Rapture of the Nerds (2012) is a comic science fiction novel co-authored with charlie-stross and published by tor-books, assembling and extending two previously published novellas — "Jury Duty" (2008) and "Appeals Court" (2009) — with a concluding section, "Parole Board," written to complete the story. Released under a creative-commons-licensing CC BY-NC-ND license, it continues Doctorow's practice of simultaneous free digital distribution alongside commercial print publication.
The Singularity as Farce
The novel's central target is the Technological Singularity — the idea, influential in certain technology culture circles, that an intelligence explosion or wholesale upload of human minds into digital substrate will soon transform civilization beyond recognition. Rather than taking this prospect seriously as either utopia or dystopia, Doctorow and Stross treat it as material for broad comic satire.
The protagonist, Huw, is a luddite potter living in a post-Singularity Wales, one of the few remaining humans who refuses to "upload" into the cloud that now contains most of humanity. Huw is conscripted onto a jury that must adjudicate whether dangerous technology from the cloud should be allowed to filter back down to Earth — a premise that allows the authors to lampoon both singularity enthusiasm and the bureaucratic absurdity of trying to regulate a posthuman condition through human institutions.
Stross Collaboration
The collaboration with charlie-stross is the most developed of Doctorow's co-writing relationships outside his work with rebecca-giblin. Stross, whose Accelerando (2005) is a more earnest engagement with singularity themes, brought a different inflection to the project — a willingness to follow the satirical premises to their most absurd conclusions while maintaining the internal logic of a speculative universe. The resulting voice is noticeably different from Doctorow's solo fiction: broader in its comedy, more willing to sacrifice narrative plausibility for a good joke, and more interested in the texture of posthuman weirdness than in political argument.
Relationship to Doctorow's Broader Project
Rapture of the Nerds stands somewhat apart from the main line of Doctorow's political fiction. Where little-brother, walkaway, and pirate-cinema are pedagogical — designed to teach readers about surveillance, post-scarcity economics, and copyright respectively — Rapture is primarily a comedy with a critical edge. The singularity critique is real but delivered through absurdist comedy rather than argument.
The novel's implicit political claim is that technological utopianism — the belief that a sufficiently advanced technology will resolve human political problems without collective action — is a form of escapism. The Singularity as depicted is a place where the uncomfortable messiness of democratic politics has been dissolved into something else, and Huw's luddism is implicitly endorsed as a reasonable response to a techno-optimism that offers transcendence as a substitute for justice.
The book connects to Doctorow's persistent skepticism about technological solutionism, a skepticism more explicitly developed in how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism and the enshittification framework — the idea that technology deployed within broken power structures reproduces and amplifies those structures rather than transcending them.