Rainbows End is the newest book from SciFi author Vernor Vinge.  Publisher’s Weekly says the story “lacks dramatic tension” and “feels like a textbook introduction to Vinge’s near future world”.  I agree entirely.  But let me say this:  It might just change your life.  (So in that way, I guess you can say it’s a lot like Battlefield Earth.)

Some background–Vinge is a seriously smart dude.  He’s the winner of four Hugo awards (the top prize in SciFi lit), but is equally well known for propounding the theory of the Technological Singularity.  Rainbows End is set in San Diego in the year 2025.  The best I can tell is that the story encapsulates Vinge’s idea of what the world will be like in the farthest time frame that we can reasonably predict right now (i.e. before the Singularity).  It’s an amazingly different world, but its entirely plausible.  There are no aliens, no interstellar warships, no wormholes–just current technological trends taken to their logical extremes.  It’s the plausibility that has me thinking this is a deceptively important book.  (It looses one star from me for the weak plot.)