Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Rainbows End
Book Review: I love this book
Summary: 4 Stars
I'm a long time Verner Vinge fan and this book is different from his usual. It is a very probable future regarding where technology is taking us. Including the lack of privacy and "Rabbits" searching the web and knowing more about us than we know about our selves. It doesn't bother me that we don't know who Rabbit is, I think that is the point. Anonymous people will be poking their noses in everyones business and there will be little that we can do to stop it. There will also be many good things in this future.
Read the book,
Liz
Book Review: Interesting Concepts, but....
Summary: 2 Stars
A 4 rating for the ideas behind the novel, especially how our networked society will continue to (d)evolve ... unfortunately it is written like a teen novel and I gave up on it half way through ...Book Review: Plain Uninteresting
Summary: 1 Stars
i'm loathe to start reading reviews for a book before i finish it, but for "Rainbows End", i have done just that for one simple reason: i'm midway through the book, disliking it with each page, and i'm wondering should i continue. from the reviews on amazon, i see that it would be pointless to continue wading through this tedious, uninteresting prose.
like many others, i was and am a huge fan of "A Fire Upon the Deep". and like many others, i do not understand how vinge can write one fantastic book, and then write "Rainbows End", which is just so not fantastic. maybe the main character in "Rainbows End" is echoing a lot of what vinge was thinking as he wrote End: can i still make words sing? do i have it anymore?
i'm sorry to say, vinge, that for this book, you definitely lost it. you are your hapless lost poet in this book who has sacrificed great writing for a lot of technological superficial overlay. yeah, it's pretty at times, but it leaves the book overall quite shallow.
you know when i decided to put this book down? when i got to the scene where several characters were walking through a library and they kept running into animated books. for page after page after page. are you kidding me? is this supposed to be a developing of tension in any way, shape, or form? they're walking through a library. literally walking through a library. WHY WOULD I CARE TO READ AN ENTIRE CHAPTER ON THAT??
anyway, this book sucks. and you know what else? the hugo has really nominated some real clunkers in the last years. i was starting to lose all hope for whoever is making such terrible decisions after reading several other recent winners until i read "Windup Girl", which was absolutely awesome. i'm starting to think though that that book was nominated not because the judges have begun to re-recognize what great writing is, but out of pure luck.
Book Review: Plausible but boring
Summary: 3 Stars
Vernor Vinge is SF's big "Idea Man," the inventor of cyberspace for the seminal novella True Names, the mastermind of one of the greatest books in science fiction, Marooned in Realtime. But I guess they can't all be gems even for Vinge. In Rainbows End, Vinge has put his tremendous world-building powers to their traditional good use and come up with a plausible near-future in which not just information, but analysis, design, and delivery are available at tremendous speed. Rainbows End's setting is its great selling point, and seems quite plausible (with a single exception: Vinge's belief that Google will be a huge megacorp in forty years is the sort of thing that might well date his work, depending on the vagaries of business in the next decade).
Unfortunately, in this book as in none of his others, Vinge's facility with plot and character seem to desert him. I just didn't buy any of the main characters: Robert Gu, who is cured of his Alzheimers to find the world very different from when his mind left it, seems in many places to be a plot device - the ignoramus everybody explains things to so we, the readers, will get information regarding the setting. And the rest of the time, he's an utter jerk who I didn't care about even a little bit. His granddaughter who tries to help him is pretenaturally chipper and intrepid; his obsessive ex-wife who faked her own death is two tired plot devices at once. The mysterious stranger known as Rabbit talks like a smug hacker out of Central Casting, as a result of which I could not get interested in the question of his origins and abilities: Vinge created a far more interesting, sympathetic, and dangerous "mysterious stranger" in True Names when he gave us the classic character known as the Mailman.
But enough about the characters. The plot bugged me too. It's uncomfortably shoehorned into the Robert Gu exposition, extremely unspectacular in its events (basically, it's a caper plot about a break-in at a laboratory), and the futuristic conflict between a pair of competing artistic paradigms that occurs concurrently with the caper aspect of the plot, while interesting, did not engage me because the matters at stake, while plausibly of import in the future, did not seem important to me (basically, it comes down to this: there was a riot about interior decoration at a university library). And Vinge clearly wants to do a sequel, so he leaves the villain free and the mysterious Rabbit just as mysterious as he was when he was first introduced. Nothing gets resolved except the decorating choice.
Love the setting; I think we're headed in the direction Vinge depicts. But this is Vinge's only boring book: setting's all it's got. Maybe he or his publisher got impatient and forced this book before it was fully developed, because this is certainly not how Vinge writes most of his stories. He is a master of intricate yet easily followed plotting and has been responsible for some of the great characters of science fiction. I'll still buy his next book. Vinge is one of the all-time greats. Everybody's entitled to an off day.
Book Review: The world of 2000, as seen from 1950, er...
Summary: 3 Stars
After reading A Deepness in the Sky I have been looking forward to reading more Vinge. Alas, I feel like a bit of a side trip has been taken here. This is very different than his other works, which in and of itself is not a bad thing, but I don't think he pulls it off.
Much has been made in descriptions of this book about the character of Robert Gu, and makes it seem as if the book is about Robert Gu. However, he is actually only a minor character, and I suspect his real purpose is so that exposition can be provided for us, the reader. Alas, its a bit obvious in this case. He is "new" to the world presented, as are we; and therein seems to be the real purpose of this book -- to present this particular version of the near future.
Indeed, it feels as if both the characters and the plot have been whipped up to serve this purpose. There are interesting things that happen in the plot and with some of the characters, but too many times it feels like the door is being locked and you are being led away somewhere else after being allowed a glimpse inside, knowing that you'd rather go through that door than where you are going.
As for the near future presented in this book? It does have some very interesting and fascinating elements, but also some absurdities, and things which have been extrapolated right off the deep end in my opinion. I suspect it will be viewed in a few years the same way we now view those 1950's versions of what the year 2000 might be like.
Ultimately, this was a book that was hard to put down, but then when I got to the end, I'm thinking "Well, that could have been better".
There is room for a sequel, which would hopefully focus more on the characters and the story, and perhaps the politics, and less on the environment. Some of the characters *were* fascinating, and some of the hinted at plot *was* intriguing, as was the environment, but the environment hogged entirely too much of the stage. This book might make a very good prolog to that book (should it come to pass). In this book, both the characters and the plot are just things that the enviroment happens to. Its as if someone took a vacation in 2025, came back, and tried to write a story to match their vacation photos.
I'm not sorry I read this book, but it feels like a movie you were glad you saw, but won't be buying/renting when it comes out on DVD. The thought occurs to me that if this book were turned into a movie, it would probably be a summer blockbuster. It has elements that lend themselves very well to that, as well as the thin characters/plot that also tend to be the case (not always) with summer blockbusters.
All in all, it was a bit like reading the novel equivalent of a film centered on special effects. I still look forward to more Vinge books, hoping this one is the anomaly.