Postsingular by Rudy Rucker

A few years back, while reading about singularities, transhumanism, and science fiction, I came across a couple of recommendations that stuck with me: Greg Egan’s Diaspora, which I absolutely loved and rated five stars, and Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular, which I’ve just finished reading… and deeply disliked. 

Postsingular has a good start with good ideas which got me hooked for 4 chapters. Chapter 5 is a bit confusing, still good ideas, but the writing goes down-hill. In Postsingular AI takes the form of nanomachines that can quickly reproduce and multiply. They invade and control the world, transforming it into a bad copy of a Philip K. Dick novel. They are also the key to other dimensions with alien entities. Rucker puts all that together and we end up with technological jargon mixed with surreal events, mixed with flat, uninteresting cardboard characters, “jumping” from place to place and dimension to dimension. In my opinion the treatment of the Singularity in this novel loses focus as other elements take over: bad actors seeking to control nanomachines for their own ends, the presence of aliens, and the impact on a society hooked on both technology and drugs. Rather than exploring the Singularity in any real depth, the novel uses it mainly as a device to create a chaotic world. 

Do not recommend it. Read something else.