Rainbows End

I had high hopes for this book, but it disappointed me a little.

Whereas once I saw Vernor Vinge as a visionary who imagines the future the way I would like it to be, the future of this novel, while plausible, seems rather old-fashioned compared to the frothing torrent of barely-comprehensible ideas from Charles Stross.

The head of an intelligence agency develops and prepares to unleash mind-control technology to keep mankind from obliterating itself, while pretending to lead an international cooperative intelligence venture to track down the perpetrator. He is initially helped by Mr Rabbit, a hacker whose identity is never revealed (but is strongly hinted to be one of the minor characters in the book), but when he betrays Mr Rabbit through mistrust, Mr Rabbit's revenge undoes his entire operation.

Some of the ideas in this book seem conventional, even obvious, and some have been done before. Clothes with built in supercomputers. Full-body computer interfaces. Contact lenses with displays built in. Holographic projections. The world he paints is vibrant and futuristic, but it seems like there is little that requires a stretch of the imagination. Despite being original, it seems to require as little imaginitive stretch as Star Trek. And this is a huge problem for the book.

The plot is too thin to justify the word count, and the world isn't challenging enough to engage a tech-savvy reader. Read Accelerando, read The Diamond Age, read The Lord of the Rings, even read A Deepness in the Sky by the same author. In all of those books the world is the star, the strangeness and newness is the draw, and the sense that there are a million stories untold by the end of those books is strong. Rainbows End, by contrast, seems rather unsatisfying.