Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 175 posts

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

#161

Post by sillyquiet »

int_19h wrote: post #141
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"The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on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.

I didn't find his politics, or any politics really, very out of place in the novels, they seemed (to me) a natural part of the story telling.

But, full disclosure, I am a bit libertarian myself, politically so maybe I didn't notice as much or they weren't as grating to me.

On the other hand, I find Terry Goodkind's novels completely unreadable, and the politic-pushing obnoxious, so I don't give libertarian politics a pass when it comes to out-of-place axe-grinding prominence.

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

#162

Post by xenophonf »

bradknowles wrote: post #144
AdamHominem wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-Kzi…

The classics are classics for a reason. Huxley and Flaubert are both wonderful authors, but all the joy was sucked out reading their works when I was forced to do it. I don't know why. Personal failing, maybe.

I thought Herbert's non-_Dune_ works were very good while also being very disturbing. I read _The White Plague_ in my teens and am reminded of it whenever I read about modern gene drive technology. The ConSentiency stories and books have stayed with me to this day, and I periodically re-read them. Both _Hellstrom's Hive_ and _The Santaroga Barrier_ are fantastic utopias crossed over with deep horror; I love them but can't bring myself to re-read them!

Everybody's different. I can't stand Asimov or Clarke or Drake or Heinlein, despite reading nearly all of their respective science fiction oeuvres, but that Ursula Le Guin isn't in your top five is a damn shame. _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is one of my favorite books, and _The Dispossessed_ primed a political conversion completed by Iain Banks' Culture novels years later. Le Guin and Banks are probably my two favorite authors now, and in that order, with Bradbury and Adams a very close third and fourth.

I'm so tired of trilogies and tetralogies and so on and so forth. I wish authors would just finish the damn story. I think that's why I like Le Guin and Banks so much. You can read out of order and it's no big deal. In fact, I read _The Tombs of Atuan_ before _A Wizard of Earthsea_, and all of Le Guin's Hanish stories are stand-alone. The same goes for Banks' Culture novels, where I started with _Excession_ and back-tracked to _Consider Phelebas_ and read in release order (mostly).

Anyway, I heartily recommend giving the literary fiction another chance some day. There's some really amazing stuff out there that doesn't happen in space.

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

#163

Post by goatlover »

stormking wrote: post #158
stormking wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Interesting answers means expanded on the rules and story in the fictional universe to provide explanations for mysteries the author(s) set up." That's the root cause of our disagreement. I simply call that a good story. On the other hand, to me a book gives "interesting answers" to something if it has something meaningful to say about reality, not just the fictional universe. In Dune, that would be true for politic…

That's why the only books that have something meaningful to say about aliens are Solaris and Blindsight. In case of the fermi paradoxon, I'd add the first two books of Baxter's Manifold series where he offers two distinct explanations, the first one being "it's not a paradox at all, we're truly the first" and "some natural process is killing them off before they can colonize the galaxy".

Solaris is focused around a planetary ocean that's sentient in some manner too alien for humans to understand. That's how Lem sets up the story, because he likes to explore failures to communicate and what it would mean to encounter the truly alien. But it is his setup, and not the result of an actual alien encounter. We don't know whether it would be similarly impossible to communicate with aliens. Maybe Sagan and the SETI folks assume correctly that it is possible.

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

#164

Post by carapace »

nl wrote: post #153
carapace wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that was John von Neumann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Technological... Vinge did "present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace" in True Names in 1981 though. > True Names is a 1981 science fiction novella by American writer Vernor Vinge, a seminal work of the cyberpunk genre. It is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be centr…

Hmm.. The first to use the concept of a "singularity" in the technological context was John von Neumann.[4] Stanislaw Ulam reports a discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue but als…

Here's Vinge on the subject:

> 2001 V. Vinge in Locus Jan. 69/1

> In 1982, on a scientific panel, it occurred to me that with all these ideas I had been talking about and others had been talking about earlier, basically if we ever did get a human-equivalent intelligence, very soon things would be very different. Since the creative impetus would not be from us, it would be in some sense unknowable… This panel was the first time I used the term ‘technological singularity’. I did a 900-word piece about that in ’83 in Omni, and almost all my science fiction has been dealing with it. In ’92 or ’93, NASA asked me to come and give a talk on it, and I did an essay where I also tried to look at precursors. In John von Neumann’s obituary written by Stan Ulam, he relates a conversation he had with von Neumann in which he even uses the term ‘essential singularity’. To me, von Neumann’s notion was not quite the same thing. He was saying that technological progress would become so advanced that the situation would be unknowable—that much is like what I was saying. But to me, the fundamental reason for the technological singularity is, technology creates something that is smarter than human.

https://sfdictionary.com/view/294/singularity

From Ulam's obit.:

> "One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958...

