Rainbows End- A Novel With One Foot In The Future

The book Rainbows End was both intriguing and frustrating to me.  The continuity of the plot was off in my opinion; Vinge's approach of starting off with a conflict and getting you interested and excited about it, leads to endless pages where the initial conflict is barely mentioned, to only jerkily return to the conflict at the end of the book.  Both times that the storyline changed this dramatically it felt like hitting a wall.  You had to pick up the pieces of new information (and your brain) and follow the new conflict presented.  I enjoyed Robert Gu's journey of being reintroduced into a world all new to him, and how he reacts to the prevalence of technology in this world and his new role in this world.  However, it was frustrating, because I do not feel like either storyline was tied up as neatly as I would have wished.  Looking up information online, I found that a sequel is rumored to this book.  Part of me wants to read this new novel to see if the storyline would have a more complete ending to me, but part of me does not wish to bother, having already been disappointed with the ending of the first book. 

Overall the book was successful in raising interesting questions about the future of technology.  How much control are we giving over to technology?  How plugged in are we into the technological world, and is that level too absorbed to be capable of relying on ourselves, or perhaps too unabsorbed so that we cannot function successfully in today's society?  This book may have been set in the future, but like many futuristic novels, Rainbows End is a mirror in order for us to take a good luck at ourselves today.

Audiobooks: A Foreign Format

For my Writing about Literature in the Digital Age class, we are reading the book, Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge.  One of the requirements for this class is to experience one of the required books in a digital format.  I decided to listen to Rainbows End on audiobook.  (I also acquired one of the other required texts on audiobook, The Case for Books.)  I have only listened to one other audiobook in my life, but it was simply for entertainment purposes.  A whole new experience takes place when you are searching academically for information within a text.  I am someone who is a visual learner, so as you can imagine, I like to feel the paper in my hand and view the words upon the physical page.  With audiobooks, elements of the reading experience are lost.  You cannot see the words upon the page, so how names are spelled is non-existent.  It is more difficult to look back to a certain part in the text to review what you read.  As a reader, I have also found it more difficult to keep track of characters and follow the storyline.

On the other hand, I have discovered that my mind is slowly learning how to focus while listening to Rainbows End, so that I can collect the needed information.  I do not know if I think that audiobooks will ever be able to take the place of physical books in their ability to help human beings process combinations of words into functional ideas, but hopefully like Miri says on page forty-six of Rainbows End, "With some practice, you should be able to see and hear as good as anyone."