Book Review: Rainbows End

Vernor Vinge

2006

Awards: Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I find myself extremely unmotivated to write this review. It is neither a book I feel good enough to recommend, nor a book I hated enough to slam.

I did end up liking this book better than Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky. Mainly because it was shorter than either of them. And also because the plot was a touch tighter and less randomly free-associational. Rainbows End is set in the near future, and starts out with several semi-coherent separate plots which inevitably converge at the climax of the book.

One story line follows the recovery of an elderly man, Robert Gu, from Alzheimer’s disease. Robert had been a brilliant, world-famous poet until he developed Alzheimer’s and descended slowly into dementia. Then, one day, at the beginning of the book, he wakes up again to find that modern medicine has cured him and given him a brand-new start on life. He goes back to school to learn all of the things that he missed out on during his decades of decline, including how to use the ubiquitous “wearables”—wearable computers that let you issue commands through gestures and see feedback displays and virtual images overlaid on the real world through contact lenses.

Another story line is about high-level international internet security personnel trying to track down a hacker-terrorist somewhere in the net who they think is designing a dangerous semi-biological,/semi-technological virus. Their problems multiply when it turns out there is not just one hacker-terrorist but at least two, one of whom may be one of them, and one of whom may be an artificial intelligence, and who are sometimes working together and sometimes working at cross-purposes.

And still another story line is about a group of UCSD professors who are trying to prevent the shredding of all the books in the main library on campus.

                                                             

All of the story lines eventually come together around Robert Gu. Robert lives with his son and daughter-in-law; they are both Marines working for Homeland Security and are trying to track down the hacker-terrorist(s). Several of Robert’s former colleagues are involved in the subversive anti-shredding movement. And several of Robert’s current schoolmates have been recruited—wittingly or unwittingly—to work for the hacker-terrorist(s). It all comes to a head when there is a big save-the-library-books riot at the UCSD campus, which the hacker-terrorists have arranged to cover up their nefarious viral activities.

Robert Gu is a more interesting main character than the similarly-aged protagonists in Vinge’s other books. He is a touch more well-developed; he has a unique back story and understandable, powerful motivations for his actions. 

But the strength of Gu's character is unable to overcome Vinge's flippant, careless storytelling style. Vinge is, as ever, too clever for his own good. Zillions of new technological ideas spew out all book long like water from a lawn sprinkler. But he doesn’t develop their function enough so that you care about, identify with, or remember most of them. Some are pulled magically out of his hat (or, in one case, from a scientist’s bag) for the first time at key moments when they are needed to solve some immediate problem. And most are left behind, unresolved and partially used, falling forgotten into the background when the next page is turned. 

Many of Vinge's ideas are evocative of earlier works by other authors. Rainbows End draws, of course, from William Gibson's virtual realities and artificial intelligences. But there are also echoes of Neil Stephenson in the avatars that populate the net and the digitally dynamic nanotech "paper," not to mention the appearance of hundreds of thousands of mice as a key plot point. And white westerners lapsing into Asian languages always reminds me of Philip K. Dick.

I did like Vinge's idea of wearable computing (even if it is somewhat derivative of Neuromancer). But I found it preposterous that his characters could be doing so many things at once with their wearable computers without being completely catatonic. Vinge has them occasionally looking distracted for maybe a moment while they’re researching, reading, or silent messaging. But given how in real life people are unable to walk in a straight line while having a conversation on their smartphones, I don't think there's any way humans could be doing all that simultaneously without being totally zoned out and inattentive of the real world.

And his occasional descents into silliness come at just the wrong frequency and strike just the wrong note. They aren’t consistent enough to be Douglas Adams, and aren’t clever enough to be Connie Willis.