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

#165

Post by ca98am79 »

Vernor Vinge is awesome and I love the character Pham Nuwen.

His books are some of the smartest books I have read. I remember hearing an interview with Vinge and he talks about how he loved writing because you could actually write in a way so that readers who are smarter than himself could get more out of it. I thought that was interesting.

He was a computer science professor at San Diego State University.

I read Dune after reading Vernor Vinge and I realized how influenced Vinge was by Dune. Dune is also a very smart book.

Vinge is also the first to coin the term "The Singularity" in regards to technical innovation growing so quickly, and on top of itself, that we can't predict what is beyond.

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

#166

Post by WorldMaker »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #11
perihelions wrote: post #7

If anyone's purchasing this as an ebook, note that there is (unusually) a DRM-free version available [0]. I'm not sure if this is the publisher (Tor Books) or the author's decision -- the publisher's DRM philosophy been discussed on HN [1][2] but I don't know what the current information is. [0] for example (.epub), https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/a-fire-upon-the-deep-1 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56301…

Tor books is well known for publishing their entire library DRM-free. It's pretty awesome that such a reputable publisher has made their works accessible.

It's also something that they (and a couple other publishers) forced Amazon to note in their catalog books published DRM-free and it has long amused me how passively-aggressively that note seems to be written from Amazon's side:

> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

It feels to me this is phrased as if this is a bad thing. Amuses me every time I see it, and it's at the bottom of a lot of book descriptions these days (certainly all of Tor's books, including A Fire Upon the Deep).

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

#167

Post by stormking »

goatlover wrote: post #163
stormking wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why the only books that have something meaningful to say about aliens are Solaris and Blindsight. In case of the fermi paradoxon, I'd add the first two books of Baxter's Manifold series where he offers two distinct explanations, the first one being "it's not a paradox at all, we're truly the first" and "some natural process is killing them off before they can colonize the galaxy".

Solaris is focused around a planetary ocean that's sentient in some manner too alien for humans to understand. That's how Lem sets up the story, because he likes to explore failures to communicate and what it would mean to encounter the truly alien. But it is his setup, and not the result of an actual alien encounter. We don't know whether it would be similarly impossible to communicate with aliens. Maybe Sagan and t…

Both authors assume that what we call "intelligence" and "sentience" is deeply influenced by the environment our species evolved in (plus a billion happenstances) and that therefore any dream of meaningful communication with extraterrestrials is a naive dream.

Now, we don't know if they're right because, as you pointed out, we never met actual aliens. But that doesn't change the fact that their assumptions is based on actual science.

Klingon mating rituals, on the other hand, are not.

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

#168

Post by wibblewobble123 »

abecedarius wrote: post #138
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…

> I would argue that Deepness is best read first I strongly recommend the publication order instead. Deepness ought to work standalone, but you'll be missing dramatic irony.

The dramatic irony is highly overrated. Deepness before Fire is way more enjoyable.

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

#169

Post by JohnMashey »

JohnMashey wrote: post #74

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…

Software archaeology: I wrote most of this program ~1970 in S/360 assembly language, using w24-bit addressing (&I used the high 8-bits for flags), ~45 years later, it was still getting occasional use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASSIST_(computing)

UNIX really got going on 16-bit PDP-11/20s with Software far outlasts hardware.

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

#170

Post by JohnMashey »

ak217 wrote: post #116
jvanderbot wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is Deepness one of the best sci-fi stories I've read, it's also immensely better than Fire Upon the Deep. I read it first, and it's basically essential sci-fi in my book.

A Fire upon the Deep is more flawed and uneven, but correspondingly more ambitious and thought-provoking. To me both are easily among the top 5 sci-fi novels ever written. I wish Vinge would keep writing more about Pham Nuwen's adventures. And to the grandparent poster's point, there are far more dimensions to A Deepness in the Sky than the one about communicating with alien cultures (the Focused is just one example)…

In 2007, Vinge told me he was planning to write story of Pham & Anne's crusade against the Emergents ... a few years later, when that hadn't appeared, I asked him about it ... he said it was too depressing. (People found Deepness dark, now imagine portrayal of the Emergents' worlds, even though they obviously get defeated, given Fire.)
Post reply on HN