There's mischief afoot in UCSD's Geisel Library circa 2022 in Vernor Vinge's brain-bending 'Rainbows End'

Reviewed by Jim Hopper
May 14, 2006

ROBERT WEST / Knight-Ridder Tribune

One morning last weekend, near the end of rereading Vernor Vinge's mind-stretching new novel, near the end of a restful night, I dreamed of shop work at my day job. I had two disparate kinds of material – steel and an exotic plastic – that I had to fit together seamlessly. One was a pre-existing piece, old enough that the steel showed through the paint; the other was brand new, an exotic and slickly impervious modern plastic, milled precisely to extend the steel into a larger, longer, glossier contraption. Not possible to glue them, or weld them, or fasten them mechanically together, but eventually I dreamed that care and craft (and a little paint) could make the project work.

Maybe I shouldn't read so late into the night. In “Rainbows End,” Vinge runs different materials together with less apparent struggle than I felt. The traditional steely bones of storytelling, plot and character become fitted out and extended with the slippery hypermodern plastics of nanotechnolgy, wearable computing and Realpolitik. Technology starts the story off; then, as we read on, the political, social and economic implications get scary.

Begin with the first game of the Greece-Pakistan Football Series. A little cheap advertisement for honeyed nougats gets a remarkable response, with a much stronger immediate spike in sales than observers had expected. Nobody connects it with an earlier alarum about a small, confined outbreak of a Pseudomimivirus.

BOOK REVIEW Rainbows End Vernor Vinge Tor, 365 pages, $25.95

Nobody except the guy who'd engineered it, and a couple of other Great Powers intelligence analysts. In 2022, really effective propaganda can be seen as a weapon of mass destruction. A viable, usable YGBM (You Gotta Believe Me) program could destabilize a nation, or many nations, or more.

Oh, pish and tosh, you may think – too much blue-sky theorizing. But it's just a part of the setup. On the other side of the world from the football series, Robert Gu has recovered from Alzheimer's. Recovered. From Alzheimer's.

He'd been a great poet, but Robert's been in the dark for so long that he needs to relearn a lot. He needs, too, to learn of things that didn't exist before, things like wearable computers and shared realities. And he needs to learn how to cope with his grown son Bob, his daughter-in-law Alice and his granddaughter Miri.

It's not easy for him, partly because he'd been a horribly cruel person in his previous life. His family only takes him in on a sufferance he all but destroys before he's even reached his semester finals in his vocational retraining at Fairmont High (the same school featured in Vinge's Hugo-winning novella “Fast Times at Fairmont High”). The school's near Fallbrook, convenient to Bob and Alice's USMC duties, and close enough for the Geisel Library at UCSD to figure prominently.

As do the biotechs sited near UCSD, and the possibilities they may present to an old poet who's lost his gift for words. Robert would do almost anything to recover his ability to write great poetry; this is quite a carrot for a Mysterious Stranger to dangle before him. Biotech has already saved what was left of Robert's life (and made him look 17 again, as well). Why not go for the whole package?

Excerpt from RAINBOWS END The younger witch hunched down. “I have so much to learn, Miri. I'm working through the simpler things, what I can run on the view-page.” Lena watched the other woman for a second and then she seemed to wilt back into her wheelchair. She looked down at her granddaughter. “Poor Miri. You don't understand. You live in a time that thinks it can ignore the human condition.” She cocked her head. “You never read Secrets of the Ages, did you?” “Of course I've read it!” “I'm sorry, Miri, I'm sure you have. After all, it's my beloathed husband's most famous achievement. And I'll give him this; those poems are a work of genius. Their 'implacable weight' is all his hurtfulness turned to support great truths. But you can't see that, can you, Miri? You are surrounded by medical promises and halfway cures. It distracts you from the bedrock of reality.” She paused and her head bobbed. It was almost like her old palsy, but maybe this was simply indecision, wondering whether to say more. “Miri, the truth is, if we are careful and lucky we live to be old, and weak, and very very tired. There comes an end to striving.”

He never had friends before, so why should he worry about what might happen to his new (and old) acquaintances? His son's family isn't happy with him, and his wife's been dead since he was ill. He doesn't like modern kids, the “paraliterates” he's in classes with at Fairmont.

