Vernor Vinge's next novel is titled Rainbow's End, and IEEE Spectrum has an excerpt online for your reading pleasure. I know what you're thinking, why does a magazine that caters to a bunch of EE hardware geeks run a science fiction story in its pages? Well, apparently the new novel is about a society where computing is ubiquitous (come on Lix!) and people share a consensual reality. The Spectrum is also running a report, called Sensor Nation, about ubiquitous computing and the issues surrounding it. See, there's the connection, and it wasn't that I was claiming EE's don't read anything other than technical manuals, much.
I really enjoyed Vinge's last two novels, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, and I also like his short story, Cookie Monster, so I'll have to pick this one up as well. Check it out!
Comments (3)
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Posted by JP Frantz at Thursday July 08, 2004 at 9:34 AM
© 2008 SF Signal
"why does a magazine that caters to a bunch of EE hardware geeks run a science fiction story in its pages?"
Well, (as the Vinge story hopefully shows) it's because we're catering to a much wider auidence these days than oldschool hardcore EEs, as is the IEEE as whole in fact. Nowadays we pretty much cover the entire range of technology and are trying to do more cool things like our Sensor Nation report. Anyhoo, glad you seemed to like the story!
Cheers,
Stephen (Ass. Ed., IEEE Spectrum)
Posted by Stephen Cass on Wednesday July 14, 2004 at 4:52 PM at 4:52 PM
Stephen,
Well, it was really more of a joke than anything else. My dad is an EE and my first major was EE before I switched to CS so I was just playing off the sterotype, and including myslef in that. I was surprised to see Spectrum running a fiction story, then I saw it was in conjuction with Sensor Nation and it made sense.
Thanks for stopping by!
Posted by jp on Wednesday July 14, 2004 at 7:05 PM at 7:05 PM
Link to story has changed (moved to an archive):
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/archive/1552
The book is coming end of May! The book is coming end of May!
Posted by Fred Kiesche on Tuesday March 14, 2006 at 9:19 PM at 9:19 PM