Rainbows End

Rainbows End is a 2006 science fiction novel by the American author and computer scientist Vernor Vinge, published by Tor Books. The story takes place around 2025 in San Diego, California, in a world where people wear computers in their clothing and see digital overlays through contact lenses, so that augmented reality is the normal way of dealing with information, other people and the physical environment. The title has no apostrophe; The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes that it was "intentionally omitted".

The novel won the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the 2007 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Its picture of everyday life mediated by wearable displays has been cited in augmented reality research and in press coverage of Google Glass, and Vinge discussed the book's technology in a 2012 radio interview after Google showed its glasses project.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Checked publication, plot, awards, interview quotes, Spectrum story, Lukosch et al. 2015 citation and Vinge's death against every cited source. About review dates.

Publication

Tor Books published the novel in May 2006; Publishers Weekly, which reviewed it in February 2006, listed it at US$25.95 and 364 pages. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits the first-edition cover art to Stephan Martinière. Vinge dedicated the novel "To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives", naming Wikipedia, Google and eBay among them.

The book shares its setting with two earlier Vinge stories. "Fast Times at Fairmont High", first published in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001), takes place in the same near-future San Diego and won the 2002 Hugo Award for Best Novella. "Synthetic Serendipity", which appeared in IEEE Spectrum Online on 7 July 2004, was a short story Vinge adapted for the magazine from the novel, which had not yet been published. Harry Goldstein, who worked with Vinge on the story and later became editor in chief of IEEE Spectrum, wrote the accompanying article, "Mike Villas's World", about the sensing, display and networking technologies the story imagines.

Plot and setting

The protagonist, Robert Gu, is a poet who missed the spread of networked wearable computing while he had Alzheimer's disease. Medical treatment restores his mind, and he is placed in remedial classes at a local high school to learn how to use the new technology. Older former faculty members of the University of California, San Diego draw him into a protest against the destruction of the university library, whose books are being scanned and shredded for a digitization project. Meanwhile, networked intelligence agents discover that a project for targeted mind control is under way in a heavily secured bioscience laboratory on the UC San Diego campus, and without knowing it Gu becomes a pawn in what Publishers Weekly called "a dark international conspiracy" to perfect a new weapon, whose true nature the novel never makes entirely clear. Brand's review identified the setting as the campus's Geisel Library. A mysterious figure called Rabbit, who may be an artificial intelligence but whose identity is never made clear, is only ever seen as a rabbit.

Depiction of augmented reality

In the novel, people wear clothing with built-in computers and contact lenses that overlay the physical environment with computer graphics. A 2015 journal introduction by Stephan Lukosch and colleagues lists the uses the book gives this technology: large-scale commercial gaming, blueprints of machines and buildings for maintenance workers, communication with virtual avatars, and medical diagnosis. Introducing a 2012 NPR interview with Vinge, host Neal Conan gave similar examples: an engineer calls up a schematic, a doctor sees a patient's temperature and heart rate, businesses project virtual storefronts, and amusement parks show creatures and landscapes that an unaugmented person cannot see.

Communication runs through "sming", short for silent messaging. In a 2012 NPR interview, Vinge said the system picks up cues and subvocalizations from the wearer, so that people nearby need not know a conversation is happening. Publishers Weekly described the effect as "so automatic that it feels like telepathy". Conan noted that Gu is constantly asked whether he is "wearing". Vinge explained that the question refers to clothing with sensors that track where it is and the state of the wearer's body, and that children in the story are more adept at using it than older people.

Shared virtual layers are a large part of the setting. Brand described a world in which everybody's view of reality is "draped with arrays of private and shared virtual realities", where massively multiplayer games are the main form of entertainment and fan communities called "belief circles" project their fictional worlds onto real places and stage contests between them, including a battle in front of the library watched by an online crowd of millions. The book also imagines infrastructure for this kind of computing, including a "Secure Hardware Environment" as a trusted foundation for everything online and "certificate authorities" that let people be held accountable despite fake online identities. When the network fails in one scene, the overlays break apart: "Like the holes in a threadbare carpet, splotches of plain reality grew around him."