Vinge presses in a lot of breezy, near-future technology that makes this book plausible science fiction. Dynamic stabilizers for the Geisel Library, for one, get installed after the Rose Canyon earthquake shook up so much of San Diego – stabilizers strong enough to imitate earthquakes in the building's interior. This is a cute touch for locals who know that UCSD already has a superb earthquake-simulator shaker table.

This is hardware, and it's cool hardware, as are all the little mobile widgets that can furnish optical laser computing links between distributed nodes. More steel for the bones of the plot.

Fleshing out those bones are notions slipperier than the plastic my dream struggled with. Vinge posits “belief circles,” based on commercial characters, where participants can clothe themselves (and tweezerbots, and carrybots, and even forklifts) in the guises of fictional characters. Imagine a costumer's convention, but with all the fur and feathers done as computer-generated projections.

Yeah, OK, but it's just a bunch of nerds and geeks tapping at keyboards, right? Well, no, because nearly everyone, save some geezers like Robert's Elder Cabal, wears computers, complete even to contact lenses that work as displays. Road maps? Easy. Blueprints? Very handy; looking at a tagged valve, for instance, will bring up a schematic of what it does in the building you're in. People? They show up as what they've programmed themselves to look like, when your overlay functions are on. Yes, this takes a lot of bandwidth, but there's usually no shortage of information-carrying capacity.

Usually. Unless something happens that brings a lot of attention to a specific event in a particular place, like when the Scooch-a-Moutis and the Hacekians come into conflict over the destruction of the books at the Geisel Library. What starts off as a cross between a flash mob, a role-playing convention and a protest gets enough media attention to overwhelm the information infrastructure around campus.

Like the computer-generated appearances of the crowd, both physical and virtual, on the evening campus, things are not as they seem. The belief-circle conflict has been encouraged as a diversion from what the Mysterious Stranger wants to happen on that evening, in that place. The proximate cause of the event is the shredding of all the books in the Geisel Library, to preserve them. Umm. Ahem. Digitally, of course.

Back to robust-looking tech: Toss the whole library, a volume or two at a time, into wood chippers, blow the shreds through a brightly lit tunnel, and take pictures as the pieces blow by. Reconstruct the mess digitally. It's faster and cheaper and more accurate than reprinting them in the ordinary Gutenbergian manner, according to the folks who have the contract to run the shredders, and you don't have to worry about any further physical damage to collections. Just to double check, the torn edges are almost unique, so algorithms can really, actually, genuinely do a downright wonderful job of eliminating errors. Uh-huh.

Robert Gu and his old sidekicks, the Elder Cabal, who want to save the library (or at least the next library, or the one after) from this fate, don't buy this argument, either. They try to manipulate media and protesters, working as spiders in their sixth-floor web, until the belief circles and the analysts and the media go far beyond what the Cabal had imagined.

It doesn't help Robert and the Cabal that the Mysterious Stranger has co-opted more than one of them, and owns sleights of hand that get them to do what he can't, or won't do.

This is where the story goes wonky. Every course of brickwork, every bit of twine, each trowel and mixer and shovel's been carefully placed beforehand, but the project somehow goes out of control.

In their official USMC capacities, Bob and Alice get involved in the battle of the belief circles. Lena and her rejuvenated roommate, Xiu Xiang, wander on the outskirts. The Cabal, and Miri, behind them incidentally, try to sabotage the book shredding from the old utility tunnels under the UCSD campus, and out to the biotech basements beyond.

And my suspension of disbelief bends like an overloaded axle. May be that there's too much going on, or it may be that Vinge left a crowbar in the gyroscope when he reached for the “on” switch.

Then, just before the mechanism crashes, the impediments whisk away from the machinery, the orbits resume, the planets align and the story moves forward.

The belief circles at the root of the riot introduce new characters, with no time to develop them in the crisis. Maybe some more putty, maybe some more paint on the seams would help. Alternatively, just a little redesign, turn the cobby parts upstage, shift the lighting ... bring these dei out of the machine a little sooner?

(Dreaming: The steel-tube rectangular trusswork turned into an open-form sarcophagus around me. I had to work from within it to find and fit the plastic pieces.)

 Jim Hopper writes the Eccentric Orbits column for the Union-Tribune.

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