A Novel With One Foot in the Future

Vinge's Rainbows End.

"It's like Neuromancer - but with the internet...".

An entertaining story . . . clearly, Vinge is familiar with Nicholson Baker's Double-fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the argument against the rush to digitize library content (and discard the pesky originals) . . . but I liked this story better twenty years ago, when cyberspace was still new. Whatever wonders Vinge shows of the near future of UI, his future still isn't as mindblowing as the first days of the real-world internet.

And I would have liked it better if only Vinge had bothered to tell us something about the fate of, you know, the most interesting character in the book.

Ho-hum.

(I apparently now seem to require the SFnal equivalent of pure heroin.)