Rainbows End
I am a huge fan of Vernor Vinge. A Fire Upon The Deep was a spectacular experience, and A Deepness In The Sky literally moved me to tears at more than one point. I scrounged eBay to pick up some of his older out-of-print books. I am an unabashed fan.
Therefore it pains me to report that I couldn’t wait for Rainbows End to … end!
After that first hundred page honeymoon, the time in which I give any book a chance, I couldn’t sit down to read without a large sigh. The page count never seemed to budge, and that looming unread section at the rear of the book never seemed to shrink.
Why?
I just didn’t care about what I was reading.
Rainbows End is a book about the near future. We have ubiquitous net presence, pervasive virtual access, and a new economy based more on ideas than goods. That’s nothing new; read Accelerando and others. Vinge centers the story around the very frightening reality where mass destruction technology is accessible at the college laboratory level. How do you prevent the inevitable?
Certainly that seems like a good premise for a story. I’d still like to read stories built around these ideas, because they are highly relevant to where we are going as a people.
But Vinge’s take is just plain dull. I was buried in a shifting web of alliances, affiliations, and associations that didn’t really entertain me.
I never liked Alice in Wonderland. I don’t like Jabberwocky. I get really annoyed when strangeness is substituted for narrative. I don’t find nonsensical farce ‘charming’.
Rainbows End felt like that. Teenage characters wrap their world in the latest cultural fantasy, sharing a virtual reality overlayed upon the real world. Common objects morph into props in their collective fantasy. ‘Belief Circles’ hold ‘riots’ where competing memes ‘war’ for the public attention. Imagine a spectacular half-time show depicting a conflict between the Harry Potter universe and Simpson’s fans. Now transplant that to a college campus and add a few million people viewing it on the net and rewarding the factions with the power to influence, until one reigns supreme.
OK, fine…but why do I care? Particularly when this demonstration is being used as cover for some sort of inept break-in to a super secure research facility located on campus? More break-in, less diversion. That would have helped the story.
I hate ripping a book by someone I respect so much. I couldn’t write a tenth of the quality of Vinge, and I know it. But as a reader, I know what I like. This just wasn’t it.
But of course, I eagerly await his next book. One glitch doesn’t wipe out so many gems.
Filed under: Reviews (Books and Movies)
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