The setting for Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End is the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego. Vinge taught math and computer science at San Diego State University for almost 30 years. (Courtesy of UCSD Publications Office)

Vernor Vinge dedicates his new novel, Rainbows End, "To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives -- Wikipedia, Google, eBay, and the others of their kind, now and in the future." The book is an imagining of how those technologies might develop over the next two decades. But publication of Rainbows End is not only a literary event. The question arises, "Will Vinge influence the actual evolution of the technology?" He has done so before.

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