02-13-13:Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross Find 'The Rapture of the Nerds'
Alien Earth
With words, writers can work a sort of magic that cannot be achieved in any other medium. In just a few short sentences, great writers can conjure images and create characters that simply cannot exist in our world. They can set in motion plots and action that are unthinkable until we read about them. The key is that the reader does all the heavy lifting. The reader provides the realizations of what the writer has imagined. It's a code, a cipher that once broken unlocks a whole world.
Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross are well-versed in the wor(l)d-building business. Both are seasoned science fiction writers with many worlds to their credit. In 'The Rapture of the Nerds,' Doctorow and Stross turn their grammar amplifiers up to eleven in order to craft a ripping farce set in a future that rides the edges of incomprehensibility with the finesse of a graceful drunk trying to hail a cabbie after a major league bender. Swaying, shouting, wheedling and inveigling against all ills in this world and those likely to follow, 'The Rapture of the Nerds' combines low humor, high intelligence and dangerous creativity to actually succeed in its quest to see the unforeseeable future.
When the world has gone so far to hell as to be virtually and actually unrecognizable, readers need a guide with both feet on the ground, so Doctorow and Stross tell the story of Huw, a Welsh rejectionist who attempts as much as possible the eschew using the omnipresent and hyper-weird technology that has overrun the planet like kudzu on acid after the singularity. In case you've been in hypersleep, the singularity is now the given name for what many believe to be the inevitable intimate unification of man and machine, after which, well, all bets are off. The definition of the singularity is that those who lived before it (ie, us, the readers) will not be able to understand what comes after it (ie, everything that happens in the book).
To write a novel set in this world is a challenge that Doctorow and Stross manage with a fair amount of ease. Huw helps a lot. He's a grumbling, bumbling guy who wakes up after a party with something much worse than a hangover. Before you can say "Down the rabbit hole," Huw is there, and the going gets weirder and weirder. Bathrooms can change your sex. A whole generation of minds simply left their bodies to become petty orbital gods who periodically dump incomprehensibly weird technology onto the earth. Huw is drafted to judge one such thing, and it proves to be the proverbial cure worse than the disease.
'The Rapture of the Nerds' is a wild, hairy-eyed science fiction farce, consistently hilarious but simultaneously, deeply though-provoking. As Huw tours his world, so do we. In America, a nation of throwbacks, highly-armed fundamentalists have been left behind by the digital rapture. Huw confronts teapot genies, pepper-pot automatons and sim-Huws that may or may not be more real than Memorex. Grounded by Huw's steady rejectionist suspicions, Doctorow and Stross have a field day with prose that is the electric Kool Aid acid test of techno-poetry, sometimes silly, sometimes nonsensical, but more often than not based on some fascinating extrapolation that merits and rewards serious thought.
For all the wild invention to be found between these very nicely-designed sans dust-jacket covers, 'The Rapture of the Nerds' plays it smart and offers, bottom line, a grounded character in a very straightforward farce. Ridiculousness is the norm in this new world. Technology has finally and fully taken root. It's exploded into a field full of wild weeds, gnarly scavengers and broken refrigerators, inviting kids in the neighborhood to see what happens when they climb inside and close the door behind them. Now is what happens. Our world is what happens. We're already quite insane. Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, have, in 'The Rapture of the Nerds,' simply managed to corral the language to tell us just how crazy we are.
02-11-13:Cory Doctorow Finds 'Homeland'
Eternal Youth
"Attending Burning Man made me simultaneously one of the most photographed people on the planet and one of the least surveilled humans in the modern world." The seeming paradox that opens 'Homeland,' Cory Doctorow's sequel to 'Little Brother,' is indicative of the delightful mind-twisting gymnastics that await the reader within. Effective both as a sequel and as a standalone novel, 'Homeland' offers up a vision of a murky disaster and its difficult-to-discern consequences. Marcus Yallow, Doctorow's engaging narrator, finds himself in what seems to be a better place after the events in 'Little Brother.' He's got a steady girlfriend, Ange, and a great reputation thanks to the combination of tech savvy, common sense and moral clarity that helped him take down military thugs who tried to silence him.
