Vernor Vinge (1944–2024)

Rainbows End blends some really interesting futurism with much less worthwhile plots about family drama and the whole idea of spooky power, and while the story builds to an explosive climax, the different thematic lines never really come together, leaving the book less than the sum of its parts.

Let's start with the setting, since that's the real star of the book. It was Bruce Sterling who observed that nothing obsolesces like the future. From about 2006, Vinge imagined a strange and show more radically different 2026, where the dominant technology was wearable computing, with kids using ensemble coding to created augmented realities and fantasy universes. Everything is full of non-user servicable parts, innovation is ramping up at a breakneck pace, and schools have evolved into virtual collaborative environments where students work on applied projects and hope to catch the eye of a real business or major fandom circle.

Our entry into this world is Robert Gu, a "retread" senior citizen. Once a gifted poet, Robert nearly succumb to Alzhimer's before a miracle of the "medical minefield" of advanced biotechnology restored him to teenagehood. Now he's living with his middle-aged son Bob and his family, going back to a Vocational High School to learn how to use the new technology. The problem is that Robert Gu, aside from being a genius poet, was also a legendary asshole, and he's on thin ice with his kids. Robert falls in with a similar group of retreads who are trying to save the books in the UCSD Geisel Library (a truly cool piece of brutalist architecture) from a plan to shred and digitize him. Meanwhile, his granddaughter Miri is trying to set him up with like-minded friends and an adoring grad student so he's not so much of an asshole, and fellow student Juan Orozco is teaching Robert Gu how to use technology in exchange for learning how to use words like a poet.

But Robert Gu's problems adapting to modernity and making up for a lifetime of abuse are small potatoes compared to the spooky side of the story. Modern technology makes it possible to kill a lot of people very quickly, and only through constant vigilance by the intelligence services of the Great Powers (and the DHS mandated Secure Hardware Environment) is it possible to avert one of a million apocalypses. A group of Indo-European spooks detected a weapons test of You Gotta Believe Me technology--basically mind control, which is under development at a UCSD affiliated biotech lab, and engage the enigmatic Mr. Rabbit to break into the lab. The problem is that their most senior member is actually the mastermind behind the program, a man who believes that it may be necessary to enslave humanity to save them. Oh, and Bob Gu and his wife Alice are also high level spooks themselves in the USMC, which is a full-fledged cyber-intervention force.

The plot loops around these topics and converge on a single night when opposing fandoms battle for control of the Geisel Library in an immense augmented reality battle, Robery Gu and his friends stage a break-in at UCSD to save the books, acting as the hands of the intelligence operatives, who finally act against each other/Mr. Rabbit--who may be a rogue AI. A platoon of USMC rapid response forces make an assault on UCSD, backed up with everything from netwar drones to nukes, but it's to Miri and Robert and Juan as the hands on the ground to foil the plot and save the day. Which they do.

But both the mastermind and Mr. Rabbit get away, status quo ante restored. Robert becomes an okay programmer instead of a great poet, and may only be cranky rather than irredeemably cruel. The Library becomes an augmented reality library, but with some real books. Again and again, it turns out that both sides were being manipulated by a power above them, but that conspiracy was for the Greater Good. From an emotional level, it's immensely dissatisfying.

The futurism holds up surprisingly well. The online world of 2006 was very different. Youtube had just come into being, Facebook was restricted to colleges, the first iPhone was in the future, Uber and Airbnb and the million other parts of the "Sharing economy" didn't exist. Augmented reality and wereable computing were very much lab demos, and not anything that consumers could buy (well, they still aren't really, but give it a decade). Vinge misses a lot of the contemporary feel of social media, but who knows, that could change as well. In one of his more clever bits, he imagines the 'vandal charity' of Friends of Privacy, which exists solely to obscure web-searchable facts about people with plausible lies.

The thing that Vinge misses, and what he really needed to grapple with to drive this book home, is the difference between Power, Wealth, and Prestige. Roughly, power is the ability to make people do what you want, and this book believes in the power of information control and conspiracies, while also making traditional power very weak, teetering on a knife-edge of rogue destruction. Strict descriptions of wealth, the ability to get what you want, are danced around in a very American way. The characters are constantly anxious about being broke, but none of them appear to be under any actual material pressure. The ultra-wealthy appear to be able to make their own laws, but the only thing they do is the strange library transformation project. Finally, there's prestige, something that Robert Gu and all the retreads are immensely concerned with. Prestige might also accrue through the belief circles and gaming, but no one truly leet shows up to demonstrate the difference between the deliberate obscurity of the spooks and the glamour of the new stars. I think more philosophical clarity on these points would have helped Vinge focus the plot and characters of his story.

