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.

Many coders and system designers, as well as those who market their work, read science fiction for ideas as well as entertainment. A few fictional ideas gain such currency that they affect the real world. In 1984, the "cyberspace" of William Gibson's Neuromancer inspired a generation of early netheads as they imagined the "consensual hallucination" (to use Gibson's phrase) that became the World Wide Web. Equally, Neal Stephenson's "Metaverse," the massively shared virtual reality in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, helped lead to multiplayer worlds such as Second Life.