Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End [Library of Babel]

Opinions differ about Vernor Vinge’s latest book, Rainbows End (the apostrophe was intentionally left blank), and mostly seem to be correlated with how people approached the book. For example, Mike Kozlowski approached it from the standpoint that it’s a new Vinge book, and thus expected to be as good as A Deepness in the Sky, and found it “disappointingly okay”.

I, on the other handed, looked at the jacket copy and said “It’s a Singularity book, it’ll probably suck,” and was quite pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed this quite a bit, actually, and it might be the best Singularity book I’ve read.

The key to it is that Vinge comes at the Singularity edge-on. Rather than throwing us in with the movers and shakers making a new and incomprehensible world, he chooses to focus on characters who are sort of peripheral, and who are struggling to make sense of the ways technology is changing things. The main viewpoint character is Robert Gu, a famous poet who was sunk deep in Alzheimer’s disease until a new treatment restores him to (nearly) normal functioning in the year 2025. He finds himself forced to confront deep changes in the world he knew, and thrown into a high school class with a bunch of other recovering oldsters, to get re-acclimated.

As a literary device for introducing a reader to a strange world, it’s almost as transparent as having a character from the present day end up in the future via cryogenic freezing or some sort of time warp, but it’s effective. Not only because Robert’s cluelessness provides a plausible excuse for a lot of as-you-know-Bob infodumping, but also because Vinge portrays him, quite believably, as fearful, confused, and reluctant to embrace the new technology. Robert Gu grappling with his issues lets Vinge ground the story in a way that more enthusiastic Singularity writers like Stross and Doctorow don’t, and it’s a stronger, more compelling book as a result.

Of course, there needs to be a bigger story than just “old guy goes to high school and learns about the wonders of a new world,” or else nobody would really want to read the thing, and Vinge provides a nicely tangled plot involving a sinister conspiracy to develop “You Gotta Believe Me” technology– crude mind control, in effect– and a rather complicated plan to infiltrate a secret laboratory. This plan just happens to involve members of Robert Gu’s family in critical roles (which could seem contrived, but didn’t bother me), and also brings together various foreign intelligence services, and a mysterious person calling himself “Mr. Rabbit.” All the threads eventually come together for a grand finale involving a break-in at a secret lab, a showdown over the fate of the UCSD library, and a surprisingly gripping discussion of the financial underpinnings of the Internet in 2025. And the usual double- and triple-crosses and acts of heroism, of course.

All in all, I thought this was a really good read. It’s not as good as A Deepness in the Sky, but I’d put it up there with A Fire Upon the Deep (which I didn’t find as impressive as some others did). And given the subject matter, that’s high praise indeed.