Now he is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he’s starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. The scenario seems all too plausible.Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. Sometimes there are errors or pages go missing, just as there are errors when you shotgun sequence a genome. By matching up the unique rip marks at the edge of every page, shotgun sequencing software borrowed from genome sequencing is able to reconstruct every book. Each book is ripped apart and sucked through a long tube lined with cameras that photograph every page from multiple angles.
It's invented a method to digitize the library's entire book collection within days. Believers in the Pokemon-like, multicultural Scooch-a-mout universe are battling it out with fans of a Terry Pratchett-style universe called Dangerous Knowledge to control the iconography overlay in the UC San Diego library.Īt the same time, a Celera-like corporation is battling to control the library another way. At the heart of the novel is a war between two "belief circles," groups of fans who make the fantasy overlays. Because everybody in this future is always "wearing," as Vinge puts it, they are constantly immersed in digital reality – whether that takes the form of Google searches running at the edge of their vision, or a complete overlay of reality with another universe where trees are represented as giant monsters and roads as sparkly rubies. Instead, I would argue the book is really an extended (and exciting) speculation on how the people who control our fantasies also control society. Many reviewers have commented on the themes of surveillance in the novel, which I think aren't the most interesting part.
Set in 2025 San Diego, the novel is about how the medically-restored elderly adopt to a world of ubiquitous computing where wearables and contact lens monitors make all space into cyberspace at the flick of a finger.
Instead, Vinge looks at what happens when humans become their own aliens in a decidedly post-Cold War era. Nor does he examine human beings though the eyes of aliens, as he did in his superlative Fire Upon the Deep. He doesn't deal with Cold War politics, as he did in Across Realtime. By now most science fiction fans have gotten their mitts on a copy of Vernor Vinge's new novel Rainbows End and are voraciously reading it – or virtuously putting it off because they'll get no work done once they crack it open.
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