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A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

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Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#31

Post by ansible »

Causality1 wrote: post #5

A fantastic book. It will really make you ache for more information, though. Why do ascended beings only hang around for a few years and where do they go? What fraction of living beings survived the Blight and the Countermeasure? What is the present-day status of Earth?

> Why do ascended beings only hang around for a few years and where do they go?

... a few years in realtime ...

In the Transcend, they can "clock up" to a very high level. Living a million seconds to each one that passes in realtime.

What would it take to create / adapt an intelligence that would last that long without falling into a very deep rut, as far as thinking goes? Maybe they've died of boredom, maybe they've discovered everything they originally sought to learn, maybe they've Sublimed (yes, I know, that's a Culture series thing) or otherwise gone to a higher plane of existence.

It would have been interesting to explore this further, but perhaps Vinge didn't think he could pull that off.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#32

Post by cybernautique »

jodrellblank wrote: post #3

I had to google what "ENCRYPTED DAISY download. For print-disabled users" means. " "Print disabled" books are those that have been specially formatted in the DAISY format for users who can not read regular print books. These titles are only accessible on a specialized device to patrons having a key issued by the Library of Congress. " " The Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) format is a means of creating d…

Good catch! I wonder how access to DAISY format can be made more accessible. Perhaps a service that automatically fills out the necessary paperwork?

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#33

Post by PicassoCTs »

moonbug wrote: post #18
mawise wrote: post #10

This is in my list of top 10 (ish) books I've read. If you've enjoyed it, He's got two more books in the Zones of Thought universe: A Deepness In The Sky, which follows Pham in his Queng Ho days before A Fire Upon The Deep (recommended!) as well as Children Of The Sky, which follows Ravna and the children on the Tines world as a direct sequel to Fire Upon The Deep.

Stay away from Children of the Sky unless, having finished Fire Upon the Deep, your response was "I'd sure like to hear more about those whiny children and the dogs"

Too late a warning. I hate post-award contract-filler sequel books.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#34

Post by ghaff »

jrootabega wrote: post #17
mawise wrote: post #10

This is in my list of top 10 (ish) books I've read. If you've enjoyed it, He's got two more books in the Zones of Thought universe: A Deepness In The Sky, which follows Pham in his Queng Ho days before A Fire Upon The Deep (recommended!) as well as Children Of The Sky, which follows Ravna and the children on the Tines world as a direct sequel to Fire Upon The Deep.

I acknowledge that I'm digressing into general Vinge talk here instead of Zones of Thought, but Rainbow's End was good, too, as more of a near-future vision that, these days, would barely be considered sci-fi. It's also got some elements that are scarily analogous to current trends in government/social media/political dialogue.

On the more general Vinge theme, his "True Names" novella is probably overlooked compared to his novels. But, along with Varley's "Press Enter" (written about the same time) is a really good early take on the "Net" and its intersection with the real world.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#35

Post by jwalton »

moonbug wrote: post #18
mawise wrote: post #10

This is in my list of top 10 (ish) books I've read. If you've enjoyed it, He's got two more books in the Zones of Thought universe: A Deepness In The Sky, which follows Pham in his Queng Ho days before A Fire Upon The Deep (recommended!) as well as Children Of The Sky, which follows Ravna and the children on the Tines world as a direct sequel to Fire Upon The Deep.

Stay away from Children of the Sky unless, having finished Fire Upon the Deep, your response was "I'd sure like to hear more about those whiny children and the dogs"

I read an interview with Vernon Vinge where he said he had this whole story arc with Ravna planned out that he expected to take five books in total. It’s been 10 years since the last Zones of Thought book… Although, it was longer than that between book two and book three.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#36

Post by cdogl »

btown wrote: post #27

Highly, highly recommend Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky [0], which won the Hugo in 2000. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony over centuries of time (in many ways thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation is in helping people to understand foreign ways…

+1. A Deepness in the Sky is one of the most underrated works of speculative fiction that I've read. It is a masterwork of plotting and character work. A Fire Upon the Deep has some great ideas and some characters that have stuck with me, but I think Deepness is a far superior work. Its brilliance is that it has the structure of a great work of fiction but you can basically just read it as straight pulp science fiction and have a fun time.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#37

Post by dsm9000 »

marstall wrote: post #29

For those that aren't familiar, a short teaser: Future archaeologists have traveled to a remote asteroid to investigate an alien artifact found within it, a computing device of some kind. They bring it to life and begin extracting its data and programs for their research. A debate breaks out about the substantial virus risk known to be associated with these "found" computing devices. They decide to cut and run, but n…

This scene in the book is maybe one of the earliest examples of fuzzing being used n fiction :-) ?

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#38

Post by marstall »

Causality1 wrote: post #5

A fantastic book. It will really make you ache for more information, though. Why do ascended beings only hang around for a few years and where do they go? What fraction of living beings survived the Blight and the Countermeasure? What is the present-day status of Earth?

This might have been in A Deepness Upon The Sky, but VV runs out the "Smart Dust" endgame pretty thoroughly, with the conclusion that as miniature sensors reach their peak form of total surveillance (floating invisibly, pervasive, low-power microwave-burst-powered, mesh networked, video/audio/etc), they inevitably destroy civilization.

Always tantalized by that idea, but always wondered why that would necessarily be the case ...

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#39

Post by marstall »

dsm9000 wrote: post #37
marstall wrote: post #29

For those that aren't familiar, a short teaser: Future archaeologists have traveled to a remote asteroid to investigate an alien artifact found within it, a computing device of some kind. They bring it to life and begin extracting its data and programs for their research. A debate breaks out about the substantial virus risk known to be associated with these "found" computing devices. They decide to cut and run, but n…

This scene in the book is maybe one of the earliest examples of fuzzing being used n fiction :-) ?

what's fuzzing?
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