But that clarity is easily diluted when he's handed a cache of information that makes the documents in Wikileaks look like yesterday's news. The days of easily-made decisions are quickly put behind him, and soon enough Marcus finds himself up against some of the same forces that tried to take him out before, but with no clear path of escape. The Internet is not longer a source of clarity; it's been replaced with the Darknet, and Marcus is one of those who helps set it up. The dividing line has dissolved, and with no demarcations, solving a problem that is both too big to comprehend and too diverse to corral requires a new set of skills that's not so obvious as to require mere common sense or tech savvy. When the problems involve solutions that promise injury to those we love, those solutions themselves become problematic.
'Homeland' may be marketed to the Young Adult audience, and it is certainly suitable, but not limited in appeal. Marcus Yallow tells the story in the first person, and he has an engagingly didactic voice. You'll have a hell of a good time learning all about the Darknet, cell phone tracking, and lie detector technology, to mention just a few topics that speed through the pages. You'll also see a character grow up as he is forced to face a crisis that is nebulously defined and morally unclear. No matter what is happening, there's an upbeat, page-turning tone to the prose.
Doctorow's challenge in this novel is two-fold; he has to remind readers of the events in 'Little Brother' while writing a novel with a new and different problem. His solution is really quite ingenious. He uses the events that precede this novel as elements to build the world, referring to them as a science-fictional backdrop. Without the data-dumps, or scroll-rolling, we're immersed in a new post-'Little Brother' San Francisco, where Marcus, now a smallish celebrity, becomes embroiled in a new thriller plot. Once Doctorow has his readers immersed in the new plot, we're hooked.
'Homeland' offers up the same combination of humor, how-to and snark that drove 'Little Brother,' as Marcus is called upon to confront the fallout from the slow motion disaster that is boiling the American frog, so to speak — the financial fiasco that makes an excellent front for all sorts of corporate and governmental malfeasance. Doctorow ratchets up the paranoia with incredible ease and, without lecturing, makes a variety of observations that are chilling and informative. 'Homeland' works equally well as a thriller and a mission statement. It's certainly going to rile up its readers.
Like 'Little Brother,' 'Homeland' includes two Afterwords. Jacob Applebaum of Wikileaks provides the first and the late Aaron Swartz provides the second. Swartz tells us, "This stuff is real." It's a powerful, poignant finish.
Technology, morality and economics have us in a grip that seems inescapable. Everywhere we turn, something seems to set limits on what we can expect and what we can achieve. The charm of 'Homeland' is that Doctorow takes us to a tomorrow that feels like today, only worse than we can imagine, but shows us, all of us, as better than we believe.
New to the Agony Column
09-18-15: Commentary : William T. Vollman Amidst 'The Dying Grass' : An Epic Exploration of Simultaneity
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with William T. Vollman : "...a lot of long words that in our language are sentences..."
09-05-15: Commentary : Susan Casey Listens to 'Voices in the Ocean' : Science, Empathy and Self
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Susan Casey : "...the reporting for this book was emotionally difficult at times..."
08-21-15: Agony Column Podcast News Report : Senator Claire McCaskill is 'Plenty Ladylike' : Internalizing Determination to Overcome Sexism [Incudes Time to Read EP 211: Claire McCaskill, Plenty Ladylike, plus A 2015 Interview with Senator Claire McCaskill]
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Emily Schultz Unleashes 'The Blondes' : A Cure by Color [Incudes Time to Read EP 210: Emily Schultz, The Blondes, plus A 2015 Interview with Emily Schultz]
07-05-15: Commentary : Dr. Michael Gazzaniga Tells Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience Reveals the Life of Science
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Michael Gazzaniga : "We made the first observation and BAM there was the disconnection effect..."
04-21-15: Commentary : Kazuo Ishiguro Unearths 'The Buried Giant' : The Mist of Myth and Memory
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro : ".... by the time I was writing this novel, the lines between what was fantasy and what was real had blurred for me..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Marc Goodman : "...every physical object around us is being transformed, one way or another, into an information technology..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report UPDATE: Time to Read Episode 199: Marc Goodman : Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
