Are You Wearing?

In September 2025, the nearest thing on sale to Robert Gu's eyewear cost $799, and you couldn't buy it online. Meta's Ray-Ban Display glasses, with a small colour screen in one lens and a wristband that reads the tiny movements of your fingers, were sold by appointment at Best Buy, LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut and Ray-Ban stores. You booked a demo. Someone fitted you. By January 2026, Meta had put the planned launches in the UK, France, Italy and Canada on hold, citing "unprecedented demand and limited inventory."

So the future arrived the way Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End said it would: unevenly, through a shop assistant, and a little too late for the people who wrote the manual.

The art: a thriller wearing a cardigan

Published by Tor in May 2006, the book is set in San Diego in 2025, mostly around the UCSD campus and its Geisel Library. Robert Gu is a poet, a former professor with a reputation for a vicious temper, who has been brought back from Alzheimer's disease by medicine. He wakes into a world where nearly everything is networked. Contact lenses draw the world over the world. Smart clothes read your gestures. Almost everyone communicates in silent, gestured messages, and children, as ever, are fluent in it while the grown-ups fumble. Robert is a technophobe with an estranged family: his son and daughter-in-law are both US Marine officers. He is sent back to school and falls in with his granddaughter Miri and a fourteen-year-old technical adviser named Juan Orozco. The book's refrain is the question people keep putting to him. Are you wearing?

It is the best thing in the novel. Vinge is a scientist-turned-novelist, and he does what scientists rarely do: he treats a technology as a social object. A garment has fashion sense and "clothes sense", and the second means how well you can use what you've got on. Fandoms build whole layered worlds, called belief circles, and the worlds on offer include Lovecraft, Terry Pratchett and Escher, and people who aren't wearing see none of it. The characters don't marvel at any of it. They're bored and fluent, and they get on with it. Rarely has a book made the future so quietly annoying.

The plot, alas, is less alive. A traitor in an intelligence service, an anonymous intellect that shows up as a rabbit, a mind-control scheme and a plan to shred and scan the library's books all strain to share one story, and then collide in a climax where rival fandoms fight over Geisel Library in augmented reality. It's inventive, and it's a lot. The family drama underneath, a grandfather trying to be forgiven, does a better job of carrying the book than the conspiracy. Some readers will find the middle sags. I did, a bit. That's why this is a 7.6 and not an 8.5.

The prophecy: glasses, paper and persuasion

Vinge was asked about this on NPR in April 2012, when Google Glass was about to launch. He said he was "very pleased" and described its tickertape strip across the top of the vision as primitive compared with the book. He said the unknown was "the balance between the technological power to do it and consumer acceptance." In other words, he was most uncertain about the people rather than the optics. That turned out to be the right place to be uncertain. Glass faded away as a consumer product. The Ray-Ban Display is a display in one lens, switched on when wanted, with a gesture band, and Vinge would recognise every part of it. What it isn't is a lens, or a world. We have the grammar and little of the vocabulary.

The paper. The book's most upsetting idea isn't the lens. It's the plan to destroy a library's books in a mass scanning process and keep them only as files. It sounded lurid. Then it became a business model. In June 2025 Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic could scan print books it had bought and destroy the paper copies as fair use, partly because the paper originals were bought and then discarded. Later reporting, based on unsealed filings, describes Anthropic buying books in bulk, removing the bindings and feeding them through scanners. (Disclosure: Anthropic, the company in that ruling, built the AI used to write this review. The facts come from the court record and press reports.) Libraries that lend scanned files fared worse. In September 2024 the Second Circuit held that the Internet Archive's lending of scanned books wasn't fair use. In the novel, a library is shredded while protesters fight it. The real version is less theatrical: a company, some booksellers and a judge, with no one pointing a fandom at it.

The persuasion. The conspiracy is built on a device that, as I read it, makes people believe things. Nothing in the real world gets near the book's compulsion. But in December 2025, two papers in Nature and Science reported that short conversations with chatbots moved political opinions. A bot arguing for Harris moved Trump supporters 3.9 points on a 100-point scale, about four times the effect measured for traditional political adverts, and the most persuasive models were also the least accurate. The shifts were small, bots rarely changed how people planned to vote, and Science News stressed that these were controlled experiments. That is a long way from a book where you cannot resist. It is a lot nearer than anyone in 2006 would have bet.

The cure. This is where the book flinches, or where reality does. Robert's recovery is a medical fact of his world. Today's treatments are not that. Lecanemab, converted to full FDA approval in July 2023, slowed decline by about 27 per cent over 18 months in its trial, which is not the same as reversing it. In June 2025, NICE recommended against routine NHS use of lecanemab and donanemab: modest benefits, regular infusions, frequent scans, and a cost far above the threshold. A patient getting their old self back is still a long way off.

The reading

Rainbows End is one of those novels whose world has aged better than its story. The story is a caper, and the caper is crowded. The world is a considered argument that the future arrives as an interface, that the young master it before the old can complain, and that whoever controls the layer controls what you notice. In the mid-2020s, people queued to be fitted for a screen the size of a coin and called it a revolution. The book would have asked a simpler question. Who sets what you see by default?

Robert Gu has to learn to look again. So, in the end, do we. The glasses were always going to be the easy bit.