A Novel with One Foot in the Future
Just finished Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge this past week...one of the books from the "top 10" list from Technology Review - Hard Science Fiction. It is certainly current - very "where will Google go", internet, life-spans, medical advances, viral warfare...even when I find the writing engaging and the topic interesting, it is hard to recommend simply due to the "hard sci-fi" elements which make the work challenging in a totally different way. Here's the quote I pulled, simply for its...aptness.
The Radner twins started out. For these two, the east side of the campus was not enough. They had some kind of wacky suspension bridge - it looked like the Firth of Forth Railway Bridge, but scaled up - that put down steel caissons on each side of the bleachers, and then climbed higher and higher inot the northeast till it broke into the departing daylight. Seconds passed - and the construciton reappeared out of hte southwest, their nineteenth-century masterpiece making a virtual orbit of the Earth. The climax was the roaring passage of vast, steam-powered trains across the sky. The bleachers shook with the apparent power of the locomotives. page 335
The Radner twins started out. For these two, the east side of the campus was not enough. They had some kind of wacky suspension bridge - it looked like the Firth of Forth Railway Bridge, but scaled up - that put down steel caissons on each side of the bleachers, and then climbed higher and higher inot the northeast till it broke into the departing daylight. Seconds passed - and the construciton reappeared out of hte southwest, their nineteenth-century masterpiece making a virtual orbit of the Earth. The climax was the roaring passage of vast, steam-powered trains across the sky. The bleachers shook with the apparent power of the locomotives. page 335