Back in 2013 I was looking for people to tell that Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” was the most enjoyable reading experience I had in the last decade.  I exchanged emails with my friend Mark who in response said “The Rapture of the Nerds” was the “best of all SF I've read in the last few years”.  So I ordered a copy and promptly read it.  For those doing the math, reading a book four years after purchase still ranks as immediate in my world.

The story takes place in a post-singularity world. (For those still interacting with real people, that’s when computers are sufficiently advanced to match or exceed the human mind).  Some people live on earth, others have “uploaded” to a virtual cloud in space.  In terms of describing issues and things that could happen with intelligent entities in a virtual world the book does OK.   I had issues with the story.  

The events early on in the book really have no relevance to the actual plot arc.  The main character goes to a trial, but I never buy the reason for the trial, and what happens during the trial never fully makes sense.  A series of near-random events ends up just planting a seed that pops up later.  The main character could have just as well been hit in the head with a micrometeorite.

Every object the main character interacts with is some bizarrely weird semi-interactive device with special properties and a painful name.  And not in a William Gibson kind of way, where he sprinkled his work with functional versions of today’s pop-science. This was just oppressive.  It got so bad that when the authors started bad-mouthing future Christian fundamentalists living in the South, I had trouble getting on board.  And that is a ship I am eager to board these days.

So I am going to say pass on “The Rapture of the Nerds”.