Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good in places but hard to follow, 21 Oct 2006
I am a big Vernor Vinge fan - I loved both A fire Upon the Deep, and A Deepness in the Sky. I also read and re-read his Realtime stories. Rainbows End starts pretty smartly. The plots involving international government security agencies, a protagonist who has been cured of senile dementia and other characters around him, get going and explained nicely. The early scene setting in the high school classroom, where our ex-Alzheimer's sufferer is back at school to learn about the future world is really neat. The picture of society of the future is concisely explained and enjoyable.
Then I started getting lost and never recovered. Lots of future in-terms appeared. It was obviously up to the reader to understand them by context, but I couldn't. What's a Haptic? There were plots involving virtual overlays of the real world - eg a Pratchetesque library. Multi player roll games also overlaid and somehow competing for credibility which gave them power. It was just too tangled. characters had some sort of avatar which they could use as telepresence - but it can be hijacked...why not just turn of your PC. Ah...PCs. Well they don't exist, but have instead metamorphosed into clothes and contact lenses. Another thing to get confused about.
Hmm... I loved the first third of this book, but by the end I really could not be bothered trying to pick apart the threads. I bought this hardback on the strength of his previous work, but I did not feel I got value for money.
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"What's Up, Doc?" - or, the Virtual on Steroids, 30 Nov 2006
Ok, I'm a member of the `geek' family - my daily job involves working with computers, both at the programming and the hardware design level. As such, this book should have been great, but I found I was disappointed in it for some rather strange reasons.
First is the world Vinge envisions, where almost everyone is plugged into the net on a constant basis via wearable computers with contact lenses for output display, and the world at large has so many contact points and monitors that you can be almost anywhere and still be totally immersed in virtual reality. My problem with this is that it doesn't go far enough! Computers small enough to weave into your clothes are an almost reality now, along with displays that can be part of normal glasses. So there is no great leap here - and in fact, the interface to the computer, how the person can give it commands, I found to be quite clunky, depending on virtual keyboards or interpretations of various body gestures (which apparently involve a fairly steep learning curve on the user's part to get right). Why not computers embedded in the body, with direct connection to the neural system, or at least allow for voice commands?
Second is the envisioned response to the dangers of having everything wired to the net and the influence generated data can have on people. I found it difficult to believe that in the time span given, a short twenty years from now, that the U.S. would have put in place a military force with the authority to not only monitor all net traffic and dragoon intelligence analysts from any organization at any time it was felt they were needed, but to take action on a moments notice, without recourse to any high civilian authority, up to and including a nuclear strike against any data source seen to be inimical.
Third is the level of software development envisaged. Software has always been the tortoise in speed of improvement, but here Vinge sees it having progressed to where it can compute and display, in real time, a complete visual overlay on the `real' world, and much of its high level programming capable of being done by almost anyone, allowing the user to effectively `live' in whatever fantasy world he desires.
The above objections are from the `geek' side of me, all technical. But what of the artistic side? Here Vinge does much better, wrapping a pretty solid story of intrigue and suspense around this future society. The threat is "YGBM" (You Gotta Believe Me), software so insidious it can make the recipient believe whatever the originator wants him to, the ultimate in mind control. When evidence surfaces that someone has actually perfected a form of this, the search is on for who and where. Most of the search is done by a character known only as `Rabbit', a very enigmatic being with obvious echoes from a certain cartoon character, intertwined with the story of Robert Gu, former world class poet who has been rescued from the ills of Alzheimer's by modern medicine, although along the way he seems to have lost that `genius' touch to writing poetry
The main characters are pretty well fleshed out, where their motivations and actions make good sense, and allow the reader to become emotionally involved with them. There are multiple plot twists and threads, all intertwined in such a fashion as to maintain a pretty high level of suspense. In fact, this book might be called a `Future Thriller' - even down to the `will the heroes save the day with the detonation clock ticking down to its last seconds?' scenario.
A mixed bag. A good, engaging story; people whose reactions to the envisioned world are plausible and realistic; but some odd technical lapses in the envisioned future that hurts its believability.
---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Have I been reading a different book of the same title??, 18 Nov 2007
I do not understand the rather negative reviews this book has. To my mind it is excellent -- way better than "A Deepness in the Sky" and almost as good as (though not at all like) "A Fire upon the Deep". It describes in a satisfyingly complex way a world beginning to accelerate towards Vingean Singularity, with all its glories and terrors. The choice of Robert Gu, a "retread" ex genius poet as the central character is very effective, providing the reader with a link to the more comprehensible point of view. And unlike most SF protagonists, Gu is hardly a one-dimensional cut-out. He's a real SOB, for whom one can't help but feeling some sympathy as the story unfolds and we see his painful adjustments to his new status.
The book starts with a bang, describing the discovery of and the initial responses to the newest Bad Thing, which turns out to be "YGBM". No I won't spoil the joke by unpacking the acronym, but I thought the obvious sly reference to ICBM quite funny. Which brings me to another aspect of "Rainbow's End": it kept me chuckling throughout, without being overtly jokey -- a pretty rare achievement.
All in all, one of the best SF books I ever read (and I've read *far* too many!).
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