POV: Neutralish
We say "neutralish" rather than "neutral" for two reasons: (1) it's more fun to say; and (2) sometimes when we see something through a character's POV, we get that character's tone. For instance, when Miri comes to help Robert in the GenGen labs, she lets slip that lots of people (Juan, Miri, Xiu Xiang) are working secretly to help Robert; and then we hear this:
So many friends, doing so much to save an incompetent old fool and his fellow fools. (27.112)
Now, is that the narrator calling Robert an "incompetent old fool"? Is that the narrator calling all those people "friends"? We're getting this moment from Robert's POV—he's the one who is surprised by all the people secretly helping him. So it seems that this tone is also Robert's—he's the one who is starting to appreciate his friends and realizing what a fool he's been.
Neutralish Moral Ambiguity
If you've read many of the character analyses, you've probably noticed that there are a couple of times where we scratched our heads and asked, "Well, what do you think? Is Alfred Vaz a terrible monster for wanting to mind control the world into peace? Is Bob a terrible monster for using weapons to stop other people from using weapons? How guilty should Robert feel about betraying his daughter-in-law in order to get his poetry back? Is Lena wrong to cut Robert out when everyone says he's changed? Is… "
You get the idea.
We ask you what you think because you might have some definite opinion about those questions… and because Rainbows End seems pretty ambiguous. If we never got a Vaz POV section, we'd just call him the villain and move on. But he just wants to help people (by controlling people's minds)—which puts him pretty close to some characters that we wouldn't want to call villains, like Miri (who just wants to help people by manipulating them) and Bob (who wants to save the world by blowing up small parts of it).
In many ways, the neutralish tone of the book works well with the character's moral ambiguity.
In both cases, the book sets up these situations and then asks you, "Well, what do you think about it?"
Style: Informative (but not Hand Hold-y)
Here's a question that we won't ask on our quiz: What's an "HEIR laser"?
The first time we hear about HEIR lasers, in Chapter 29, we hear that they are some of the weapons available to Bob and the other military forces. So we know that they are military equipment—and we also know that they are lasers (29.103).
Now, if you're dying to know what "HEIR" stands for, you have to read on to Chapter 32, where we finally hear about a "High Energy Infra-Red laser" that blasted the lab (32.54). And if you read about "High Energy Infra-Red" lasers and forgot that we earlier heard about "HEIR lasers," then you have to wait a few paragraphs to hear about "HEIR" again (32.58).
So by that point, we finally know what HEIR lasers are. Unfortunately, there are no blueprints on how to build our own. Dang.
That's an example of how Rainbows End is informative but not hand hold-y. Vinge's narrator lays out a lot of information for us. We hear about what it's like when a certificate authority collapses (28.1-4); we hear about what the book shredding/digitization looks like to Robert (like a tree-shredder, 12.38-45). And yet, the narrator doesn't walk us through this complex world and tell us what's what.
Check out Juan's bike. When we first see Juan, we hear how the Radners helped him avoid a recall on his bike:
That had left him with a great martial-arts weapon—and a bike that was almost impossible to unfold. (4.18)
Then when Miri sees him, she notices that Juan "had a shiny new bike, but he couldn't seem to get it unfolded" (13.27). Well, we know why, but the narrator doesn't make the connection for us—we have to make it ourselves. Oh, and there's one last mention of the bike, eighteen chapters (!) after it's first mentioned. When they almost get caught by Alfred, Juan uses his bike to attack Alfred:
The wheels spun up with all the power from the regen brakes, and the bike exploded across the room, smashing into the stranger and the equipment behind him. (22.60)
So in Chapter 4 we hear that it's a useless bike but a great weapon; and all the way in Chapter 22 we finally get to see it in martial arts action. But again, nowhere does the narrator remind us of these facts. It's almost like Vinge expects us to remember stuff and put stuff together without help.