Rainbows End

[jack]

This was another sequel I was looking forward to in the order I made in December. I'd heard mixed opinions on it. At least now I've read it I no longer get the title mixed up with "Gravity's Rainbow" :)

It's an extension of ideas in the short story "Fast Times at Fairmont High". I thought the world was wonderfully conceived. It's a middle ground between living in a cyber-reality and not. The cyber reality is overlaid on the real one: people wear glasses/contacts that overlay both straight information and enhancements to location on your vision.

For instance, people might present themselves as avatars instead of what they really look like, and everyone who's seeing the default view of the street will see that. Or project their avatar somewhere else, to visit other people without physically moving. And there are thousands of others, eg. fantasy world interpretations of places.

The world is fascinating, it's really good.

The story I didn't like so much. I quite enjoyed the characters, but the plot didn't seem as well balanced in the world as Vinge managed in the even-more sweeping worlds of Fire Upon and Deepness.

In fact, I think I prefer the short story as book, although the longer book expands a lot of things. The short story is better with the expanded (and only occasionally changed) view of the characters gained from reading the novel.

I'm curious to see what everyone else thinks, if they've read it.

I feel like I'd like to read another book in that world, but experience teaches me that sequels that take the most interesting aspects and then do them right are quite rare. (Although sometimes spawn whole series and genres when they get them right.)

Comments

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

if they've read it.

For people who want to read it but don't have a copy, it is available online at the author's website.

(I have a paper copy, but the "search" function is useful!)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah, good point!

Welcome to the future, everyone!

Interestingly, I still want to own it. And not just to donate money, or out of fear of the future, but because I like paper books. Although if all books were available online, I don't know which ones I'd pay to have physical.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Search is good. I often find myself scrolling back in a book, and finding grep suddenly doesn't work. The internet can generally find the specific quote I'm looking for, but not *always*. And is less good on plot points.

[(Anonymous)]

The world is fascinating, it's really good.

And I didn't realise initially you were talking about someone's imagined world. What a nice thought :)

m, should fix that openid thing.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

ROFL. Yes, I guess if you don't read the title and have (gr?) heard of the book, it might not be clear from what I actually said. I should have said "Rainbows End (which is a book)" in the title :)

But I'm happy to claim the sentiment about the real world, even though I didn't originally mean it like that. It *is* really good that the world is so fascinating :)

m, should fix that openid thing.

Mair, I assume? I know too many "m"s, though only one that I know to have lost openid. FWIW, it doesn't bother me particularly to have anonymous comments, but it's obviously more convenient to have an identity.

What happened to your id?

[d37373.livejournal.com]

I read it over the holidays. I liked the style and the ideas, but the plot was a bit thin.

The premise is interesting, and I liked the way so many of the concepts were taken for granted by those who had grown up with them. There were a few bits of background I felt I was missing, but that is part of the immersion - no need to explain jargon when everyone in the world knows what it is. I suspect reading the short story would fill in some more of the background, but there's still a whole world out there to explore if Vinge wants to.

With good ideas and decent execution, I can cope with an uninteresting plot. It's not a great book, certainly not as good as A Deepness In The Sky. I don't think I'll read it many more times, and I can't say I've been thinking about it much since finishing the book. On the other hand, it was a nice realisation of a techno-heavy near future, so I'm sure I will be reminded of it by world events.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I suspect reading the short story would fill in some more of the background,

I can't remember what was where now, but while I preferred the short story overall, I don't think it had anything necessary for the novel.

so I'm sure I will be reminded of it by world events.

Charlie Stross (author of some similarly near-future books, as well as the awesome Atrocity Archives) was talking about watching technical developments. The world as a whole hasn't caught up, but a virtual-world bank heist, which sounded ridiculous, happened between his writing about one and it being published.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Rainbows End a lot; it’s an engaging portrait of a world that’s a recognizable but highly exaggerated projection of current developments. I liked the exploration of the way that technology can substitute for knowledge and skill as well as for physical labour. I’ve been thinking about this in my own life: I’ve not switched to GPS navigation because I like to keep my map-reading skills fluent by continually practicing them. But maybe this maintainance of an obsolete skill is a foolish waste of time?

There are a couple of things I didn’t believe, though I can see why Vinge put them there. While I can believe that fear-driven legislation might force a lot of people to adopt something like the Secure Hardware Environment described in the books, the costs are considerable: not just the computational and energy costs of doing all that cryptography, but the very big risks that come when other people can revoke your ability to run your own computer programs on your own hardware. Surely there would be proportionate pushback (as we’re seeing in a small way at present with Microsoft Vista), especially after the first big revocation disaster. What happens when everyone’s car navigation software stops running at the same time? When airplane autopilots stop working at the same time as air traffic control goes down? When buildings fall over because their active balancing software has been revoked? It would be interesting to see this conflict play out politically and technologically.

The second thing I don’t believe is that the non-technosavvy will be shut out from the economy quite as thoroughly as Vinge implies in the novel. Our experience is that technological advance doesn’t lead to the total obsolescence of older skills, but rather to a mixed economy in which there are both lettuce pickers and Internet search engine optimization consultants. If one kind of manual labour becomes obsoleted by automation, those labourers become available for other kinds of activity (for example, moving from manufacturing to service parts of the economy).

I would have liked to know a bit more about what happened at the end. What happened to Alfred Vaz? How did people recover from the Credit Suisse revocation? To what use did the military put the YGBM technology they had discovered? And most importantly, who or what was Rabbit? It seems rather unfair to me to raise the likelihood that Rabbit was an AI without answering any of the resulting questions.

P.S. You have a typo in your title.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thank you, that's interesting.

GPS: I know what you mean, I don't know the answer.

SHE: Ah, I think I totally missed that, I must have been skimming, I didn't get the details of SHE at all, I had assumed the revocation was about trust of programs, not a problem if it's self-contained, but shuts almost everything down if it can't talk to anyone else (like shutting down a nameserver, doesn't stop someone running programs per se, but stops them doing anything useful with anyone else).

Techno-illiterate: I wasn't sure what was implied, I thought they were shifting, but many people were left behind by just how fast everything shifted, which sounds normal.

But it's the sort of book where he throws so many ideas into the world some of them won't fit. As you say, it just seemed to stop: I guess he hadn't thought any further. And he could fit a sequel in (I'd be very curious!) but he'd have to go off and invent it.

I said something like this, I didn't really believe in the story he was telling, I didn't really care, I wanted to know more about the characters and the world, but if he wrote another novel with the same characters and world, but a different plot, I'd almost be equally interested in that as a canonical sequel, though that only occurs to me because I did have the opportunity of reading the short story as well as the novel.

Typo: Thank you, fixed. I was concentrating too hard on the apostrophe, I got an extra "d".