10) Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
Vinge has sometimes left me a bit cold, but I rather enjoyed this Hugo nominee. In particular, after a run of really bad stories about cures for Alzheimer’s which seemed to feature on the shortlist every year for the last while, it was rather good to have a central character whose Alzheimer’s is cured, and this is only the start of his and his family’s problems.
That’s not the main part of the plot, which is a complex tale of intelligence (both agencies and artificial), set in the brilliantly realised environment of UC San Diego a few decades from now. Of course, it’s a landscape Vinge must know well, but I think he has brought it to life in loving detail here. Indeed, I have to rate his worldbuilding (of a familiar world) rather ahead of the complex story, involving three generations of the same family in the conspiracy by sheer coincidence.
There’s lots to like here, and I suspect (given Vinge’s previous record) this probably has a good chance of winning the award. I’m not wildly grabbed by it, though, and I wonder whether either of the other two nominees will grab me in the same way that Spin did last year, or River of Gods the year before.
Top 5 UnSuggestions for this book:
- The awakening by Kate Chopin
- My sister’s keeper : a novel by Jodi Picoult
- Blue like jazz : nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality by Donald Miller
- Lucky by Alice Sebold
- Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress by Dai Sijie
The thing with the date is that Anderson didn’t particularly specify a date in the original brief, he just said “100 year into the future”, which was interpreted variously (similarly, no-one really specifies the date for the original Star Trek). The 2065 date was adopted by TV21 (who also applied it to Stingray). The only onscreen date is on a calendar in one episode, and is 2026. But this wasn’t necessarily the date intended by the Andersons. Both the movies have onscreen dates in the 2060s – 2067 and 2068, though they are only vaguely mentioned, I think. Certainly, the date for Thunderbirds is not as emphatically stated as that for Captain Scarlet or UFO.