The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Two of science fiction’s most exciting modern authors, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross have teamed up with Titan Books to bring you The Rapture of The Nerds.
Huw’s a Welsh Luddite, living post-singularity in an old-fashioned brick and mortar home. Meanwhile, millions around him (including his own parents) have decided to ‘upload’ themselves into the virtual world where age can never catch up with them.
One day Huw’s called up for Jury Service, not to potentially convict criminals, this is tech jury service. Members of the public are enlisted to decide whether new technologies should be allowed or are deemed too dangerous. Excited to be able to stop some new technology heating up the world, Huw heads to Libya to take part in the decision process. This starts a twisted tale that leads to romance, death, alien infection, sex changes and generally saving the planet.
With sci-fi pop culture references galore and enough philosophical ideas to get the brain pumping, this novel runs at 100 miles an hour. Huw is thrown from one extreme, life-threatening situation to the next, all with outcomes you could never expect!
Q&A WITH CHARLES STROSS
You’re both well-known solo writers but what made you want to team up on this novel?
Fun. Also, it didn’t get started as a novel; initially, it was going to be a short story, and then it grew into a novella before we sold it. One thing led to another, by way of a second novella, and then Tor offered us a contract to “finish the book”.
Did either of you have to change your writing style or processes to work together?
A process, yes — we had to work together! Style? I don’t think so. We took turns writing, then edited each other’s previous chunk before adding more of our own. The effect was a weird double-headed hybrid.
Which was your favourite character to write?
This question bears so little resemblance to how I think about writing that I’ve got no idea how to answer it.
Did you ever disagree on plot or characters direction, if so, how did you work it out?
We hired a boxing ring and pummeled each other bloody. When that got tiresome, Cory proposed a duel, with small muzzle-loading carronades; I declined the invitation.
How long did it take you both to write the book, from the first idea to publication?
About six years, of which five and a half years were spent working on other projects. (We didn’t do it all at once, we did it as three separate projects.)
If you had to describe the novel in just 5 words, what would they be?
The Rapture of the Nerds!
Q&A WITH CORY DOCTOROW
How did the idea for the book come together?
I was living in SF, and Charlie was living in Edins, and though we’d not met, he and I had corresponded and read one another’s’ work and such. Charlie proposed collaborating, I agreed, and he sent me the first ~500 words of a story he’d got stuck on, called JURY SERVICE. I rewrote that, added ~500 words more, and sent it back. He did the same, and we volleyed until the story was done.
APPEALS COURT, the second novella that went into the novel, went less smoothly. Now that there was some backstory, we each seemed to possess distinctive ideas about where the story should go, and there’s a lot of literal back and fro in the first printing of that story as the protagonist runs back and forth while we tried to wrest control. Thankfully all that was edited out in the rewrite we did for the book.
This was almost certainly exacerbated by my own reluctance to talk about writing — I prefer to write out my story problems. Charlie’s much better about it.
PAROLE BOARD — the final novella, twice as long as the other two combined — went much more smoothly, likely because we had both come along quite some way in our own writing habits. We had a couple of meetings — one f2f, one Skype — and sorted it all out and banged it out.
What is singularity?
It’s a literary device. As I wrote in Locus in 2007:
http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/07/cory-doctorow-progressive-apocalypse.html
Futurism has a psychological explanation, as recounted in Harvard clinical psych prof Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. Our memories and our projections of the future are necessarily imperfect. Our memories consist of those observations our brains have bothered to keep records of, woven together with inference and whatever else is lying around handy when we try to remember something. Ask someone who’s eating a great lunch how breakfast was, and odds are she’ll tell you it was delicious. Ask the same question of someone eating rubbery aeroplane food, and he’ll tell you his breakfast was awful. We weave the past out of our imperfect memories and our observable present.
We make the future in much the same way: we use reasoning and evidence to predict what we can, and whenever we bump up against uncertainty, we fill the void with the present day. Hence the injunction on women soldiers in the future of Starship Troopers, or the bizarre, glassed-over “Progressland” city diorama at the end of the 1964 World’s Fair exhibit The Carousel of Progress, which Disney built for GE.
Lapsarianism — the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace that makes each year worse than the last — is the predominant future feeling for many people. It’s easy to see why: an imperfectly remembered golden childhood gives way to the worries of adulthood and physical senescence. Surely the world is getting worse: nothing tastes as good as it did when we were six, everything hurts all the time, and our matured gonads drive us into frenzies of bizarre, self-destructive behaviour.
Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Orthodox Jewish friend whose tradition holds that each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears’ wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.
The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is an apocalypse. If things get worse, and worse, and worse, eventually they’ll just run out of worseness. Eventually, they’ll bottom out, a kind of rotten death of the universe when Lapsarian entropy hits the nadir and takes us all with it.
Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the Enlightenment ideal of a world of great people standing on the shoulders of giants. Each of us contributes to improving the world’s storehouse of knowledge (and thus its capacity for bringing joy to all of us), and our descendants and proteges take our work and improve on it. The very idea of “progress” runs counter to the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as a species, are falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of entropy into a neat, tidy braid.
Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition — if only because we eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human condition can improve. And science fiction has a name for the upper bound of progress, a name for the progressive apocalypse:
We call it the Singularity.
Vernor Vinge’s Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a stage that allows us to “upload” our minds into software, run them at faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable because everything is possible. We will cease to be human and become (as the title of Rudy Rucker’s next novel would have it) Postsingular.
The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out of progress. It’s the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity “the rapture of the nerds,” an apt description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian apocalypse.
At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are illusions. The central thesis of Stumbling on Happiness is that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our predictions are skewed by our imperfect memories and our capacity for filling the future with the present day.
The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn’t send out transporter-equipped drones — instead, it would likely find itself on missions whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely incomprehensible to us, and so obvious to its crew that they couldn’t hope to explain them.
Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only era that we can hope to understand, because it’s the only era that lets us check our observations and predictions against reality.
How far off do you think it is?
It’s not.
Several years ago you mentioned the concept of getting lost was something which, with location technology, about to die out. You’re batting a solid wicket here so what do you think is the next societal concept to go?
Cory, you’re up. What do you think will be the next societal construct we lose?
I think we’re approaching a crisis point in the distribution of dividends from automation. As with the Luddite crisis of the industrial revolution, automation is obviating a ton of labour (including highly skilled jobs), and the dividends from those productivity gains are being hoarded by capital — the 1% are getting richer, the rest are relegated to increasing precarity as they compete for scarcer jobs and real wages plummet. This can’t last forever.
What led to the pair of you working together?
See above.
How did you divide the book up? Was it a joint idea or did you write different sections and then bolt them together?
See above.
What changed in the process?
That implies that we planned things! We didn’t — the story was an emergent property of our mutual one-upmanship and attempts to amuse one another.
Did anything not make the cut?
Oh, there’s a few bits and pieces that we excised, but nothing substantial.
What’s the moment you’re proudest of in the book?
I like the knock-knock joke about the Singularity at the beginning of PAROLE BOARD
Are you considering working together again?
Sure — the major obstacle isn’t desire, it’s diaries. We’re both pretty busy and finding a time of mutual non-occupation is a major undertaking.
Future work
Titan will soon publish PIRATE CINEMA, a YA novel that came out in the USA last autumn, to critical/commercial success:
Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by reassembling footage from popular films he downloads from the net. In the dystopian near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; the punishment for being caught three times is that your entire household’s access to the internet is cut off for a year, with no appeal.
Trent’s too clever for that to happen. Except it does, and it nearly destroys his family. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where he slowly learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. This brings him in touch with a demimonde of artists and activists who are trying to fight a new bill that will criminalize even more harmless internet creativity, making felons of millions of British citizens at a stroke.
Things look bad. Parliament is in power of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers-that-be haven’t entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people’s minds….
Next from TITAN is HOMELAND, the sequel to my novel LITTLE BROTHER, which just spent 4 weeks on the NYT bestseller list:
In Cory Doctorow’s wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco—an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.
A few years later, California’s economy collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumb drive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.
Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him—but he can’t admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He’s surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago regard him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He’s not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet,
before he’s gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do.
Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they’re used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want. Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.
I’m working on a novella called THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON for Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyphics project with Arizona State University — it’s about hackers who land a 3D printer on the moon and spend a generation remotely printing out a habitat for their descendants to occupy.
I’m also planning a prequel to DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM, my first novel, which came out 10 years ago.
Finally, my agent is shopping my recently completed nonfiction book about copyright, called INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE.
Thank you to Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow for taking the time out to answer these questions.
Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross is out now, Titan Books, £7.99. This review/ interview was posted as part of the Rapture of the Nerds Mind-bending Blog Tour.
If you like Rapture of the Nerds you’ll love Empire State by Adam Christopher