Rainbows End

Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and beca [...]

A Review Wherein I Postulate The End of Humanity:but first the boring stuff:Ideas ideas ideas ideas ideas ideas :]Writing, characterization, plot, and dialogue :[Basically, the plot focus is all wrong. It's incredibly domestic. If plots were pokemon, this one would involve a Magikarp and a Gyrados and focus on the Magikarp.I mean dang, look at that BAMF.Basically, Robert Gu, an old poet with Alzheimer's, has his youth and mind restored by medical science. Unfortunately, his poetical genius is lo [...]

I'll start off with something positive to say about Rainbows End. The best things about this novel are the ideas about technology and what the world could look like in an even more networked future where information is the form of currency. However, this isn't a new idea at all, here's a quote from Gravity's Rainbow regarding information, "A tragic sigh. 'Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it a wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exc [...]

Although I did not love this book as much as his Zones of Thought space operas, Vernor Vinge has yet to disappoint me. Rainbows End is not really a cyberpunk novel, but "post-cyberpunk." It takes place in a world that looks a lot like ours, if you just extrapolate out the technology. (Almost) everyone is wired, you can carry petabytes in your pocket (the sum total of all recorded human media on the equivalent of a USB drive), the world is globally-connected in ways we still are dreaming about bu [...]

I loved Gibson's Neuromancer and I liked Stephenson's Snow Crash, and this is basically the same thing for the current generation except it leans a little more towards the techno-thriller side, like Michael Crichton if he were actually a good writer and knew more about his subject than what he'd just dug up via research. Vinge is a mathematician and computer scientist, so his vision of 2025 rings a helluva lot more true than many others. The major drawbacks to this book are a lopsided plot (the [...]

I really love 'A Fire Upon the Deep,' and I feel like I keep waiting for Vinge to recreate that, in some form and it keeps not happening.I felt like 'Rainbows End' aimed at being a near-future cyber-thriller a la William Gibson - but the 'thrilling' part was missing.There's a conspiracy to infect the world with some sort of suggestion-susceptibility, which its proponents see as the only way to 'save the world.' There's another group of NSA-types trying to stop the plan, but they don't really kno [...]

The one where a Rip van Winkle figure is cured of Alzheimer's and has to figure out how to live in the future, and apparently gets involved in some sort of plot involving mind control technology.I gave it fifty pages, and every single one was an effort. This book has tons of ideas, large and small. As a portrait of the niftiness and danger of the future, I suppose it's reasonably good, though it's rather slow and didactic compared with the pleasant breathless hurtle of cyberpunk (my usual danger [...]

I'm a fan of Vinge's work, and I've had to wrestle a little with the idea that my dislike for this book might just be the result of it being different from the other things he's done. On balance, I don't think that this is the case. This is a book with serious flaws in both credibility and storytelling. On the credibility side, Vinge creates horrific inconsistencies in his visions of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and augmented human interaction which he doesn't even try to paper over [...]

Most genre fiction is character-driven. Uniquely among genres, science-fiction can be idea-driven. This book is. So, that I didn't really empathize or care about any of the characters isn't a valid criticism. Idea-driven science fiction can be brilliant (for example, most Phillip K. Dick, Crash by JG Ballard, etc). In this book, the main plot is the attempt to investigate a use of media and neurochemicals to operate on learning/memory as a weapon of control. That would have been very cool if it [...]

It took me an absurdly long time to track down this book, and then when the dust settled, I somehow found myself in possession of two mass market editions. (I bought one at the big library sale last year, but forgot I had done so, and then picked it up again at a used bookstore.) None of the libraries in town had it, even though it was a Hugo nominee not all that long ago.Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to thi [...]

In the near future, a victim of Alzheimer's has been cured and rejuvinated. Robert Gu must now use his 90's oriented brain to navigate the world of the 2020's. So, like many of the elderly in the latter decade, he goes back to high school.Among other things, he must learn to understand how to "wear." To wear is to use internet-ready computers embedded into one's clothing and contact lenses. (The I/O for these devices consists for the most part in subtle movements of the eye.) Those who can wear [...]

A few weeks ago, Bruce Sterling shared his thoughts on hacking and activism three years after first discussing the Wikileaks scandal. One thing he said really stuck with me:Even the electronic civil lib contingent is lying to themselves. They’re sore and indignant now, mostly because they weren’t consulted — but if the NSA released PRISM as a 99-cent Google Android app, they’d be all over it. Because they are electronic first, and civil as a very distant second.They’d be utterly th [...]

I really wanted to like this book - as a "concept" story, it's extremely engaging, exploring a not-too-distant possible future where our "plugged-in", multitasking, social networking culture becomes ridiculously pervasive (in conjunction with an economy that increasingly value those who collate and analyze vs. those who produce), with all the amazing advantages and frightening disadvantages that confers. I especially liked how our viewpoint character was a man who, successful to the point of arr [...]

The worldbuilding here is fascinating, which makes it a pity that the plot is pedestrian and the characters wooden. I was willing, grudgingly, to give two stars out of respect to the astonishing inventiveness of the near-future tech, but the ending annoyed me enough that I can't even muster enough enthusiasm for that.(view spoiler)[I'm particular unhappy with the way the book handles abuse. Robert Gu was, we are told repeatedly, an abusive husband and father. His ex-wife wants nothing to do with [...]

I'm trying to understand. I'm trying to see things from the perspective of the Rainbows End enthusiast, i.e those people inflating its rating on this site and elsewhere justifying its Hugo. Yet, try as I might, their reasons remain cyborg opaque. I mean, these people certainly ain't fiction lovers.Despite a heavy rep from A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, Vinge neglects all the traditional hallmarks of decent fiction. What you notice after a promising start (if only he stuck with G [...]

