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Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on right-to-repair issues in a way.
Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on right-to-repair issues in a way.
Vinge invented the idea (and name) of the singularity.
Also a fun bit of sobriety to look back at how sure some of us were that the singularity is coming and now we have humans arguing on Facebook all day and pausing occasionally to eat horse paste. Transcendence hasn’t felt this far away since the Cold War.
Seems we have some time yet. Just as well, we don’t have fusion or flying cars yet and while by definition I can’t know what the singularity will be like, it seems like fusion would certainly help with something like that.
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…
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…
Huh I just recommended that some do go forward with a deepness in the sky, but read a fire upon the deep first because of the aforementioned content warnings. I think if I didn't already have some faith in the author I would have just stopped because the theming is so dark
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 liked Children of The Sky, but in terms of plot it seems clearly meant to be a bridge to a next book, and seemed to suffer from the "middle book" syndrome of trilogies, losing a lot of the faster pace of the first book as it slowly builds up the details and tension to be resolved in the next book.
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.
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll put them on the top of my reading list. I generally consider A Fire Upon the Deep to be one of the great achievements of human imagination. Reading this book and discovering Vinge's unique vision of a variable physics universe was akin to reading Tolkien and discovering his vision of a divine universe.
Spiders you both can and can’t understand, and then hive mind mammals… The facile approach would be to cut out the middleman and make hive insects, and he did not. The speed of sound aspect of his hive mind was a brilliant stroke, the intergenerational element was the cherry on top.
I enjoyed the sci-fi parts of this book. The whole thing about the ship trying to evade the Blight was some of the best hard sci-fi I've come across. What I liked less was the subplot about the children marooned in a medieval-style society of dog-like aliens, which got a bit Game of Thrones-y for my taste, and felt like a completely different book. I considered reading A Deepness in the Sky, but then learned it invol…
https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-...
Also everyone should read Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" to understand a plausible outcome of the technological change we are witnessing today.
It's a bittersweet book, about being a small human in a world where the value of individual creative efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer might of automation and vast collaboration and technological accumulation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
You will recognize Pokemon Go, and many other things that happened after the book was published (2006). Great foresight.
Wikipedia: Vernor Vinge is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and perhaps the first to present a fictional "cyberspace" (in his novella True Names).
By the way, Adam Back (probably Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto) has referenced the True Names novella in interviews when explaining why Satoshi Nakamoto remains pseudonymous. So Vinge influenced that, too.
Vinge, man. Vinge.
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…
"You want a deepness that endures, a deepness that [we] can depend on? there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever"
it's got VR headsets, distributed computers - hacking plays a major role. Only way it could be better is if I could forget the plot so I could read it again