91–100 of 175 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was definitely dark, and before I was halfway through I was desperate for the alien chapters just because all of the humans were just so damned miserable.
I am a little confused. Which of the books are you and GP talking about that is so dark?
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…
This is indeed in A Deepness in the Sky. You're the first person in this discussion who's brought this up. This, to me, is the most important insight of Vinge in the Fire/Deepness series.
>Always tantalized by that idea, but always wondered why that would necessarily be the case ...
It's pretty obvious; those with the power to deploy such surveillance are always tempted to use and abuse such power. (EDIT: Let me reword this. Those with the power to deploy such surveillance methods inevitably deploy them. Smart dust is far, far, far more all-encompassing and inescapable than having security cameras on every street corner. The combination of these two things inevitably destroys civilization.)
Because the traders in A Deepness in the Sky use coldsleep and visit planets every few decades or centuries, they notice big changes that occurred incrementally.
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 ficti…
This is one of several books I read in the 90s that I still think about and love so much. Startide Rising and Downbelow Station are the other ones that immediately springs to mind. This book (and Startide Rising) are very much in the space opera camp. There's really no basis in physics for the zones in this book but I really love the ideas. I love the Tines. I also love the idea of the arms race that was unwittingly…
That’s because the Zones are artificial.
1) In a 2004 article for ACM Queue magazine, I couldn't resist excerpting the software archaeology bit as a an introductory section: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039532 and of course, as an ancient Unix person, recognized the date.' 2) In 2007, I was Program Co-Chair for the Hot Chips conference, and got Vernor to give a keynote first day. We used keynotes for fun topics. (I had a connection via UC Berkeley P…
As much as I loved the Tines as an idea, I really hate it when large portions of a scifi book take place on some "medieval" world. If I wanted that, I would just read fantasy novels.
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…
In my opinion A Deepness in the Sky is a better book. The spiders are more interesting than the dogs, and the two storylines are much more closely intertwined.
But I do agree with you that A Deepness in the Sky is better in many ways. It’s a much more subtle book.
This is the book that reignited my love for sci-fi after college. It’s the only book I’ve ever read twice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a meme phrase that applies quite literally to Focus, and has similar implications in the real world to those in the novel. That phrase is "weaponized autism".
If we're going in this direction, you might find enjoyable the book Echopraxia (and its predecessor, Blindsight ). Without spoiling too much, it features a group of people that pushed their cognitive wetware and hardware to the point they can't even communicate with normal humans anymore.
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…
Deepness introduced me to the concept of software archaeology. I won't spoil it, but there's a really fun bit when a character, digging deeply into the bowels of software systems in this far-future human society, makes an observation about the basis for timekeeping in the oldest systems. The "focused" remind me of the mentats from the Dune universe, but less general purpose-- more like replicating feedback-based cont…