Robert Gu is a world-renowned poet and recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a new cure, he discovers that the world has changed. He is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he’s starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son’s family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access and to see the digital context—through smart contact lenses.
With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination. This conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert’s son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot . . .
‘In the grand tradition of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge just turned the future upside-down in Rainbow's End’ Charles Stross
Description:
Robert Gu is a world-renowned poet and recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a new cure, he discovers that the world has changed. He is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he’s starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son’s family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access and to see the digital context—through smart contact lenses.
With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination. This conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert’s son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot . . .
‘In the grand tradition of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge just turned the future upside-down in Rainbow's End’ Charles Stross
**
From Publishers Weekly
Set in San Diego, Calif., this hard SF novel from Hugo-winner Vinge ( A Deepness in the Sky ) offers dazzling computer technology but lacks dramatic tension. Circa 2025, people use high-tech contact lenses to interface with computers in their clothes. "Silent messaging" is so automatic that it feels like telepathy. Robert Gu, a talented Chinese-American poet, has missed much of this revolution due to Alzheimer's, but now the wonders of modern medicine have rehabilitated his mind. Installed in remedial classes at the local high school, he tries to adjust to this brave new world, but soon finds himself enmeshed in a somewhat quixotic plot by elderly former University of California–San Diego faculty members to protest the destruction of the university library, now rendered superfluous by the ubiquitous online databanks. Unbeknownst to Robert, he's also a pawn in a dark international conspiracy to perfect a deadly biological weapon. The true nature of the superweapon is never made entirely clear, and too much of the book feels like a textbook introduction to Vinge's near-future world. (May)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
A multiple Hugo Award?winning author ( A Fire Upon the Deep ; A Deepness in the Sky ) and former professor of mathematics at San Diego State University, Vernor Vinge writes as if he's spent some time in 2025. This novel's setting, contemporary with the author's Fast Times at Fairmont High, is one of instantaneous technology where accomplished hackers wield profound influence. Reviewers applaud Vinge's avoidance of science-fiction traps like information dumps and rootless "techno-bedazzlement" in favor of emotional storylines and plausible—and sometimes frightening—insights into where technology is moving humanity.
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