And on that note, while the setting was truly cool, and an interesting comparison of Silicon Valley ideology next to The Diamond Age, the characters and plot were very close to Vinge's previous two Hugo winners. Another grumpy old man out of time with the potential for greatness and evil. Another precocious young girl who learns to save the day. Another spies' war of information that culminates in a rapid and shadowy duel between great powers. You know what intelligence professionals say about anything that happens three times... show less

I am reading Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought novels in publication order. This second book is set earlier than the first. It does not engage the "Zonological" ideas introduced in A Fire Upon the Deep. It is structured very similarly however, with two parallel and converging narratives, one of which is cutting-edge space drama featuring (the original, in this case) Pham Nuwen, and the other of which takes place in a radically non-human planet-bound society.

The space story involves grappling show more between two human spacefaring societies. The Qeng Ho are Nuwen's mature interstellar mercantile culture, while the Emergents are the totalitarian development of a more local society whose hypostasized Emergency has resulted in an innovative form of enslavement. Simultaneous missions to contact the nascently industrializing aliens of Arachna erupt into catastrophic conflict, leaving the two competitors in a lopsided symbiosis full of intrigue.

The business on the world of Arachna is translated for the reader using conventions later rationalized as the work of the humans surveilling the planet from space. Although the denizens are quasi-arthropod "Spiders," they are characterized with Hobbitsy sorts of English names and traits, such as Sherkaner Underhill and Victory Smith. Since their technological level and social challenges better match our own, these creatures actually come off as more "human" than the either of the human cultures, at least during the first three-quarters of the book before the first in-person meetings between humans and Spiders.

I found it interesting what a mature figure Pham Nuwen is in this book, "resurrected" at its start in a more figurative manner than in A Fire Upon the Deep, but still with an enormous prior history. Despite a serious developmental arc within the scope of the current story, and some significant retrospectives to flesh out his character and motivation, Vinge has left many centuries to play with if he should ever want to compose a pre-prequel using Nuwen as the connective thread.

Big ideas that are central to this book include the coercive management of human attention, and the epistemological weaponization of networked information technology. These both feel more topical now than they would have been when the book was first published in 1999. Vinge also seems to have put a new turn on Ibn Khaldūn's theories of civilizational growth and decay, and the practical superiority of organized merchants to wealthy despots. These notions become intrinsic to the premise that a sufficient "industrial ecology" is needed to support productive interaction with interstellar travelers, who cannot carry such an ecology themselves even at the scale of a fleet. But the industrialized civilizations are necessarily finite in duration, acquiring vulnerabilities with their efficiencies.

Like the previous Zones of Thought book, A Deepness in the Sky is long--eventful, characterful, and thoughtful--and it took all my reading attention for a couple of weeks in order to get through it. Looking back at my review of A Fire Upon the Deep, I find myself in the same position of being glad to have read it and being unwilling to charge on to the next one without a significant pause to recover. And I already own a copy of The Children of the Sky. show less

Not since reading Hyperion have I felt this divided about a work of SF. There's no way that I would be able to cover the plot of A Fire Upon the Deep in an appropriate amount of time, but I'll cover the basics for posterity's sake.

The Milky Way is split up into concentric rings radiating out from the galactic center that define the upper limit of thought and technology. At the core, in the Unthinking Depths, there is no rational thinking, no civilization, no sophonts of any kind. On the show more outskirts of the galaxy, in the Transcend, intelligent species become what essentially amount to gods. It is here, at the edge of the Transcend, that a group of human researchers discover an ancient, forgotten data archive. It is here that they unknowingly awaken something called the Blight, a virus in the data that is capable of spreading and assimilating all life into a corrupted hive mind. Some of these researchers escape with a potential antidote to the Blight, and flee to the lower levels of the galaxy in an effort to escape it. Their shuttle crashes on a world of medieval technology inhabited by the Tines, a species of intelligent weasels/dogs that function as a collective intelligence; 4-8 individual members that are otherwise only semi-conscious combining to create one whole individual. The plot centers around these humans as they struggle to survive and understand the Tines, and another group's desperate attempt to find and recover the antidote; to prevent the destruction of the galaxy.

Like I said, it's a lot. That's just the bare bones of it. And what sweet, delicious, dopamine filled bones they are. A significant portion of Vinge's ideas give me the adrenaline rush of creativity and newness that I think is stereotypically associated with SF. I love the Zones of Thought. I love the Tines, their collective intelligence, the philosophical questions about the soul that they raise. I love the skroderiders and their adaptation to long-term versus short-time memory. I love that the galaxy feels vast and unknowable in the quantity of intelligent species. I love the implied billions of years in history that sits under these transient cultures. The richness and sheer quantity of ideas in A Fire Upon the Deep make it super memorable.

