In The Rapture of the Nerds von Charles Stross und Cory Doctorow gibt es eine netten Twist, in dem die USA komplett von einer Hyperkolonie Ameisen beherrscht werden. Die Amerikaner leben in Städten, die wie riesige Tupperwaren komplett von Plaste umhüllt sind. Draußen, zwischen den Städten, hast Du nur eine Möglichkeit zu überleben, wenn Du Dich schnell bewegst, in der Luft bleibst oder auf dem Wasser lebst. Aber selbst das ist alles sehr gefährlich.

Diesen kleinen Plot-Twist kann man für typische SciFi-Spinnerei halten. Oder aber man liest diesen Artikel in der New York Times über Rasberrys Crazy Ants, die gerade den Bundesstaat Texas erobern.

So oder so, The Rapture of the Nerds ist eins der besten aktuellen Nahzeit-SciFi-Bücher, das ich kenne. Und wie man sieht, ist vieles darin wahr!

Sehr schöner Artikel im Smithsonian über die Effekte von SciFi auf unsere Welt. Ursula K. Le Guin sagt beispielsweise:

“The future is a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in,” she tells Smithsonian, “a means of thinking about reality, a method.”

Le Guin schrieb The Left Hand of Darkness, das ich kürzlich las, und das ist auch so ein Laboratorium für eine geschlechtslose Gesellschaft (die meisten Personen in dem Buch sind bis auf wenige Tage pro Monat geschlechtslos).

Cory Doctorow, Co-Autor von Rapture of the Nerd (auch kürzlich gelesen), sagt:

“I’ve been in engineering discussions in which the argument turned on what it would be like to use the product, and fiction can be a way of getting at that experience.”

Neal Stephenson, Autor des Barock-Zyklus oder von Cryptonomicon oder Cobweb, findet aber, dass wir genügend dystopische Blicke auf unsere Zukunft geworfen haben. Er will, dass wir lieber wieder mehr optimistisch in die Zukunft sehen. Ob ich das nach Piketty noch kann, bezweifle ich aber. Ein Grund ist vielleicht, dass Fortschritte in künstlicher Intelligenz nicht ganz so sichtbar sind wie große Brücken oder Häuser:

“Techno-optimists have gone from thinking that cheap nuclear power would solve all our problems to thinking that unlimited computing power will solve all our problems,” says Ted Chiang, who has explored the nature of intelligence in works such as The Lifecycle of Software Objects. “But fiction about incredibly powerful computers doesn’t inspire people the same way that fiction about large-scale engineering did, because achievements in computing are both more abstract and more mundane.”

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I've never read Doctorow before but I've read quite a few Stross novels and this fits squarely in his techno-geek SF vein of novels, quite similar to Accelerando in style, theme and even plot to some extent.

It moves at a ridiculously fast pace (or maybe it just feels like it after the Jane Eyre glacier) and this partially makes up for a number of flaws. The worst two being swearing-as-humour-substitute and lack-of-protagonist-agency. The swearing thing is not something I'd noticed Stross being guilty of previously but you can find some fine examples of it in Iain Banks' novels. Creative insults can be amusing but simple profanity gets dull really fast so it's very easy to over do it.

As for the protagonist, he has to save...something,then something more important...then something  even more important...except it's not really him doing it; everybody else is manipulating him. At one point even he complains that he's just cargo...which reminded me of the let-down aspect of Accelerando quite a bit and even one of Sross's Laundry novels (the James Bond one). This approach only really works if the hero turns the tables at some point, which doesn't really happen in any of these three books. It's frustrating because I keep feeling Stross has a great book in him but he always gets something wrong. Grrrrr.

One of the issues with post-singularity, post-humanity SF novels is that you can quickly lose any sense of connection with the characters; the world becomes so foreign that you stop caring who lives or dies.

Though I stopped caring about the characters in the book, kudos to Doctorow for creating a world bizarre enough to hold my interest until the end (just barely).

I flirted with that sense several times during this novel, though ultimately, I'd suggest it was a well-written, reasonable book that others would probably find interesting.