The Rapture of the Nerds should be a good (if not great) book based off it’s credentials. It’s a book by two authors (that I mostly like) about the Singularity. However, something went wrong in the actual writing of the book. This book seems like they two writers were having fun throwing out ideas and situations, but not working on forming it into a coherent story. Let’s check out what went wrong.

The book takes place post-singularity, where most of the technically inclined folks have uploaded themselves into a the cloud (a literal cloud of computing surrounding the Earth). Left behind on the land are the luddites, religious freaks and just general freaks. Among the luddites is our hero (of sorts) Huw Jones. Huw wants on a tech jury, which is a jury of left behind people who decide if a new technology is suitable to being released to the masses. After a minor jury session, Huw ends up running for his life. He finds his way to an American inhabited by ultra-religious bigots and idiots. There is a confusing episode where Huw gets transfromed from male to female and manages to fall in love and almost get killed multiple times.

Later, Huw is set up as a witness against the cloud, which has decided to destroy the Earth and force the remaining luddites to upload to the cloud. But with the deck stacked against Huw, he finds himself, again, running for his life. Then he ends up in a simulation bake-off with his father to decide the fate of the Earth against aliens, who aren’t sure humans are reasonable people to allow to exist in the universe.

The plot is ludicrous and the characters are, for the most part, badly stereotyped. The book reads like a first draft that escaped from the authors. It’s a surprise that two authors, who usually have such well-polished books, published this shaggy dog of a story. Since the book is a hybrid of multiple short stories, it’s not surprising that there are some wild jumps in plot, but there seems to be little to no effort to polish the connections. The seams are all showing and we can see the rough patches too much. Mildly recommended for some fun ideas, but just barely recommended.