Tommie laughed. “You should do some ego surfing. Your hack was noticed. Back when I was young, you could have got a patent off it. Nowadays –”
Xiu patted Tommie’s shoulder. “Nowadays, it should be worth a decent grade in a high school class. You and I — we have things to learn, Thomas.”
– Vernor Vinge in Rainbows End
As the person who came up with the term “Technological Singularity”, any new science-fiction book by Vernor Vinge is always highly anticipated. Unlike his previous two bestsellers, A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep, both of which were space opera novels set in a universe of his own creation with specific rules to allow a high level of technological development without invoking a singularity, Rainbows End is a solid science-fiction story set in a near-future Earth. There are tech toys aplenty and cyberspace permeates and interconnects with the real world, but it’s still more or less our same old planet with recognizable lifestyles and people. Unnoticed by the most of the world’s population however, who live mostly pleasant and peaceful lives, are events that suggest that the state of the world is not as stable as it seems, and there are hints of upheavals yet to come.
Rainbows End is, in my opinion, best categorized as social science-fiction. There are plenty of detailed descriptions of cool new technology and the main plot has all of the elements of a James Bond-style spy thriller, but the emphasis of the novel is on how technology has changed, and is still changing, lives and social structures. Even though the events in the novel have global implications, they take place on a local scale and are focused on the lives of Robert Gu and his son, his daughter-in-law and his granddaughter, all of whom live in the same house in San Diego. Their relationships are fraught with familiar problems : his son and daughter-in-law argue over work commitments; Gu’s son is wary of him due to his abusive personality; and his granddaughter is far smarter than any of them realizes and is determined to help her grandfather adjust to his new life.
This is because Robert Gu, at age 75, has just been cured of Alzheimer’s disease after having spent the past 20 years as a living vegetable. With a newly rejuvenated body that passes for that of a teenager, Gu returns to high school to learn the skills that he needs to fit in with a society he knows almost nothing about. He isn’t alone either as in his class are fellow students his age who have, in one way or another, found that the unrelenting pace of technological development has made their skills obsolete. This contrivance allows Vinge to demonstrate and explain the workings of the technology of the day including wearable computers, augmented reality made possible by contact lenses that allow graphics to be overlaid on top of normal vision and actuators on clothes to provide haptic feedback, ubiquitous computing in which every technological device is smart and wirelessly connected to everything else and advanced computing interfaces that allow users to perform ultra-fast searches for information or send silent messages to one another using subtle twitches of different bodily muscles.
With all this technology, cyberspace is so pervasive that anyone not using a computer is practically blind. Gu is initially puzzled when he sees Mirri, his granddaughter, talking and walking with invisible friends who are with her only virtually. One time, Mirri announces that it’s time for her to go to school and instead of actually going anywhere, she simply sits down and starts to look at and interact with people and objects that Robert can’t see. Group conversations in physical space are punctuated by private and public silent messages that include data files and net search results. It gets so infuriating for Robert, known as one of the greatest livings poets of his time before his illness, that one day he orders a computer-controlled car to take him some place, any place, that is off the grid just so that he can think and be truly alone.
Apart from the recurring theme of technological change outpacing human learning ability another major theme in the novel is the constant danger posed to the world by mass destruction technology being so cheap and easy to obtain and the need for government authorities to keep up with technological innovation that could be used to come up with new and unforeseen weapons. As it turns out, both Gu’s son and daughter-in-law are high-ranking military officers charged with the responsibility of watching for such threats and executing operations to quietly take them while keeping the general public in blissful ignorance. Part of how they do that is through something called the Secure Hardware Environment (SHE) which is a sort of hardware level rootkit mandated by law to be included in every device so that all smart hardware is always under the ultimate control of the government.
This puts Robert Gu in the position of a pawn in a conspiracy involving some of the most powerful governments of the world as they try to determine who has been trying to develop in San Diego what might be the ultimate terrorist weapon: mind-control technology that in the novel is called You Gotta Believe Me (YGBM). Through it all, a mysterious entity who exists only in cyberspace, known as the Rabbit, and who seems to possess the terrifying power of subverting SHE security at will, is alternately portrayed as being used by the world’s governments and using them, as part of the conspiracy.
As exciting as the main plot is, the novel is really at its best when the focus is on how social dynamics have been altered by technology. Vinge writes a lengthy scene for example on how belief circles fight each other for dominance, essentially groups of fans of a particular vision of the world vying with each other in a sort of popularity contest to determine whose view should be dominant. Imagine Harry Potter fans vying with Star Wars fans to decide whether the local neighborhood should look like Hogwart’s or Coruscant. Another point of interest is that the pace of innovation has become so fast that kids are by far the most skilled at making the most of the technology available, stated in a matter-of-fact way by the teenagers and children themselves. Adults have tried hard to cope, some using accelerated skills learning programs called Just In Time Training (JITT) that unfortunately have nasty side effects.
Readers have speculated that the novel attempts to describe a society on the very cusp of the Singularity with all of the instabilities that entails. That is true in some ways, but there is a frustrating lack of cohesion in the novel that prevents it from being fully successful. For example, adults try hard to remain productive and apparently the economy is still essentially a capitalistic one, but the society Vinge describes seems pretty close to a post-scarcity economy so it’s not clear what is motivating the adults to try so hard to keep up. This is rather surprising when you consider how much detail Vinge provided in his two previous novels on the economies of interstellar powers and what they ultimately valued. This novel itself ends rather abruptly and leaves too many questions unanswered for it to feel satisfying. A sequel is promised to tie up loose ends, but it could be a long time coming since Vinge has announced that his next book will be based in the same universe as A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep.
Overall I’d rate this a read well worth the time of any science-fiction fan, but I have to say that I enjoyed Vinge’s space opera novels far more than I did this one.
[I was a bit miffed to discover, after having my wife buy a paperback copy of the book for me at a Borders in Australia, that the entire novel is available online for free at the author’s website. It appears that it was put online after it won the 2007 Hugo Award for best novel. Good of Vinge, but I wish I’d known that before I bought the book.]