Vernor Vinge’s latest book Rainbows End is an annoying thing to read. If you check out Amazon’s customer reviews you’ll get a sense that even the hard core SciFi crowd is disappointed. However the most information-packed review came from MIT’s Technology Review. In this little article I learned that Vinge is a computer science professor and the great mac daddy of the concept of social singularity.
Vinge proposed that technological progress would soon accelerate to a spike of such intense change that on the other side of it, humanity would be unrecognizable. On this subject, there are several fascinating books which I am presently reading and already recommending: The Singularity Is Near and Shaping Things.
In short, the story is about very near future, 2025. The singularity has taken place and technology has exponentially advanced. Most people depend on their “wearables”, computers embedded into human bodies for non-stop access to information. Several parallel stories develop:
Robert Gu, once a poet and a professor, comes out of Alzheimer’s seemingly unscathed. He is faced with a changed world and has to go back to high school to catch up. His little granddaughter Miri is the ubergeek of her time and concentrates on helping her grandfather overcome the difficulties of getting used to new technology.
Bob Gu, the son of the professor is a modern day NSA-equivalent high ranking official. His wife Alice works there too. Get it? Bob, Alice? In the world of data encryption, these are often marked as 2 nodes exchanging encrypted information. In the book there is even an Eve (like the Eve’s dropper).
Modern day books are being scanned from libraries but in the process of being scanned books are destroyed by a shredder. Robert Gu and his friends try to stop the process. There are plenty of allusions to Google here. While Google isn’t physically destroying books, it does so by scanning them. Given convenient reading devices, will we continue using libraries or physical books?
Secret Agencies of several countries are involved in an operation around a bio lab at the same University where the afore mentioned library stands. YGBM (you gotta believe me) is a mind control kind of technology. It’s escape into evil hands would be devastating to the world where everyone is constantly hooked up.
The book is absolutely dull. The language is as good as that of a soap opera written by the likes of Daniel Steel. The underlying philosophical questions are enormously trite: the virtual and digital vs. physical and analog.
While reading the book, I felt as though I was watching trash like SPY Kids. Mom & Dad (secret agents), their daughter (futuristic technology prodigy) and her Grandpa & Grandma collectively save the world. This all feels like a family movie … Was this story once a screenplay? Did Hollywood pass and it just became a book instead?
