Rainbows End

Vernor Vinge doesnt write novels very quickly, but they are well worth the wait. His last two novels have won the coveted Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Rainbows End is set in the same near future as Vinges novella, Fast Times at Fairmont High, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 2002. Set a few decades from now, Rainbows End is an epic adventure that encapsulates in a single extended family the challenges of the technological advances of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The information revolution of the past thirty years blossoms into a web of conspiracies that could destroy Western civilization. At the center of the action are Robert Gu, a former Alzheimers victim who has regained his mental and physical health through radical new therapies, and his family. His son and daughter-in-law are both in the militarybut not a military we would recognizewhile his middle schoolage granddaughter is involved in perhaps the most dangerous game of all, with people and forces more powerful than she or her parents can imagine. Filled with excitement and Vinges trademark potpourri of fascinating ideas, Rainbows End is another triumphantly entertaining novel by one of the true masters of the field.