Rainbows End blends some really interesting futurism with much less worthwhile plots about family drama and the whole idea of spooky power, and while the story builds to an explosive climax, the different thematic lines never really come together, leaving the book less than the sum of its parts.

Let's start with the setting, since that's the real star of the book. It was Bruce Sterling who observed that nothing obsolesces like the future. From about 2006, Vinge imagined a strange and radically different 2026, where the dominant technology was wearable computing, with kids using ensemble coding to created augmented realities and fantasy universes. Everything is full of non-user servicable parts, innovation is ramping up at a breakneck pace, and schools have evolved into virtual collaborative environments where students work on applied projects and hope to catch the eye of a real business or major fandom circle.

Our entry into this world is Robert Gu, a "retread" senior citizen. Once a gifted poet, Robert nearly succumb to Alzhimer's before a miracle of the "medical minefield" of advanced biotechnology restored him to teenagehood. Now he's living with his middle-aged son Bob and his family, going back to a Vocational High School to learn how to use the new technology. The problem is that Robert Gu, aside from being a genius poet, was also a legendary asshole, and he's on thin ice with his kids. Robert falls in with a similar group of retreads who are trying to save the books in the UCSD Geisel Library (a truly cool piece of brutalist architecture) from a plan to shred and digitize him. Meanwhile, his granddaughter Miri is trying to set him up with like-minded friends and an adoring grad student so he's not so much of an asshole, and fellow student Juan Orozco is teaching Robert Gu how to use technology in exchange for learning how to use words like a poet.

But Robert Gu's problems adapting to modernity and making up for a lifetime of abuse are small potatoes compared to the spooky side of the story. Modern technology makes it possible to kill a lot of people very quickly, and only through constant vigilance by the intelligence services of the Great Powers (and the DHS mandated Secure Hardware Environment) is it possible to avert one of a million apocalypses. A group of Indo-European spooks detected a weapons test of You Gotta Believe Me technology--basically mind control, which is under development at a UCSD affiliated biotech lab, and engage the enigmatic Mr. Rabbit to break into the lab. The problem is that their most senior member is actually the mastermind behind the program, a man who believes that it may be necessary to enslave humanity to save them. Oh, and Bob Gu and his wife Alice are also high level spooks themselves in the USMC, which is a full-fledged cyber-intervention force.

The plot loops around these topics and converge on a single night when opposing fandoms battle for control of the Geisel Library in an immense augmented reality battle, Robery Gu and his friends stage a break-in at UCSD to save the books, acting as the hands of the intelligence operatives, who finally act against each other/Mr. Rabbit--who may be a rogue AI. A platoon of USMC rapid response forces make an assault on UCSD, backed up with everything from netwar drones to nukes, but it's to Miri and Robert and Juan as the hands on the ground to foil the plot and save the day. Which they do.

But both the mastermind and Mr. Rabbit get away, status quo ante restored. Robert becomes an okay programmer instead of a great poet, and may only be cranky rather than irredeemably cruel. The Library becomes an augmented reality library, but with some real books. Again and again, it turns out that both sides were being manipulated by a power above them, but that conspiracy was for the Greater Good. From an emotional level, it's immensely dissatisfying.

The futurism holds up surprisingly well. The online world of 2006 was very different. Youtube had just come into being, Facebook was restricted to colleges, the first iPhone was in the future, Uber and Airbnb and the million other parts of the "Sharing economy" didn't exist. Augmented reality and wereable computing were very much lab demos, and not anything that consumers could buy (well, they still aren't really, but give it a decade). Vinge misses a lot of the contemporary feel of social media, but who knows, that could change as well. In one of his more clever bits, he imagines the 'vandal charity' of Friends of Privacy, which exists solely to obscure web-searchable facts about people with plausible lies.

The thing that Vinge misses, and what he really needed to grapple with to drive this book home, is the difference between Power, Wealth, and Prestige. Roughly, power is the ability to make people do what you want, and this book believes in the power of information control and conspiracies, while also making traditional power very weak, teetering on a knife-edge of rogue destruction. Strict descriptions of wealth, the ability to get what you want, are danced around in a very American way. The characters are constantly anxious about being broke, but none of them appear to be under any actual material pressure. The ultra-wealthy appear to be able to make their own laws, but the only thing they do is the strange library transformation project. Finally, there's prestige, something that Robert Gu and all the retreads are immensely concerned with. Prestige might also accrue through the belief circles and gaming, but no one truly leet shows up to demonstrate the difference between the deliberate obscurity of the spooks and the glamour of the new stars. I think more philosophical clarity on these points would have helped Vinge focus the plot and characters of his story.

And on that note, while the setting was truly cool, and an interesting comparison of Silicon Valley ideology next to The Diamond Age, the characters and plot were very close to Vinge's previous two Hugo winners. Another grumpy old man out of time with the potential for greatness and evil. Another precocious young girl who learns to save the day. Another spies' war of information that culminates in a rapid and shadowy duel between great powers. You know what intelligence professionals say about anything that happens three times...