Book Review: ‘Rainbows End’ by Vernor Vinge

By Chris Meadows

The recent post about book scanners that can process 3,000 pages per minute reminded me (and at least one other person) of the Vernor Vinge novel Rainbows End. Since it had been a while since I had read that novel, I decided to take another look.

For a while, the novel was posted free in its entirety on Vernor Vinge’s website. It has since been taken down; however, the Internet Archive still has it available in its entirety in the Wayback Machine’s archive of the page.

I’m actually surprised nobody reviewed it here back when it was newly published, but I can only find a few references to it on TeleRead. E-books—and some modern issues relating to e-books—actually play a pretty prominent part in the book’s plot, in a number of ways.

Vinge’s Other Work

Those who only know Vinge from his recent work prior to Rainbows End might be surprised at his return to the relatively-near future, more commonly the province of Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, and Neal Stephenson. After all, his books A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky take place thousands of years in the future, when Earth is barely even a memory and humans have spread out across the galaxy.

But long before he wrote those, Vinge wrote another near-future book, The Peace War—and before that, his 1981 novella True Names helped to define the entire cyberpunk genre. With Rainbows End, Vinge returned to the near-future, adjusting and updating his predictions to fit the present-day.

(It is refreshing, by the way, to read a near-future extrapolation story for once that is not written in the present tense, or bombastic in the way that the authors like Doctorow can be. Vinge is old-school in his writing approach, which means I can appreciate his technological extrapolations all the more.)

The Plot

The story of Rainbows End is a third-person narrative woven together from the perspectives of several characters. The overall plot concerns an intelligence agency’s infiltration of a research lab that someone is using to perfect a workable mind-control technology—but unbeknownst to most of the intelligence agency, the mind-control mastermind happens to be the very man in charge of the search.

The infiltration plays out against a backdrop of fascinating new technology, culture clashes between fandoms, and protests against destruction of old media in favor of new. There are a number of memorable characters who get caught up in all these events.

The closest thing to a sole protagonist the book has is Robert Gu, an Alzheimer’s victim who is returned to lucidity by one experimental medical process, and returned to a youthful body by another. He lives with his son and daughter-in-law, Bob and Alice, and his grand-daughter Miri (another character of importance). Robert starts out as a fairly unsympathetic character—he used to be a real bastard, abusive of his wife and others around him—and it seems as though he is set to resume where he left off…until something changes him.

Since he was last lucid in our era, and has spent fifteen years or so in a mental fugue before being revived like Lazarus, he serves as a viewpoint character for modern readers. We learn about the startling technological advances in this new world just as he does, and we can sympathize with his future shock as he gradually grows accustomed to his new life.

Another important character is the mysterious Rabbit, a shadowy fixer (and trickster)from the Internet world who specializes in getting things done by getting people with complimentary talents together. His identity—indeed, even his very nature—is unclear, as are his motivations. However, he is a vital part of the plot to infiltrate the lab—whether the intelligence agency thinks it’s a good idea or not.

There are actually several different narratives within the story that interweave and cross over with one another in the most unusual ways. Characters watch others in secret, and exchange private messages to hold conversations behind each other’s backs. In the end, it all comes together in ways that are unexpected even by the participants.

Vinge’s Cyberspace

Rainbows End is an expansion and reworking of ideas found in Vinge’s 2001 short story, “Fast Times at Fairmont High” (found in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge). “Fast Times” features characters who would later appear in Rainbows End, though some of them have different names (or even entirely different species), and the plots are almost entirely unrelated. The technology is the same, however, as far as it goes.

However, Rainbows End also owes a lot to True Names. Both feature consensus fantasy realities constructed within computer networks. Both of these fantasy worlds have geographical correspondences to real-world locations—though True Names’s world is one that can only be observed from within while Rainbows End’s can be seen by anyone wearing special glasses.

Interactive Fiction: If You Build It, Will They Come?

And both True Names and Rainbows End also feature interactive “books”. The protagonist in True Names writes what another character refers to as “games” but he calls “novels”—apparently advanced multimedia versions of the text adventure games that were just reaching the height of their popularity at the time True Names was written.

Vinge has long held that the e-book medium of the future would be “interactive” in some respect. In 1993, when Vinge wrote an introduction for an “annotated” edition of his book A Fire Upon the Deep, he believed that hypertext (at the time, the newest new computer thing) was going to be the future of fiction:

I believe hypertext fiction will ultimately be an entirely new art form, as different from novels as motion pictures are from oil paintings. […] Guessing: There may not be hypertext sequels so much as the instantiation of new windows on the “reality” of the story. Group participation both during initial construction and in expanding the ongoing reality may be one of the most striking features of the art form. […] Hypertext fiction may evolve into immense art works that combine the essence of professional production teams with independent artists with the interests and efforts of the ultimate viewers.

This has, of course, never really come to pass. (And, as pnh noted in his interview, probably never will.) I always think of it as an example of the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy—projecting the popularity of something based on the ability to do it rather than the demand for it.

We can do hypertext fiction today very easily—but apart from a few Internet writing sites like Ficly or Writing.com, nobody seems to bother. Wikis would seem to fit best of all with Vinge’s vision for expanding upon someone else’s story, but there have not been many uses of them exactly like the ones he imagined. The closest things would be the forest of wikis that have sprung up to cover select interests or fandoms, such as the Avatar: The Last Airbender wiki, but these are usually reference rather than creative works.

