“Rainbows End,” by Vernor Vinge (Tor, 364 pages, $25.95)
“Rainbows End” is subtitled a novel “with one foot in the future.” The other foot is right now. Vinge fits into today’s discussion on the future of the book with The New York Times and John Updike.
Twenty years from now medical science has a cure for Robert Gu’s Alzheimer’s. He plays the role of the classic sleeper awakened as he tries to catch up with the rapid changes he missed. He enrolls in the vocational track at Fairmount High where his generation is mixed with kids who have grown up in a world of wearable computers.
Gu was the best poet of his generation but he hasn’t recovered his genius. He was also a nasty man, and those who hate him start at home with a son who barely tolerates him in his house. When Gu lashes out at his granddaughter he loses the most sympathetic member of the household.
The one youngster who befriends Robert has an ulterior motive. Juan Orozco is being paid by someone with an online identity of the Rabbit. A group of spies has hired the Rabbit to find a way into the biological labs on the University of San Diego campus. Robert’s daughter-in-law is a government investigator with full access to the labs. Rabbit needs Robert’s help to steal her lab access.
The cover they use for infiltrating the labs is a protest to save the library. A new generation of digitizing equipment pulls the books apart and shreds them while scanning every scrap to use in reconstructing the books electronically. The librarians have launched a protest against the administrators who embrace the new technology.
“Rainbows End” is a spy thriller, a coming-of-age novel and an academic comedy. Vinge is on the cutting edge of technology, and it’s a delight when tomorrow’s wonders are displayed with humor.
“Polder,” edited by Farah Mendlesohn (Old Earth Books, 308 pages, $40)
John Clute has a fierce reputation as an expert and rethinker of the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. He contributed a huge new vocabulary to the field in “The Encyclopedia of Fantasy,” including the concept of Polder, “an enclave of toughened reality, demarcated by boundaries from the surrounding world.”
“Polder” is a celebration of a critic, an artist and their apartment. John and Judith Clute have had the same bohemian apartment in London for four decades and it has its own reputation for real and fantastic meetings.
Reprints include excerpts from several novels that set scenes in the Clutes’ apartment. Kim Stanley Robinson, Elizabeth Hand and Geoff Ryman have all borrowed it. Ryman’s “Lust,” with Pablo Picasso in modern London, is particularly delightful.
Fiction and memoir are mixed with essays about Clute’s criticism, although the attempt for a continuous run of endnotes goes off the rails somewhere in Edward James’ interesting article expanding Clute’s ideas of fantasy to the larger world. Brian Aldiss and Neil Gaiman have fun with Clute’s penchant for the unusual but always appropriate word.
“The Silverville Swindle,” by Kym O’Connell Todd and Mark Todd (Ghost Road Press, 201 pages, $17.95)
Roswell is the big success story in flying saucer towns, but it certainly is not alone. In recent news reports, the makers confess to filming the alien autopsy video in a London apartment.
The Gunnison writing team Kym and Mark Todd spin a funny story of a mountain town marketing itself around a UFO sighting. It’s a pathetic sighting story and everything about the UFO quest is a fraud except the simple soul who perhaps saw something.
Billy Melton is driving through the mountains in the car he “borrowed” from his girlfriend when he hits and kills Earl Bob Jackson. Billy borrows Earl Bob’s Caddie. When he stops at the cafe in Silverville he takes on the persona of Earl Bob for the men at the cafe eagerly awaiting their out-of-town consultant.
Billy is a natural con man and takes up the role of UFO consultant for Burford Price, the force behind the town’s new flying saucer theme. It’s a job too good to pass up.
“The Silverville Swindle” may be more mountain humor than science fiction but it’s close enough and more believable than Whitley Strieber.
Fred Cleaver is a freelancer who writes a monthly column on new science fiction.
