Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (and apparently I'm revisiting The Children of the Sky a bit)

I don't really have much to say about Rainbows End except in comparison to Vernor Vinge's other books that I've read. Before I read this one, the three Vinge books I'd read were all part of the same continuity, all basically the same series: A Deepness in the Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep, and The Children of the Sky. I complained a bit about The Children of the Sky on this blog a while back, and I find myself doing so again, but I want to be more precise this time.

The Children of the Sky happens to be the latest in a collection of related novels, the others of which happen to be paragons of science fiction. It could be the worst of the three and still be very, very good. It does fail to deliver the same general level of excellence as the other two, but not in a particularly egregious manner. The problem is that the story starts out taking the setup from A Fire Upon the Deep, but then fails to really follow up on that. I loosely reinterpret it like this. In A Fire Upon the Deep, the villain is repeatedly underestimated, and turns out to be, more or less, the devil. The main characters manage to burn up the world in order to slow the devil down. They can't stop the devil outright, but they can halt the imminent rampage and buy time for other things to happen, whatever those might be. The forces moving behind the scenes, including whoever originally crafted the weapon that has (with massive collateral damage) halted the devil's rampage, are still only vaguely hinted at by the end of A Fire Upon the Deep. In The Children of the Sky, the rampage of the devil himself is still delayed, but the characters are aware that the devil is coming, inexorably, and the approximate timing of this horrible arrival can even be estimated. This isn't just background: the reader is reminded of these facts repeatedly and anxiety and preparations regarding the eventual arrival of the devil are vital components of the plot and character development. Meanwhile, the antagonists in The Children of the Sky are ineffectual. Oh, some of them are quite malevolent and even occasionally threatening to individual characters, but their machinations always come across as, at worst, short-term problems. One of the primary miscreants of the story literally gets all of his power to work evil when one of the other characters hands it to him because she feels like she'd seem to be too much of a control-freak if she doesn't try to appease him. He causes problems only because the person that gave him this power spends most of the story too far away to simply walk up and take it away from him. The conflicts in The Children of the Sky are not uninteresting, but too much of the time these conflicts take a form that leaves the reader thinking, "Yeah, yeah, hurry up and finish beating up King Dedede so that you can deal with the whole issue of the devil from the first book, whose inexorable arrival has not become any more exorable than it was before."

Back to Rainbows End. It does not share continuity with those books. So it's a chance for me to examine Vernor Vinge's storytelling outside the universe with which he'd familiarized me. Although I found many aspects of Rainbows End unimpressive, I'll note that it comes with a very enticing hook: it's a story about a man that nearly died from Alzheimer's just as medicine advanced enough to rejuvenate him, introducing him to an unfamiliar future, all while he realizes that his family is at the center of some bizarre conspiracy. Sounds pretty fascinating.

Rainbows End was published in 2006 and takes place in 2025. Writing a "futuristic science fiction" story that takes place less than 20 years in the future strikes me as rather ambitious, so I'll at least say I'm impressed by that detail. Vernor Vinge's depiction of the world of 2025, though? Well, not really. I mean, I don't assume that he was trying to be prophetic, but the setting in general doesn't seem persuasive to me. Maybe I'll have to check back in 2025 if I can and revisit that.

There's a point relating to character development, which has nothing to do with technology or science fiction per se, but which I found glaring as I read the book. The main character, the one that was brought back from a bout with Alzheimer's, was a renowned poet. Much of his character development deals with a possible personality change following his recovery: before his illness, he was an asshole to everyone, all the time. The concept is potentially interesting, but Vinge takes it too far. This character is supposed to have been an acclaimed author around the time Rainbows End was written. It's currently 2013, so in the universe in which this book takes place, the guy is a famous poet now, and presumably on his way to retirement as a university professor. If Rainbows End had portrayed him as having an abrasive personality, that might have worked, but Vinge took it too far: he makes it abundantly clear that everyone that knew this guy personally hates him because he was constantly insulting them. His ex-wife arranges to appear to him to be dead when he recovers his mental faculties, then also arranges to spy on him for the sole purpose of being able to talk shit about him behind his back to the other characters. And she's supposed to be a psychiatrist. At some point, I stopped being able to buy it. If poetry was ever so venerated that someone with no redeeming qualities whatsoever could garner widespread recognition for it, that certainly hasn't been the case for a while, at least I don't think so. I contend that in our world, today, if an individual was so universally vituperative and wretched as to have no friends, no amount of genius as a poet would be enough to cause society to overlook that, not even in an ivory tower setting. It might work if the extent of the individual's curmudgeonliness was exaggerated or if he lived a reclusive lifestyle, but Vinge works hard to eliminate all suspension of disbelief on this front.

There are other, similar problems with the story, generally mildly baffling. There's an enigmatic character that the reader is made to suspect might be an artificial intelligence. At one point, characters dealing with this mystery entity raise that possibility. And then, rather than trying to confirm it or dismiss it as unlikely, they just pass over it. "Hey the other guy involved in our scheme may or may not be an artificial intelligence. And we're living in a world where that'd be a pretty big deal because there are no confirmed artificial intelligences. But it's sure starting to look like he's an artificial intelligence. Even before this suspicion was raised, we were all desperately worried that he'd betray us somehow and this revelation is made all the more disoncerting, but anyway, moving on..." I'm really only exaggerating a little bit there.

Rainbows End isn't great. The Children of the Sky is better. Still, it is a fun book in its own way and I'm intrigued enough to want to check out more Vernor Vinge books.