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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)

#141

Post by int_19h »

sillyquiet wrote: post #19

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"The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on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.

I just wish Vinge's ancap politics weren't so blatantly pushed in the Peace War cycle. It gets especially in your face in the short story in between them.

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

#142

Post by int_19h »

atombender wrote: post #51

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…

The spiders in Deepness are already a technological society with cars, airplanes, radio etc. Furthermore, the interaction between them and humans in space above their planet is one of the main storylines in the book. To a certain extent, it's one of those "what if we were the aliens?" kinds of stories, but very thoroughly fleshed out.

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

#143

Post by int_19h »

themadturk wrote: post #128
brongondwana wrote: post #119

My daughter is named after one of Vinge's characters! Big fan of his work.

I named a character in an unpublished novel after Ravna. It was hard coming up with justification for her name, though; last I looked (a long time ago) there was just Vinge and part of the hyphenated name of a European hotel. I decided her parents called her that because she was conceived there, a la Ron Howard and his kids.

The name is Norwegian, like pretty much everything else about the human civilization in the Beyond.

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

#144

Post by bradknowles »

AdamHominem wrote: post #122
cdogl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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…

I recently read Fire Upon the Deep and I think I'd agree that Vinge is great at speculative fiction. I hadn't looked at the publish/copyright date when I borrowed the ebook from my library. I was shocked just now to see it's a thirty year old book. Zero signs or hints of it, at least to me. The concept that computers/AIs can be affected by the region of space they're in is a nifty idea I don't think I've seen before,…

It is a bit of a slow burn.

But with these books, Vernor Vinge has now become one of my favorite authors, up there with Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, David Drake, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle (although I don’t care for Niven and Pournelle when they work together).

Larry Niven has introduced me to some new authors that I’ve liked, through his “Man-Kzin Wars” series, but I haven’t read enough of their works to put them in my “favorite authors” category, at least not yet.

Piers Anthony is also great, but I’ve only read his fantasy novels, so I can’t speak for where he would rate on the SF scale. I also wouldn’t consider Edgar Rice Burroughs to be SF. Same for Arthur Conan Doyle.

And Orson Scott Card is just plain weird. I love his work, but I find it hard to recommend to others.

James S. A. Corey is a pseudonym of two authors, so I don’t feel like I can include it on the top list above. But I do love what I’ve seen of their work.

Ironically, while I love the Dune movie, I haven’t actually read any of Frank Herbert’s work. I look forward to seeing the new Dune movie as well, and then maybe I’ll go back and read some of the novels.

I absolutely hated, loathed, and despised Aldous Huxley. The closest I ever came to suicide was while I was forced to read his book. The second closest was when I was forced to read “Madame Bovary”. Both were a result of a sophomore level English class I was forced to take in order to get my degree.

I don’t think I’ve actually read any of Roald Dahl’s novels, same with Cory Doctorow, Harlan Ellison, and Neil Gaiman.

And I think I’ll stop there. I’m seeing too many names that I recognize on the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science-fiction_author... but which I don’t remember reading any of their work. So, I’ve got a few decades of reading to catch up on.

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

#145

Post by goatlover »

stormking wrote: post #24
goatlover wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liu Cixin managed to provide some very interesting answers regarding the nature of the cosmic dark forest and higher dimensional space in Death's End, the third book in the Three Body Problem trilogy. The Expanse book nine, Leviathan Falls, will probably explain the advanced alien conflict and unknown aggressors that proceeded human discovery in the distant past. Given how the authors have handled mysterious alien st…

Oh come on, it's a nice book and I enjoyed reading it but his physics are pure bullshit and his game theory is based on pop psychology.

It's fiction, not a science book. I'm responding to the claim that an author can't depict something akin to transcendence or very advanced technology. Both of which are fictional, at least as far as we know. Arthur C Clarke has also written stuff along those lines.

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

#147

Post by stormking »

goatlover wrote: post #145
stormking wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, it's a nice book and I enjoyed reading it but his physics are pure bullshit and his game theory is based on pop psychology.

It's fiction, not a science book. I'm responding to the claim that an author can't depict something akin to transcendence or very advanced technology. Both of which are fictional, at least as far as we know. Arthur C Clarke has also written stuff along those lines.

I was referring to "managed to provide some very interesting answers regarding the nature of the cosmic dark forest and higher dimensional space".

No, he was not because his ideas about "the nature of the cosmic dark forest" - allthough having at least some internal consistency - lack any foundation in actual science and his ideas about "higher dimensional space" were pure nonsense.

They were not "answers" but plot devices.

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

#148

Post by 2ion »

cdogl wrote: post #36
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 ficti…

Besides the SF content, A Deepness in the Sky is also one of the very very few books that have completely disgusted me about a fictional character, namely in this book, what happened to Qiwi and Kira Pen Lisolet. I had to stop reading a few times. For the writing to steer impressions this much alone this book is 11/10.

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

#149

Post by garmaine »

2ion wrote: post #148
cdogl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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…

Besides the SF content, A Deepness in the Sky is also one of the very very few books that have completely disgusted me about a fictional character, namely in this book, what happened to Qiwi and Kira Pen Lisolet. I had to stop reading a few times. For the writing to steer impressions this much alone this book is 11/10.

That aspect of it destroyed the rereadability of the book for me. I tried reading it again recently because I loved the part of the plot that dealt with the spiders, but I ended up skipping over the chapters with the emergents because I knew where thing were going and didn't want to re-experience it.

Still, that's credit to the author that he was able to write something powerful enough to evoke such a response.

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

#150

Post by garmaine »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #83
bitwize wrote: post #73

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.

Also along similar lines is Alastair Reynolds' Diamond Dogs short story.
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