Re:Rainbow's End -- a novel by Vernor Vinge that shows what ...
by geuis on Monday July 28, 2008 @04:37AM
(#258895)
But don't you see that this book was a very shallow? As a piece of work, setting aside the pre-singularity tie-ins, the story was boring and the characters were uninterresting. The technology aspects of the story did little to actually explore near-term implementations of emerging tech in little more than glossing ways. There was little original thought in this book and was little more than VV's recent speeches of the last few years.
Re:Rainbow's End -- a novel by Vernor Vinge that shows what ...
by skmurphy on Tuesday July 29, 2008 @04:52PM
(#261070)
I re-read in the on-line version and was fascinated all the way through. Perhaps you could offer some other books/stories to read that you found more interesting or thought provoking.
1. As computing gets cheaper and basic AI/pattern recognition follows suite, the ability to get a group of human experts to collaborate becomes more valuable. 2. The "Rip Van Winkle" effect of an Alzheimer's patient waking up after a cure is found and having to go back to high school (or what voc/tech school has become) allowed for an interesting exploration of how little impact computers have had to date on K-12 education and how much they are going to. 3. The portrayal of the military as an enhanced system administration function was interesting and matches what Barnett is proposing in "Pentagon's New Map."
It's not the far future space opera of "Marooned in Real Time" or "A Fire Upon the Deep"--both of which I also enjoyed--but it's about a lot more than "some old people trying keep some books from being destroyed."