The Charles Stross/Cory Doctorow collab novel “The rapture of the nerds” has been released in a Creative Commons format for all to read over at Stross’ site. Read it here if you like.
I still haven’t finished the book, and I have to confess it took me a bit of a run up to get into it, but eventually I got into the swing enough that I was inspired to draw a little fanart. It helps if you think of Huw as a kind of updated Arthur Dent being buffeted around in a slightly less benign universe than that of the Hitchhiker’s guide to the universe trilogy.
The singularity has come and gone, and the solar system is a cloud of nanotech microsatellites orbiting the sun in layers absorbing every last erg of power to fuel the massive computation required to sustain the new minds that came into existence after the hard takeoff of superintelligence. The earth however still exists, and about a billion old style hominids still exist on it’s surface, learning to coexist with their ascended brothers. Our protagonist, Huw wakes up from a party dismayed to find himself tattoed with a bioharzard trefoil, but before he can do anything about it he is whisked off to play a part as a juror in a trial to determine if the latest message from the cloud represents a beneficial gift to humanity or a world ending threat.
Dead tree and commercial e-book editions can be obtained here