It may not sound inspiring, but to the many fans of Vinge, this is a most ambitious -- and perhaps unattainable -- goal for any member of our species.

Vinge is a mathematician and computer scientist in San Diego whose science fiction has won five Hugo Awards and earned good reviews even from engineers analyzing its technical plausibility.

He can write space operas with the best of them, but he also suspects that intergalactic sagas could become as obsolete as their human heroes.

The problem is a concept described in Vinge’s seminal essay in 1993, "The Coming Technological Singularity," which predicted that computers would be so powerful by 2030 that a new form of superintellligence would emerge.

Vinge compared that point in history to the singularity at the edge of a black hole: a boundary beyond which the old rules no longer applied, because post-human intelligence and technology would be as unknowable to us as our civilization is to a goldfish.

The Singularity is often called "the rapture of the nerds," but Vinge doesn’t anticipate immortal bliss. The computer scientist in him may revel in the technological marvels, but the novelist envisions catastrophes and worries about the fate of not-so-marvelous humans like Robert Gu, the protagonist of Vinge’s latest novel, "Rainbows End."

Robert is an English professor and famous poet who succumbs to Alzheimer’s, languishing in a nursing home until 2025, when the Singularity seems near and technology is working wonders.

He recovers most of his mental faculties; his 75-year-old body is rejuvenated; even his wrinkles vanish.

But he’s so lost in this new world that he has to go back to high school to learn basic survival skills. Wikipedia, Facebook, Second Life, World of Warcraft, iPhones, instant messaging -- all these are quaint ancestral technologies now that everyone is connected to everyone and everything.

Thanks to special contact lenses, computers in your clothes and locational sensors scattered everywhere you go, you see a constant stream of text and virtual sights overlaying the real world. As you chat with a distant friend’s quite lifelike image strolling at your side, you can adjust the scenery to your mutual taste -- adding, say, medieval turrets to buildings -- at the same time

you’re each privately communicating with vast networks of humans and computers.

To Robert, a misanthrope who’d barely mastered e-mail in his earlier life, this networked world is a

multitasking hell. He retreats to one of his old haunts, the Geisel Library, once the intellectual hub of the

University of California, San Diego, but now so rarely visited that its paper books are about to be shredded to make room for a highbrow version of a virtual-reality theme park.

At the library he finds a few other "medical retreads" still reading books and using ancient machines like laptops. Calling themselves the Elder Cabal, they conspire to save the paper library while they’re trying to figure out what, if anything, their skills are good for anymore.