On the other hand, there has been at least some serious study of the idea, as I found when searching TeleRead for another link. But it does not seem to have led to any commercial success outside of a few isolated experiments.

Belief Circles

With Rainbows End, Vinge’s conception of the interactive book of the future has evolved again, into a fully multimedia, virtual reality experience—though in most other respects it has a lot in common with his hypertext prediction quoted above. In Rainbows End, fans of published works create “belief circles”, which seem to be a mash-up of fanfic, Internet shared-universe writing circles, live-action roleplaying, and virtual multi-user environments such as Second Life.

In the virtual world that overlays the real world (and is viewed through displays embedded in contact lenses and controlled via sensors in clothing), fans of a given fictional or historical setting (members of that setting’s “belief circle”) create their own avatars and overlays for themselves and everything around them based on that setting. A skyscraper might be painted as a medieval tower, and cars might become horse-drawn carriages or low-flying magic carpets. Multiple different belief circles’ worldviews can overlap the same area; onlookers can switch between them like changing channels on a TV set.

For settings that are still under copyright, micropayments are charged to belief-circle members and credited toward the owner for each use of something relating to that world. (Though apparently there has been some copyright reform in Vinge’s cyber-fantasy world: at one point movies are said to have five-year copyright terms. I guess we can at least dream.)

One of the central conflicts of the book involves a clash between two belief circles over which one will dominate the University of California San Diego Library building—the “Dangerous Knowledge” setting in which librarians are knight-guardians of knowledge, and the Pokémon-ish “Scooch-a-mouti” children’s-fantasy-monsters setting. At one point the clash escalates into an out-and-out battle, with millions of viewers world-wide tuning in to see the outcome.

An Object Lesson in Obsolete Objects

The UCSD Library conflict actually grows directly out of the other aspect of the book of interest to e-book fans: the digitization of the contents of the library. In the timeframe of the book (sometime in the 2020s, apparently), physical books’ intrinsic value has declined to the point where the books themselves are considered much less valuable than their contents.

So, to get at the contents, a company is destroying the books themselves—feeding them through a shredder then blowing the shreds through a tunnel lined with high-resolution cameras. The cameras capture images of the shreds, then batteries of computers stitch them together into reconstructions of the pages, like jigsaw puzzles. The idea is to gather and collate all the world’s knowledge, to unlock synergies that had been prevented by it all being so inaccessible before.

Vinge wrote Rainbows End just as Google was beginning its own massive scanning project (which does get a mention in passing in the book), but well before the settlement with the Authors Guild (and the attendant controversy) was on the horizon. Thus, some of the predictions are already slightly obsolete. (It is amusing how little controversy there is over the idea of China digitizing the entire contents of the British Museum and Library, compared to how much uproar there is in Europe right now over Google.)

Still, it’s easy to see how this global scanning project inspired Vinge’s future version—scanning books a page at a time is a time-intensive process, even if you saw the spine off and put the stack of paper in a sheet-feeding scanner. With better computers it would be much faster to scan them in windblown fragments, and digitize all the world’s knowledge in a matter of weeks.

This does, of course, depend on printed books getting so deprecated that nobody minds if scores upon scores of them—some possibly valuable antiques—go through the shredder in the name of digital reincarnation. It is difficult to see that happening now—but on the other hand, if technology marches on as quickly as Rainbows End predicts, before long entire generations may come to think of printed books as akin to papyrus scrolls and stone tablets. (Even for an e-book fan like myself, that’s a scary thought.)

Faulty Crystal Balls

Still, I’m doubtful it will happen. Predicting the future is always an inaccurate game—if we go by True Names, we should already have direct-brain-stimulation cyberspace and mandatory computing licenses by now. Rainbows End is set as far in our future now as True Names was then—and if it seems like books written now are “more accurate” predictors, that is only because hindsight is 20/20. Things that didn’t come to pass in a book written thirty years ago are easy to spot—but those same things in a book written now will have to wait another thirty years.

There are already a few “predictions” (for the 2005-2010 years) that did not come true—and one irony. At one point in Rainbows End, a character refers to a (fictitious) Terry Pratchett book written after Robert Gu succumbed to Alzheimer’s Disease. Of course, we now know that Terry Pratchett himself has been diagnosed with latent Alzheimer’s.

But as far as prognostication goes, Vinge also isn’t above poking a little fun at himself. As the battle between belief circles rages at the library, one character reflects:

There had been a few debacles in the late Teens, when major belief structures had produced some awful art. Some were so bad that the circles themselves had shriveled and died. Who heard of Tines anymore, or the Zones of Thought?

The Tines and Zones of Thought are, of course, major elements from A Fire Upon the Deep.

Conclusion

Rainbows End is an interesting book for the future it predicts. It presents a fully-realized world, very well fleshed out and with more interesting predictions and characters than I have been able to cover in this review. I highly recommend it.

Ironically for a book where e-books are important, Rainbows End does not seem to be commercially available as an e-book—not on eReader, Fictionwise, or even for Amazon’s Kindle. The HTML version at the Internet Archive appears to be the only way to read it electronically.