Development

Vinge told Locus in 2008 that the novel took about five years to write, and that he had to keep revising it to stay ahead of the news, a common problem with near-future fiction. He said he had already been working on the book for some time when he heard of Google's digitization project, and that he had to change some of the emphasis of the library digitization plot; he kept the image of shredded books even though, in his words, "no real librarian is suggesting what I did with shredder digitization". He called the book "an entirely straightforward extrapolation of a number of trends that are still going like gangbusters". Brand noted that the near-future setting let Vinge draw on his career teaching mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University.

Reception

Publishers Weekly wrote that the novel "offers dazzling computer technology but lacks dramatic tension", and that "too much of the book feels like a textbook introduction to Vinge's near-future world". In MIT Technology Review, Stewart Brand called it "a picaresque of sorts" and wrote that "Vinge's technological speculations are among the book's chief pleasures"; he picked out Rabbit as the most interesting character.

Year	Award	Category	Result
2007	Hugo Award	Best Novel	Won
2007	Locus Award	Best Science Fiction Novel	Won
2007	John W. Campbell Memorial Award	Best Science Fiction Novel	Finalist

The Hugo Awards were presented at Nippon 2007, the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, with the winners announced on 1 September 2007. The other Best Novel finalists were Glasshouse by Charles Stross, His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik, Eifelheim by Michael Flynn and Blindsight by Peter Watts. The Locus Awards, chosen by readers of Locus magazine, were announced in Seattle on 16 June 2007.

Influence and later commentary

In a 2009 interview for the Norwescon convention, Vinge said he was "pretty happy with the track record of Rainbows End", but that "the transition from 'this is crazy' to 'this is blasé' is happening painfully fast for that novel". In the same interview he listed wearable computers, "even just widespread consumer-available head-up displays", among the technologies he hoped to use himself.

When reports appeared in February 2012 that Google X was building augmented reality glasses, Annalee Newitz of io9 presented the project as the glasses from Vinge's novel. In April 2012 NPR's Talk of the Nation interviewed Vinge about Google Glass. He said he was "very pleased" and had been watching for such a product, but that the display in Google's concept video was "essentially a tickertape strip across the top of the field of vision". He named very high resolution, "say, 4,000 pixels by 4,000 pixels", as one improvement he hoped for, and said that head-up display optics were still bulky, especially with a wide field of view. He also gave examples of what such displays could do: a worker repairing a building's air conditioning who looks at a wall and sees the studs and ventilation inside it, and a 3D model on a coffee table that friends who share the data feed can see from their own positions around it, with a different image sent to each eye and "no holograms".

Researchers have also used the book as a reference point. In their 2015 introduction to a special issue of the journal Computer Supported Cooperative Work on collaboration in augmented reality, Stephan Lukosch, Mark Billinghurst, Leila Alem and Kiyoshi Kiyokawa opened with the virtual reality of Tad Williams's Otherland and the augmented reality of Rainbows End. They wrote that the two authors "forecast a vision for the future that current research on collaboration in AR is addressing", and that while the novel shows AR supporting teams of experts who cannot meet in person, "current AR experiences are not there yet".

Sequel plans and author's death

Brand reported in 2006 that Vinge was planning a sequel, and in 2008 Vinge told Locus that the book "certainly cries out for a sequel", though he thought waiting ten years might be a good idea. His last novel was The Children of the Sky (2011), a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep; according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, apart from two flash fiction pieces for Nature in 2015 and 2017, he published no new fiction after 2011. Vinge died of Parkinson's disease on 20 March 2024, aged 79.

See also

• Snow Crash
• Neuromancer
• Ready Player One
• Otherland
• Ubiquitous computing