Rapture of the Nerds

I'm starting to get the feeling the Singularity subgenre only really has one good book in it. It's an amazing and powerful idea, but most of the novels based around the idea simply don't do it justice. That's partly because the actual implementation of the singularity would be incomprehensible for us mere humans, but I don't know whether than is really a good enough explanation for the silliness that these books tend towards.

Stross & Doctorow's Rapture of the Nerds has a bunch of interesting ideas in it, but in lots of ways those are rehashed from previous books in the genre. The characters are the usual wild and wacky types you get in a singularity novel, battering up against forces for more powerful than themselves and fighting to retain their humanity in the face of an overwhelmingly digital world. But the plot of the novel tended towards the deus ex machina and the Chosen One trope, so it was quite unsatisfying and occasionally annoying.