Vernor Vinge's "Synthetic Serendipity": Prelude to "Rainbows End"

This 3 year old story essentially gets a large prefix & suffix to become 2007 Hugo Award winning novel, "Rainbows End". Story get very little tweaking to accommodate the larger plot.

You experience much of the computer utopia preached by "Rainbows End", & some of the subplot involving rehabilitation of the very old.

Reading this story might be a good idea before picking up the novel - it gives you a feel of whether you will like the novel.

Full text of the story can be downloaded here.

Trivia.

1. Since the novel version won Hugo Award, publisher's marketing appears to be selling this story as an extract from novel rather than the other way round - even though the story actually appeared 2 years before novel, & has appeared in at least one earlier anthology.
   

Fact sheet.
Synthetic Serendipity, short story, review
First published: IEEE Spectrum, 30 June 2004
Rating: C

This story appears in the following anthologies.

1. Gardner Dozois' "The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty Second Annual Collection"