Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End

[mmcirvin]

I finally finished reading this. While I was reading it, in fits and starts, it won the Hugo for Best Novel. Anyway, I don't think it's Vinge's best, but it's interesting: a nearish-future, relatively-hard-SF thriller set in the same universe as his short story "Fast Times at Fairmont High", a world of massively networked augmented reality in which people walk around with special contact lenses accessing partially-location-based services.

There's a lot of interesting worldbuilding and some of Vinge's best characters ever, particularly his protagonist: a man named Robert Gu who was an accomplished poet and total bastard in his past life, then got Alzheimer's disease and was a near-vegetable for decades, then was rejuvenated and made functional again by a medical procedure that only works on rare lucky individuals (thus avoiding making the whole story about the effect of functional immortality). So we have a variant of the old "When The Sleeper Awakes" scenario for infodumping the World of the Future, combined with the interesting idea of Gu dealing with his somewhat terrified relatives and gradually discovering that he's not quite the same man he was before. And since Gu gets dumped with a bunch of other semi-rejuvenated oldsters into the future version of a high-school vocational program, there's a lot about future education in there too.

So far, so good. The book's weak point is its plot, which is a tangled mess, a good example of why Kibo likes to use the world "intrigue" derisively when describing movie plots. It's a lot of double-crossing and double-double-crossing and distractions on top of distractions and half a dozen entities secretly using each other at cross-purposes. I had trouble maintaining sufficient attention to follow it. It revolves around a typical Vernor Vinge villain; his bad guys are always thoroughly dastardly and one-dimensional slavers or mind-controllers of some sort, often motivated by a desire for tyrannical social order. This time, it's a guy who believes that exploding human technical capability will lead to terroristic apocalypse unless he personally takes over the world through secret mass-mind-control techniques. (Vinge does leave open the possibility that he may be right.)

Then there are the "Indo-European Alliance" security experts he's tricked into doing his bidding, their American counterparts, the mysterious trickster entity that may or may not be an AI and disguises itself as Bugs Bunny, some adventurous kids, a pop-culture phenomenon that is sort of an infinitely ramified Pokemon, and a cabal of old academics trying to prevent the UCSD library from being physically shredded in the process of digitization. The details are a lot of fun but don't ask me to describe how they all fit together. I personally recommend reading this for the details but not sweating the big picture too much. Vinge's best writing here is in the few chapters of denouement after he's gotten the monstrous plot out of the way.

Comments

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

I just got that book! It's in my stack of books I'm reading, and I haven't started it yet, but will as soon as I'm done with the Lovecraft.

You mentioned Kibo, so I'll take this opportunity to say that I hope he's doing well; I haven't heard from him in ages.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

He seems to be doing all right.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

What I like about this book is that it's one of the few in recent years which does what I used to primarily read SF for (and I think what made SF popular for most of its history): give a look at a possible future. I didn't worry much about the plot. It seemed to me to be more of a millieu story, with the classic bewildered viewpoint character from the reader's time and place to show us around.

I think it's gotten so hard to write a plausible story about where technology might lead us anymore that there are only a few writers who can pull it off. Vinge, Stephenson, and Kim Stanley Robinson are the ones that come to mind for me.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Connie Willis does this in the soft-SF sense while those writers do it in the hard sense. (And Stephenson in the soft sense as well, I think.)

Okay, I don't know if I've made a well-considered statement, but this thread reminds me that Connie Willis has a new hardcover out about now, or nowabouts; a book of shorts, possibly including some previously published stuff. That is all.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I just now realized that the story describes a gray Gu scenario.

*big groan*

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Ouch, ouch.