Rainbows End

Rainbows End is a science fiction novel by the American writer Vernor Vinge, published in 2006 and set in and around San Diego in 2025.

Gu comes back to a family he treated badly and a culture that has moved on without him: books are mostly gone, reality is overlaid with information, and the people around him treat the ability to see it as a basic skill. He enrols in a school for teenagers to catch up, which is humiliating and useful in equal measure, and he begins to work again. Meanwhile his granddaughter Miri and a set of other people are drawn into a scheme involving a research library, an old man who wants to live for ever and a great deal of hardware. Vinge writes the near future as something already unevenly distributed, and the novel is interested in what it feels like for a clever person to be a beginner again.

The book won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and it shares a setting with two of the author's earlier stories about the same near-future world.