Surprisingly enough, I even enjoyed the ending, which is not something I can say about many of these sweeping space operas (or to be frank SF in general). The motif of oceans, waves, the inter-tidal space was quite striking. It is often in the messy and violent spaces between two disparate things, where they meet and cohabitate, that some of the most unique creatures and ideas can come from. As this is true of the ocean and the shore, such is true of the contact points between layers of the galaxy. Much like the ocean, the galaxy also follows a cyclical pattern of events, like the tides or the discrete repetition of an individual wave on the shore, that have massive effects on the species that call that place home. Even though the effects may indeed be world ending on a small scale, the system as whole continues to function, and will provide refuge for new individuals, species, and ideas in the future. I enjoyed how Vinge tied the Skroderiders and Tines into this broader analogy.

Where Vinge fails miserably is in the details: in the moment by moment execution of these ideas and the plot that holds it together. Battle sequences are often muddled, confusing, and poorly drawn. The plot follows several side tangents for far too long, which is ultimately one of the factors leading to its undeniable bloat. The actions of the Blight always happen the background; we barely get to see one of the coolest things in the whole book. Most of the characters are tossed off and shallow in their portrayal. The main Tinish villain is not just intellectually stupid, but cartoonishy so. The love interest between Pham and Ravna was completely unnecessary. Too often Vinge's writing is amateurish and beneath his true capabilities, because infrequently he throws in a line or two that actually have some artistry to them.

None of these flaws are a death sentence on their own, but totaled together they make for a nasty quagmire of quicksand that Vinge frequently dives headfirst into. There's also the dated idea of the Net, that all intelligent species communicate on. Perhaps in 1992 this was forward looking, but today it's a hunk of limestone amongst glittering diamonds. Are we really meant to believable that the best communication that the galaxy can muster is a 4chan forum?

Unfortunately, what I am left feeling is that; had these concepts and ideas been given to a better writer, this could've easily been one of the best books I've ever read. Vinge's capabilities as a writer acted as an anchor dragging everything down. I also fear that much of my enjoyment derived from the novelty and unknown of the zones of thought. Were I to re-read this novel, I wouldn't have the newness to balance out the drudgery. More than most books, A Fire Upon the Deep benefits from a blind reading. Even though the first hundred pages were by far my favorite, I still understand why it has the massive reputation it does. show less

[a:Vernor Vinge|44037|Vernor Vinge|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1215099239p2/44037.jpg] is brilliant, and his [b:Fire Upon The Deep|7685668|Fire Upon The Deep|Vernor Vinge|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-6121bf4c1f669098041843ec9650ca19.png|1253374] has got everything that really good science fiction should have.

In his Zones of Thought universe, Vinge has divided the Milky Way galaxy into zones in which technology, thought, and intelligence increases the further you show more move from the galactic core. These zones--the "Unthinking Depths," the "Slow," the "Beyond," and the "Transcend"--allow for fascinating dynamics that Vinge uses with great aplomb. In the Unthinking Depths, biological intelligence is impossible, so space ships that accidentally end up there are stranded as their crews become too stupid to even manage the ship. Humanity is said to have originated in the Slow, though only one branch of humanity--descended from Norwegians--appears to have escaped the Slow limits against faster-than-light (FTL) travel and communication and inability to create artificial intelligence. Ending up in the Slow--which has boundaries that are constantly moving--is a major hazard to space travel in the Beyond.

The Beyond allows FTL travel and communication, as well as artificial intelligence. Species there are connected by a network that is, in sophistication at least, not quite up to par with the modern internet, but not dramatically indistinguishable from the blackboards and net groups of the early days of the Internet. Call the Net or, more derisively, the "Net of a Million Lies," it has a lot in common with our modern World Wide Web in that just as much of the content is driven by paranoia, guesses, speculations as by news and information. Also like the real "net" the Net is the main source for information and news.

And this was published in 1992.

Meanwhile, there's the Transcend, an area so far out from the core that the entities there are beyond the understanding of the beings in the Beyond, almost god-like. They interact with species in the Beyond, but only peripherally.

Yet, it is from the Transcend that the villain appears, gobbling up and destroying whole civilizations throughout the Beyond in days and weeks.

Vernor would be clever with a space opera in this kind of setting, but he doesn't settle there. While battles and plots are unfolding in the top of the Beyond, a parallel story is happening down in the Slowness. A ship of human lands on an unexplored (to them) world, find a species that is capable of thought--and personality--only when it works in packs of three or four or more. Medieval technologically and culturally, they find themselves in the midst of a war. Watch as two children and a dataset reverse engineer technology that we find so common that we take it for granted: radio, black powder, and more.

It's incredibly interesting, and Vernor, who thinks of everything (as Jo Walton notes), weaves a lot of really complex elements out of what is, really, just a hunt for a MacGuffin. It's very cool. show less