A review of "Rainbows End" — 1 year ago
Vernor Vinge’s novel, Rainbows End takes place about 20 years in the future, in 2025. In the novel, this is an era in which the young understand much more about their world than grown-ups do. Old people find themselves going back to “high school” (which is attended by junior high or middle school-aged kids) to learn how to function in this new world.
One of these people is Robert Gu, a poet and a recovering Alzheimer’s patient, who is lucky enough to regain his mental function through new therapies. Although he has regained his intelligence, he has lost both his poetic ability and his characteristic meanness. He semi-unintentionally gets drawn into a scheme involving the UCSD library and international espionage.
All of the ubiquitous computing people use in this fictional future scenario is based on something called SHE (Secure Hardware Environment, I think), which is sort of like Trusted Computing. A couple of times in the novel, characters find themselves frustrated by the fact that below a certain level, you can’t change things. Below a certain level (where SHE comes into play—possibly at the OS), there are “no user-modifiable parts inside.” Of course, this restriction is quite different from the neo-DIY/Make Magazine style hardware hacking we see today. It reminds me of those little remote control cars that were all the rage a few Christmases ago. You could “customize” them, which meant snapping off a few pre-designed parts and snapping on other ones. In the novel, SHE allows for far more complex combinations, creating a network effect much like the Internet itself. In this future, people are making creations that don’t make much sense to folks from our time—ubiquitous computing allows possibilities that we cannot yet envision. However, I still get the sense that something is lost when hackers give up the ability to modify their OS or below.
A related geek reference—I found it rather hard to believe that:
- the GNU Hurd kernel is released by 2025.
- it’s illegal—someone uses a contraband “HurdOS” box in the novel.
Anyway, I definitely recommend this book—I enjoyed both the tech and the humanity of this near-future tale.
