Book reviews: Rainbow's End
April 29, 2010
Rainbow's End, by Vernor Vinge, is a near-future science-fiction in the tradition of Charles Stross' Accelerando or Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Vinge takes existing trends, such as Google's digitalization of libraries, proliferation of mobile devices, targeted therapies for diseases, and augmented reality, extrapolates and then explores their impact on society. This setting supports a tale of high school antics which quickly becomes a geopolitical thriller.
The protagonist, Robert Gu, is an aging poet and literature professor who is brought back from terminal Alzheimer's disease by the recent development of a new therapy. He is restored to a youthful condition but finds that the skills and attitudes of the past are useless in the new world. As is common for those in his situation, he is enrolled in a remedial technology class in a public high school. Because his son and daughter-in-law are high-level operatives in America's security force, Gu becomes the target of a rogue entity trying to disrupt American intelligence for a nefarious plot.
The world of Rainbow's End is both attractive and terrifying. Weapons of mass destruction, while not ubiquitous, are known to fall into the hands of terrorists. Chicago was destroyed by a suitcase bomb ten years before the events of the novel. Worse, new weapons combining biological and psychological warfare are in active development. The government has responded by completely re-designing the military and emphasizing “snoop and swoop” tactics – hard intelligence plus fast deployment any where on the globe. They have also perfected a “Secure Hardware Environment” for all electronic devices that allows ubiquitous government surveillance.
Despite these horrors, the world is a technological marvel. Wearable computers that sense your intentions and read your body language are the norm. Teleprescence, augmented reality, haptics, and global high-speed wireless Internet access are commonplace. Medicine has become a “heavenly minefield” which spontaneously results in total cures for random ailments.
Vinge is always at his best when exploring the interaction betweens humans and their nascent technologies and this novel is no different. On the areas in which I have expertise (wireless networking and the hacker zeitgeist), he shows a firm understanding of both the technology and its implications. However, as is also common in his work, the characterizations fall a little flat. Robert Gu is a proud, cantankerous poet, but he accepts the complete loss of his talent more quickly than I would believe possible. With the exception of Gu's grand-daughter and her classmate, the other characters are generally one-dimensional or stand-ins for general social types. As a piece of technological futurism and thriller, however, the novel is a success.