The Rapture of the Nerds

Publisher Marketing: Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century. Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick it obscures the sun. The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander and when that happens, it casually spams Earth s networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there s always someone who ll take a bite from the forbidden apple. So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth s anthill, there s Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors."The Rapture of the Nerds" is a brilliant collaboration by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, two of the defining personalities of post-cyberpunk science fiction." Review Citations: Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2014 pg. 222 (EAN 9781429944915, Other) Publishers Weekly 07/16/2012 pg. 151 (EAN 9780765329103, Hardcover) Booklist 08/01/2012 pg. 41 (EAN 9780765329103, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Library Journal 08/01/2012 pg. 69 (EAN 9780765329103, Hardcover) Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2012 (EAN 9780765329103, Hardcover) Romantic Times 10/01/2012 pg. 66 (EAN 9780765329103, Hardcover) Quill & Quire 09/01/2012 pg. 31 (EAN 9780765329103, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Shelf Awareness 09/07/2012 (EAN 9780765329103, Hardcover) Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2014 pg. 222 (EAN 9780765329103, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Doctorow, Cory Canadian-born Cory Doctorow is the author of the "New York Times" bestselling young adult novel "Little Brother", and the co-editor of the popular blog BoingBoing. His other YA novels include "Pirate Cinema" and "Homeland" (2013), the sequel to "Little Brother". His adult novels and short stories have won him three Locus Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has been named one of the Web's twenty-five "influencers" by "Forbes Magazine" and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He lives in London with his wife and daughter. Contributor Bio:  Stross, Charles Charles Stross is the author of the bestselling Merchant Princes series, the Laundry series, and several stand-alone novels including "Glasshouse", "Accelerando", and "Saturn's Children". Born in Leeds, England, in 1964, Stross studied in London and Bradford, earning degrees in pharmacy and computer science. Over the next decade and a half he worked as a pharmacist, a technical writer, a software engineer, and eventually as a prolific journalist covering the IT industry. His short fiction began attracting wide attention in the late 1990s; his first novel, "Singularity Sky", appeared in 2003. He has subsequently won the Hugo Award twice. He lives with his wife in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a flat that is slightly older than the state of Texas. Contributor Bio:  Lee, John John Lee, a stage actor and writer and a coproducer of feature films, has narrated more than one hundred audiobooks of every conceivable genre, earning some three dozen Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award.