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Rating: One of these afternoons, I was listening to an entertainment program – “Baobab – l’albero delle notizie” – on the radio. The topic of the broadcast was space travel, and among the broadcast voices, there were the undoubtedly competent ones of Franco Malberba, profession astronaut and alas, in his spare time, a European Parliament member within the European People's Party, and the inevitable eminent Florentine astrophysicist Professor Margherita Hack.
The theme discussed might seem perhaps remote, yet it is indeed more current if we consider the precarious state of our planet; more current as it is universally known that traveling in space has always been one of humanity's greatest dreams. However, together with time travel, space travel, understood as an infinite and unknown universe, is undoubtedly what appears to be the next and ultimate frontier and barrier to be broken down.
In any case, according to the current state of astrophysics studies and the current and future knowledge in the field of aerospace technologies, it seems that a journey through space, searching for a new yet unidentified habitable planet for humans, is not even representable within a single "life" span. This journey, in fact, would require hundreds of years and, to be traversed, the assistance of starships where somehow the daily life of these hypothetical space travelers could be feasible. The search, the conquest of a new habitable planet would thus require, akin to the migratory trips of the monarch butterflies of North America, which every year embark on a brave and fascinating round trip across the continent, multiple generations.
I wouldn't digress further anyway. The fact is that the question posed by Professor Margherita Hack seems thus all the more fascinating and perhaps provocative: would you sacrifice your entire existence for this journey across the vast and unknown space? Would you be willing to give away your whole life for science?
Absolutely, answering this question seems all too simple. Despite all its flaws, humans appear potentially as infinite creatures. At least, their conception of time and especially spaces is infinite. Despite the constant brutalization of the social community and the human race, in fact, humans, by their nature and constitution, set no limits. Traveling in space, understood in any case as physically traversable space, is for humans something indispensable and somehow equivalent to traveling within oneself and thus renewing, giving new life to the species and, if you will, gaining more awareness of one's own means, finite or infinite that they may be. After all, it should not be forgotten that we are a relatively young species. In the unprecedented format of “Homo sapiens”, we have inhabited this planet for only 130,000 years. Dinosaurs, for example, any nine-meter-long and three-meter-high triceratops, weighing about eight tons, inhabited this planet for a few million years.
It is evident, therefore, that the question posed gains a much broader sense and it seems thus legitimate to ask ourselves what and how much we would actually be willing to sacrifice, if even our life, if it somehow helped to discover our true essence and who we truly are.
This is the pressing question posed by Robert Gu, the protagonist of “Rainbows End”, a sci-fi novel by the writer, and already a professor at San Diego State University, Vernor Vinge. Robert has traveled through time in perhaps an unorthodox and unconventional way, but which today, without offending the amiable and bemused Professor Emmett Brown made famous on the big and small screen by Christopher Lloyd, who traveled through time at the wheel of a DeLorean – “Great Scott, Martyyy!!!” -, seems to be the only possible way: recovering memory after years of semi-consciousness due to Alzheimer's disease. When he wakes up, after about twenty years, Robert is in San Diego of 2025, in a world completely different from the one he belonged to, where modern information technologies dominate and there is no longer space for literature; books are mostly considered something to dispose of and are destroyed or kept in a state of total neglect; people communicate with each other through the use, “wearing”, futuristic multimedia contact lenses; some undergo, at their own risk, real multimedia “upgrades” to obtain new and more unlimited capabilities. With some unintended consequence, it sometimes happens to find themselves spouting out phrases and imprecations in Cantonese dialect in the middle of a normal and daily conversation.
A world, after all, concretely future-oriented, given the current pace of technological development and growth. Where even medicine, however, has made great strides. Robert Gu is seventy-five years old, but, thanks to the treatments received, he appears much younger and has been completely restored and brought back to life. Having reacquired all his physical functions, Robert discovers he is better off than twenty years before; he is reintegrated into society and, through attending “high school” courses, initiated, like all his other "rehabilitated" peers by the new medical technologies, into the use of new IT novelties, and above all, the complex technique of “wearing” these blessed futuristic contact lenses.
He could be happy, all things considered, if it weren't that he used to be one of the greatest American poets, one of the best of his generation, and now he has “lost the music in the words”. His head is crowded with images, he continuously has new and good ideas, but no concrete verses: it's as if he were dead inside, and this drives him mad.
Robert Gu seems lucid in performing all his vital functions and carrying on his (little) social and daily life; although he is not mad, however, he appears almost hallucinated and blinded by the impossibility of rediscovering himself, even twenty years later and in a world that evidently doesn't belong to him and in which he doesn't recognize himself. So, as in the most typical representations of ancient Greek tragedies that expected the resolutive intervention of the so-called “deus ex machina”, Robert decides to make the typical pact with the devil; only this time, the devil has the guise of a rabbit – which in the intention might remind perhaps of Lewis Carroll's “White Rabbit” but which reminds us instead, if only for its annoying behavior and equally annoying habit of munching on carrots during conversation, of the Warner's Bugs Bunny -; only that the pact will end up involving Robert in an international intrigue that will risk undermining and shattering the already inevitably fragile balance between the great international powers (Europe, USA, China), as well as ultimately endangering even the lives of his own family members, of whom truthfully, the cynical old heartless man, he has never cared much about.
“Rainbows End” succeeds only halfway. The underlying ideas are good, but the narrative, at times confusing, seems too complicated and above all not very linear. Not only. The author presents us well with a concretely futurible reality and a significantly “naked” and unarmed character before the inevitable reality and unreality that surround him, raising interesting questions about the development of technology and society, as well as on the actual nature of the human race. He invites us, therefore, to a reflection, but does not propose to provide any concrete answer or better perhaps this is not well characterized and thus appears questionable. Surely and in fact, Robert Gu, searching for his lost talent and somehow himself, is not presented as a positive character. On the contrary, it almost seems the author wants to imply that his search is wrong and that in reality, Robert, in the apparent frantic search for something that, like artistic talent and literary skills, is a high expression of great sensitivity, a state of mind, a lucid unconsciousness, a manifest representation of our thinking and which therefore cannot be achieved only through desperate study and academic efforts, is basically and essentially just unhappy; he doesn't realize he already has everything he needs. Thus, it seems Vernor Vinge invites the reader to take refuge in family affections and appreciate the small good things that daily reality offers us, rather than continually searching and pursuing great objectives.
Is it wrong, then, to go looking for ourselves? Do we already have everything we want? And if this were true, does it perhaps mean settling? In short, I mean, maybe there is nothing outside our solar system and at the end of this galaxy. At the end of the rainbow.
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