MATHEMATICAL FICTION:

a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

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The Rapture of the Nerds (2004)
Cory Doctorow / Charles Stross
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Contributed by "William E. Emba"

This story is set in Stross's "Accelerando" series, due for publication in novel form in 2005, offering a worm's eye view of the "Vinge singularity", the supposed moment in the coming decades beyond which machine intelligence gets so stupendous that any extrapolation ahead of the event is impossible.

In "The Rapture of the Nerds", a Klein bottle makes a significant appearance, and there are brief (but relevant) mentions of game, complexity, and chaos theory.

[It was published in] ARGOSY #2 March/April 2004. Note that ARGOSY issues are published as two parts for mail orders and as one part for bookstore magazine racks. This novella is essentially the entire second part. See www.argosymag.com. This issue is still in bookstores as of August 2004. Furthermore, the first half was originally published on-line at scifi.com.

More information about this work can be found at www.amazon.com.
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Works Similar to The Rapture of the Nerds
According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:
  1. WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
  2. Antibodies by Charles Stross
  3. Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds
  4. Axiom of Dreams by Arula Ratnakar
  5. Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies by Greg Egan
  6. The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
  7. The Whisper of Disks by John Meaney
  8. i by Paul Evanby
  9. Mine the Primes by Julian Todd
  10. The Grass and Tree by Eliot Fintushel
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Categories:
GenreScience Fiction,
Motif
TopicGeometry/Topology/Trigonometry, Chaos/Fractals,
MediumShort Stories, Available Free Online,

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Exciting News: The 1,600th entry was recently added to this database of mathematical fiction! Also, for those of you interested in non-fictional math books let me (shamelessly) plug the recent release of the second edition of my soliton theory textbook.

(Maintained by Alex Kasman, College of Charleston)