Rainbows End

By: Vernor Vinge

Narrated by: Eric Conger

Length: 14 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

Vernor Vinge doesn't write novels very quickly, but when he writes one, it's well worth the wait. His last two novels have won the coveted Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the year. Rainbows End is set in the same near future as his novella "Fast Times at Fairmont High", which won the Hugo Award in 2002 for Best Novella. Set a few decades from now, Rainbows End is an epic adventure that encapsulates in a single extended family the challenges of the technological advances of the first quarter of the 21st century. The information revolution of the past 30 years blossoms into a web of conspiracies that could destroy Western civilization. At the center of the action is Robert Gu, a former Alzheimer's victim who has regained his mental and physical health through radical new therapies, and his family. His son and daughter-in-law are both in the military, but not a military we would recognize, while his middle-school-age granddaughter is involved in perhaps the most dangerous game of all, with people and forces more powerful than she or her parents can imagine.

Filled with excitement and Vinge's trademark potpourri of fascinating ideas, Rainbows End is another triumphantly entertaining novel by one of the true masters of the field.

©2006 Vinge Vernor (P)2007 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

• 2007 Hugo Award winner, Best Novel

"This [is] top-drawer hard SF - fast-paced, packed with action, intellectually challenging and, above all, capable of invoking SF's grail: a genuine sense of wonder." (Publishers Weekly)

Digital is maybe not the best format for this one.

The delicious irony of listening on my Android device, sitting on a subway car, my fellow passengers engrossed in their own various electronic distractions, to a distopian neoluddite B-plot about saving phyisical books from digitisation only leaves me wondering why I didn't just go in for the hard copy of the book to begin with. I found it somewhat refreshing that the author chose not to dwell excessively on the novelty of the AI character, given that by now it's such a well-worn sci-fi trope. Thankfully, this is more a story of character driven interactions than the orgy of futurism that it appears on the surface. The protagonist's Hero's Journey does its job in leaving me with the appropriate warm fuzzy feeling. While little about the story strikes me as boldly unique in the way that "True Names" did in the intetnet's infancy, it's still an engaging plot. For a 2006 release, some details already feel slightly dated -- for one, the author largely misses the emergence of social media that would have been taking shape around the time of writing.

Unfortunately, the reader's oblivious Chinese mispronounciation takes me out of the story completely. If you're considering this book, I'd strongly encourage you to go with the dead-tree-and-ink version.

started strong but lost me by chapter 2

the intro premise was very clever and hooked me in. then it switched topics to what amounts to user experience issues with future technology. I didn't buy into any of it and lost interest in what was happening. tbh, I skipped some later chapters in hopes it would return to the initial theme but it didn't or I zoned out and missed it. sad to imagine a world where augmented reality products ship with such poor UX. consider me skeptical.

Ambitious, convoluted, and complex

What started as an interesting concept and a study of future tech became hopelessly lost in the details. I enjoyed the performance quite a bit, however there was just too much happening with characters that were difficult to relate to.

Whole new world

Rainbows End, or Robert and the Rabbit. This book somehow reminds me of Gibson's The Peripheral

Wordy reading

Much of the dialog through instant messaging was tedious due to the speaker/recipient labels that did not transfer well to audio. Compelling story at first but by chapter 9 or 10, the pace slowed to dull. Might have been better on the page. I would recommend choosing other Vinge novels first.

SF Down the Rabbit Hole

Really enjoyed this after I got past the uninspired narration... Top notch speculative sf w/ a bit of a Wonderland theme... Maybe a little slow to start but get moving, and the last third or so is fantastic, especially the last 2-3 hours... Good characters even if most aren’t terribly likeable, at least not to start... I loved the multiple literary sf references, most of all the less obvious throw away ones;). Little dense so wouldn’t recommend as a casual read... You’ll wanna cogitate and masticate over much presented if you’re into that sorta thing;) It is a better read than listen...

Good thoughtful sci-fi

Fascinating ideas of the near future. Ubiquitous web-presence, holographic technology, Gesture-based wearable computers. Self-driving cars. The manufacture of things has become as cheap as today's chip manufacturing. Even buildings are self-assembling units. Into this world lands a grumpy old poet from our time who's awoken from years of dementia by a new cure...

Awesome!

This story is surprisingly realistic. I never thought of advertising as a engineering problem before this but wow-- new perspective!

What Moore's law might provide

Interesting sci fi of a few decades from now without the full apocolypse having occurred yet.

One of Vinge’s Best

I love this book for many reasons, but perhaps the best is its sense of world-building. The science is scarily possible and characters very interesting. I really hope he does a sequel.