Before I wrote my review, I listened to Luke Burrage's review on SFBRP, and the recent podcast discussion of it on SFF Audio. I was curious to see if the discussion would make me like it any more, and it might have boosted it to 3.5 stars, but I'm still going with 3.Some of the story was really relevant to my work in the academic library world, and the story of all the books being destroyed in the UCSD Geisel Library didn't seem like very far future to me, especially with the premise that they w [...]

Vernor Vinge continues to delight with well-plotted and offbeat SF. Rainbow's End is a tale about loss, growing old and getting a second chance, and how that affects bad family dynamics, along with the usual gobs of interesting speculation about the future. I didn't quite follow the motivation of the main character's changes of heart during the middle of the book, but by the end it came together reasonably well. The greatest strengths of the story are in the utterly believable future world Vinge [...]

"The Rabbit" appears in the novel, is is A.I. (artificial intelligence) and then It has a huge power through internet.During reading the book I know A.I. Rinna starts Twitter, it is popular with Lineitter/ms_rinnaLine ; Rinna rinna/rinna/A.I. is more popular with general people. Real life cross over this science fiction.Then It tool appears on it ,Google Glass topic appears in it. Google overcomes the novel.otherwise Google Book Search ,Google Maps,iRobot, and Google Now ,AR appears in it.our re [...]

The author manages a rich, imaginative, and fairly believable world of tech. It showed some good, interesting foresight about where VR and the IoT might be taking us. The setting could have supported a good story, but this wasn't it. Instead, the execution of the story and characters was consistently sub-par.There was very little character development, and what there was left almost every character unlikable, if not pretty-much-evil. I found the story to be mostly a bunch of old, fading men tryi [...]

_Rainbows End_ by Vernor Vinge is an excellent science fiction novel by in my opinion one of the best novelists in the genre. This story is in the same setting as his earlier novella "Fast Times at Fairmont High" which he finished in August 2001 and first published in _The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge_. The central character of the novella, a young student at a San Diego high school (really a middle school), Juan Orozco, makes a reappearance in this novel, though as one of several important [...]

This is the third Vernor Vinge book I've read, and it had some things in common with the first two: A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep. For starters: all 3 books won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. In addition: the all feature protagonists that aren't very easy to love (for me, at least) but who transition believably into somewhat realistic heroes by the end. They also feature lots of innovative science fiction ideas that are integral to the plot and generally dark universes.But there [...]

Starting over again. I'm most interested in the grouchy poet. At least the rabbit has a funny voice in the audiobook. Before I lost interest in the middle. But hey it won a Hugo, so it must be good.Ok, here's where I left off the first time:page 254/381 = 66% = 9:50/14:45 in the audio Will Tamahome make it over the hump the second time?47% - I think last time I got bored by all the new characters in the library. Remember, Rainbows End has no apostrophe.53% - With all the visuals, maybe I would l [...]

I tried. I really wanted to love this book and its protagonist Robert Gu, a world-renowned poet who at age seventy-five was given treatment that not only reversed his Alzheimer's, but gave him the body of a twenty-five year old in the process. It's a novel about connecting with a lapsed generation and also generations of family long neglected. There are also global conspiracies, library riots and Fahrenheit 451-style book cleansings, and far too much needless HTML-based artifice—the silent mes [...]

I made it about 2/3 of the way through this book before giving up in sheer exhaustion. With a lot of sci-fi books, there's an initial period of exposition and world-building that lasts for a hundred pages or so, and I slogged though, thinking that it would be easier going a little further on. I started to despair around page 200, however, when the complexity of the plot and the technological shenanigans seemed to be increasing geometrically.Around page 235 I realized I didn't have a freaking clu [...]

Lo mejor del libro la verdad que es el futuro que plantea. Imagina un futuro en donde la realidad aumentada reina y para ello se hace uso de lo que se llama "Vestir". Vestir son unas ropas que están completamente conectadas a la red global y que se complementan con unas lentillas. Así, es posible que mientras estás dando un paseo y mires un pájaro veas a su lado el nombre de la especie, que cuando andes por la calle la gente te vea disfrazado de lo que tu hayas elegido, jugar a juegos en el [...]

2.5-ish. Setting aside the fact that I started this in August, and just now finished it, I don't think this was very good. Vernor Vinge seriously impressed me so much with the Zones of Thought series, but this was just so uninteresting, I couldn't be bothered most of the time to pick it up and try to finish it. I'm honestly so glad it's over with. To be fair - and the reason that I didn't DNF it or give it a 1 or a straight up 2 - the world building is fantastic and really cool, and I still like [...]

When I think of 'science fiction', Isaac Asimov comes to mind; perhaps a rather fossilised idea, but because of at least one or two that I had tried to read of Asimov many many years ago, I never delved into scifi much more than that. Seemed too technical. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, on the other hand, I really enjoyed: a portrayal of how the human species becomes adapted to the world that it's in. So Vinge was an out-of-the-blue read that expanded my re-introduction of the scif [...]

Vinge's vision of the future may be more realistic than most, but his characters and plot drag. The first chapter is a bait-and-switch, introducing us to fascinating heroes, villains, and schemes, before focusing the rest of the book on less likable and interesting settings. Even one particular scene, which is identified as a diversion for the real action, is described in far greater detail across many more chapters than the situation warrants. And that's the overall problem I had with Rainbows [...]

The best Vinge I've read yet. Fully engaging in a believable just-over-the-horizon scenario with the usual twists expected of Vinge. Lots of fun.One concern: he notes--and defuses--a future confrontation between "circles" of believers in alternate literary realities. It would be sad if such came to pass, but history shows that people do get fired up over what they believe in, even if it is a particular literary convention.

An excellent post-cyberpunk novel about augmented reality. Recommended. For an extended review, please visit my blog here: tesatorul/2008/10/.