Doesn’t he deserve the black bar on top of HN?
+1
Vernor Vinge has died
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Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#12:(
Currently reading The children of the sky. And wow I had somewhat forgotten how good sci-fi can be. So much depth, such coherent and well thought out worlds.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#13This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.
Thomas Nau is such a fantastic villain. Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#14Doesn’t he deserve the black bar on top of HN?
+1
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#15Oh man, that's sad to hear. I really loved his books, especially the ones that looked into the future from a modern day engineer point of view. "Rainbows End" comes to my mind quite often when as I read the tech news, it paints a picture of a future that seems to get closer day by day - a sci-fi that you can one realistically believe to live in one day.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#16It is astonishing how many of the great sci-fi writers are/were around California: Vernor, PK Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Huxley, Frank Herbert, Bradbury, Heinlein, Niven, etc. Per-capita has to be several orders of magnitude higher.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#17Interview from ReasonTV - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alxyAeCPits (2011)
I love the cyberpunk vibe of "Prisoners of Gravity" (1992) but it only discusses "Marooned in Realtime"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERRA8qXvuyU&t=87s
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#18He wrote some of my favorite sci-fi books. I was aware he wasn't in good health for a while already, it's still sad to hear about his passing of course. Thank you for the worlds you showed me.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#19Haven't read his fiction works yet, but his singularity piece is very interesting: https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
"Rainbows End" is his singularity book.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#20He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all.
>The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",[8] and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity,[4][7] in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.
Looks like he was spot on.