RAINBOWS END by Vernor Vinge
Vernor Vinge is the kind of science fiction writer (like Asimov or Sagan) who takes himself seriously and really gives a go at modeling the future and writing something that’s technologically and societally plausible (or even likely). I probably first encountered Vinge’s name in the context of something nonfiction that he wrote about the impending technological singularity, but when I found out that he was a singularitarian and an anarcho-capitalist, I drove to the bookstore and bought the first book of his I could find.
Rainbows End (no, there’s not a missing apostrophe, it’s a sentence) deals with the pre-artificial intelligence world of 2025, which is very much in upheaval due to the impact of augmented human intelligence. Where science fiction like Star Trek often makes the mistake of crewing 24th century spacecraft with people with 20th century morals, social structures, and haircuts, Vinge has a gift for taking things like gesture controlled text messaging and contact lens interfaces and showing how they change the nature of human interaction completely (in this case by allowing people to have discrete 1-to-1 conversations with only one of the people at the table, often in parallel to a bigger group conversation).
Most jobs in Vinge’s future have to do with search and analysis. Advertisers mine their data and look for the effects of combinations of ad campaigns. Disease control people, spy agencies, and many of the other industries mentioned in the book do roughly the same. Everyone’s job has become Levi’s job.
Children with a good handle on the right technologies play pranks with global political implications.
I was repeatedly spooked by this book, because while the world described was alien and chaotic, it also seemed strangely familiar to a person who often texts under the table, bombs polls with Reddit, and reads Palin’s hacked emails.
The book’s lasting impression on me is a lingering feeling of nervousness and worry. I interact daily with people whose cultural lag causes them to reject ideas like human evolution and global warming. How will they cope with the dissolution of hierarchy and privacy, or the advent of AI? I feel like we’re not ready, but the future doesn’t care.
July 7th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Just reading this post gives me a sense of nervousness and worry.
You’ve read Snow Crash, right? It used to give me a similar feeling, but not so bad, because it was less “realistic” sci-fi than this apparently is.
July 7th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Yeah, I’ve read Snow Crash, and it’s actually a good analogy. Rainbows End was entirely a cyperpunk/hacker novel, and I think the hallmark of that genre is that overwhelmed bewildered feeling. I think Snow Crash was probably pretty realistic. As soon as augmented reality lets us experience our internet interactions as something more palpable and physical, the technologies and situations of that book will have come to pass.
But Vinge’s barely-alluded to expectation that the whole world was on the edge of something unprecedented and unimaginable, even while the book’s bewildered characters struggled to make sense of a issues that were trivial in comparison, might have added more awe and terror to the thing.
July 7th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Oh, and also, there’s this phenomenon in linguistics where words get turned totally around and start meaning their opposites. Maybe it starts as sarcasm, and maybe a lot of time the reverse meaning thing is just for hipsters and quickly dies out (Gavin, my surfer brother-in-law from South Africa, uses the word “sick” meaning “cool”), but a lot of time it sticks, so that “resent”, which meant “appreciate” or “feel grateful for” in Shakespeare’s time, has totally flipped. Anyhow, Vinge has all the characters in the book use the word “tragic” like I use “cool”, and I love it so much that I wish that people would take a cue from the book and start using it that way.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Well, Stephenson’s not a singularitarian, which is probably why Snow Crash lacks that undertone of expectation. He expects the world to change, but not to the degree that Vinge does. (He also spells his name “Neal,” so you aren’t the only ones.)
I’ve heard (or read) “sick” meaning “cool” - but “tragic” for “cool” is wonderful.
February 14th, 2010 at 10:15 pm
[…] set a hard science fiction novel very far in the future. In some Vinge’s novels, such as Rainbows End, he stays away from the prediction wall by writing about the near future. In others, like A Fire […]