This Title Will Be Released On May 16, 2006

If you’re as big a fan of Vernor Vinge as I am, this should interest you. His newest novel is only five and a half months away.
Rainbows End (Zones of Thought)
Thanks Amazon.com! Here’s their bland summary…

Four time Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge has taken readers to the depths of space and into the far future in his bestselling novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Now, he has written a science-fiction thriller set in a place and time as exciting and strange as any far-future world: San Diego, California, 2025.
Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer’s patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet. Now he is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he?s starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts . Living with his son?s family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access?through nodes designed into smart clothes?and to see the digital context?through smart contact lenses.
With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination.
In a world where every computer chip has Homeland Security built-in, this conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert?s son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot.
As Robert becomes more deeply involved in conspiracy, he is shocked to learn of a radical change planned for the UCSD Geisel Library; all the books there, and worldwide, would cease to physically exist. He and his fellow re-trainees feel compelled to join protests against the change. With forces around the world converging on San Diego, both the conspiracy and the protest climax in a spectacular moment as unique and satisfying as it is unexpected. This is science fiction at its very best, by a master storyteller at his peak.

So he’s explicitly labeling it as a “Zones of Thought” story. I wouldn’t have expected that. Here’s the cover art (Just so you’ll know what to look for). Is that a bunny rabbit gazing pensively out over the City of the Future? He seems to be wearing clothing of some sort.
For your listening pleasure, here’s a keynote presentation Professor Vinge delivered in September at Accelerating Change 2005. And here’s a story set in the same milieu as the upcoming novel, available as an eBook. A brief sample follows…

Final exam week was always chaos at Fairmont Junior High. The school’s motto was “Trying hard not to become obsolete”–and the kids figured that applied to the faculty more than anyone else. This semester they got through the first morning–Ms. Wilson’s math exam–without a hitch, but already in the afternoon the staff was tweaking things around: Principal Alcalde scheduled a physical assembly during what should have been student prep time.
Almost all the eighth grade was piled into the creaky wooden meeting hall. Once this place had been used for horse shows. Juan thought he could still smell something of that. Tiny windows looked out on the hills surrounding the campus. Sunlight spiked down through vents and skylights. In some ways, the room was weird even without enhancement.
Principal Alcalde marched in, looking as dire and driven as ever. He gestured to his audience, requesting visual consensus. In Juan’s eyes, the room lighting mellowed and the deepest shadows disappeared.
“Betcha the Alcalde is gonna call off the nakedness exam.” Bertie Todd was grinning the way he did when someone else had a problem. “I hear there are parents with Big Objections.”
“You got a bet,” said Juan. “You know how Mr. Alcalde is about nakedness.”
“Heh. True.” Bertie’s image slouched back in the chair next to Juan.
Principal Alcalde was into a long speech, about the fast-changing world and the need for Fairmont to revolutionize itself from semester to semester. At the same time they must never forget the central role of modern education which was to teach the kids how to learn, how to pose questions, how to be adaptable–all without losing their moral compass.
It was very old stuff. Juan listened with a small part of his attention; mostly, he was looking around the audience. This was a physical assembly, so almost everybody except Bertie Todd was really here. Bertie was remote from Chicago, one of the few commuter students. His parents paid a lot more for virtual enrollment, but Fairmont Schools did have a good reputation. Of the truly present–well, the fresh thirteen-year-old faces were mostly real. Mr. Alcalde’s consensus imagery didn’t allow cosmetics or faked clothes. And yet … such rules could not be perfectly enforced. Juan widened his vision, allowed deviations and defacements in the view. There couldn’t be too much of that or the Alcalde would have thrown a fit, but there were ghosts and graffiti floating around the room. The scaredy-cat ones flickered on-and-off in a fraction of a second, or were super-subtle perversions. But some of them–the two-headed phantom that danced behind the Principal’s podium–lasted gloating seconds. Mr. Alcalde could probably see some of the japery, but his rule seemed to be that as long as the students didn’t appear to see the disrespect, then he wouldn’t either.