, with the story in motion. Peppered with references to pop-culture staples (The Matrix, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and drawing on concepts from hard SF, cyberpunk, and videogames, the novel is a surefire hit for genre fans, especially those familiar with the works of its coauthors. Fans of Adam Roberts’ elegant, intellectually challenging SF will also be on firm ground here.

The Rapture of the Nerds will be published on September 4th.