Rainbow's End, by Vernor Vinge

A shorter than usual (for me) book review.

I read Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End, a science fiction book set later in this century, in the San Diego area. Vinge is a good writer. He won the Hugo award for A Fire Upon the Deep. I remember that chiefly for the society of telepathic dog-like creatures on a far planet that Vinge made up. A Deepness in the Sky is about an intelligent spider-like species.The two books also have some underlying cosmological/philosophical ideas.

Rainbow's End is pretty good science fiction. The ideas that it extrapolates into the future include curing some currently terminal diseases and crowdsourcing. There's also a lot about the extension of the Internet and computing. People wear computers, sort of like a shirt, and glasses, so that they can access information and communicate wherever they are, or almost wherever. While wearing such a computer, you can see hyperlinks for most of the landscape features around you, which is both scary and intriguing, I guess.

Vinge is a good "hard" science fiction writer -- there's no magic in his works, other than technology.

Thanks for reading.