Computers, networks and good old science fiction – of course I enjoyed this thorougly!

This book calls itself “a novel with one foot in the future”. Well, it’s a very novel novel, full of interesting ideas and futuristic concepts, maybe a bit TOO full of them. My mind was so concentrated on trying to figure out what Vinge meant by all the futuristic jargon that I kinda lost sight of the plot for a long while. The characters weren’t as well-developed as I would’ve liked either.

Nevertheless, this book explored a bunch of cool ideas, being set in a future where everyone “wears” computers and has access to libraries of information with a glance. A world where people can overlay an imaginary landscape on the actual one. Most intriguingly, a world where all kinds of people – even schoolchildren – can reach out and cooperate with others all over the world to collectively analyse and solve problems, beating out even traditional information-collecting organisations. Which is something we’re beginning to see today, with wikis and alternate reality games.

Some particularly interesting ideas:

1. “Jin didn’t speak very good English, but then Miri’s Mandarin was worse. Actually, language wasn’t a problem. They’d get together on his beach or hers - depending on which side of the world was daylight or had the nicest weather - and chatter away in Goodenuf English, the air around them filled with translation guesstimates and picture substitutions.”

I think this is a great idea to overcome the limitations of machine translation – why not present the top possibilities and let the capabilities of the human mind do the highest-level part of the work?

2. “whatchamacallit” is “whatchamagoogle” in the book – nice phrase, I’d use if I could make it come out naturally.

3. The role of the educator, as described by Mrs. Chumlig: ””I just showed my students how to use what they have and what the world has.”

4. “The data is all on-line, along with a lot of cross-analysis that the Chinese will be charging you extra for. But even if you don’t have a card reader, I thought you’d be interested in holding this in your own hot little hands.”

A lot of the story revolves around attempts to digitise libraries – by shredding books and having computers put together the shreds to “scan” them, triggering protests. The “Chinese Informagical Coalition” has access to the British Library and has digitised all the books in there – similar to the way Google and, until recently, Microsoft are doing. Vinge suggests that the information should all be freely available, but that they can still make money from all the behind-the-scenes cross-analysis that they can do with their indexes, which is an intriguing idea.

5. The field of “prospective medicine”, where it’s obvious that future advancements in medicine will be able to cure existing maladies, and where the solution is therefore to do – nothing!

Yep, so while I was glad to have waded through all the novel terminology to extract out some interesting ideas, it was a bit of a slog.

A blurb on the back of this book claims that it is Vernor Vinge’s “best work to date”. ?? I’m a big fan of Vinge, particularly for his “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “Deepness in the Sky” novels, and in picking this one up, I was hoping for more of the same. But “Rainbows End” is, in that respect, disappointing. It’s a fine book - interesting (not groundbreaking) ideas, good (not great) characterization, occasional plot twists - but it just doesn’t live up to his previous work. Perhaps that’s because it lacks a fascinating alien race? ;) He re-uses ideas that he’s already explored in his previous books (accelerated learning, hyper-intelligent analysts that see connections and can track down problems in realtime) without pushing them to the next level. He does create an interesting future computing paradigm, in which computers become omnipresent by being “wearable”. But overall, it was a good book… not a great one.