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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#81

Post by loudmax »

turing_complete wrote: post #43

If you never read Vernor Vinge (except for his essay on the Technological Singularity), what would be the best book to start?

Agreed about A Fire Upon The Deep, optionally followed by A Deepness In The Sky. Those are classically styled hard science fiction novels with spaceships and aliens. But much more thoughtful than you might expect from a typical spaceships and aliens scifi novel.

If you're looking for something more germane to present concerns, Rainbows End is about a near future where people's interaction with the world is mediated by augmented reality and various forces are fighting over access to information.

And since I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, Marooned In Realtime is also really good.

But if you're looking for a single book, then you won't go wrong with A Fire Upon The Deep.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#83

Post by KineticLensman »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #71
nl wrote: post #70

One of the true greats. True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote. Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer ). RIP

The Bobbler was a strange idea. It made for a fun concept. I think there was more than one story in that world, if I'm remembering correctly. Rainbow's End was very good!

> I think there was more than one story in that world

Two separate novels: 'The Peace War' and 'Marooned in Realtime', sold collectively as 'Across Realtime'. Enjoyed them both a lot, but for me 'Marooned...' had a more emotional punch, especially as it becomes clearer what had happened to the victim.

There is also a short story 'The Ungoverned' whose main character is Wil W. Brierson, the protagonist in 'Marooned...'.

Overviews without plot spoilers: 'The Peace War' describes a near-future in which bobbles (apparently indestructible stasis fields where time stands still) are used by 'hacker' types to launch an insurrection against the state. 'Marooned...' is set in the far future of the same world, where bobbles are used to support one-way time travel further into the future, where the few remaining humans try to reconnect following the mysterious disappearance of 99.9% of humanity. Both are high-concept SF, but 'Marooned...' also has elements of police procedural where a low-tech detective (Brierson) shanghaied into his future has to solve the slow murder of a high-tech individual (someone from the far future, relative to him).

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#84

Post by WillAdams »

mnsc wrote: post #55
gcr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.

Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.

Yes, eventually one gets a series of software improvements which eventually result in the best possible performance on currently available hardware --- if one can consistently get an LLM to suggest improvements to itself.

Until we get to a point where an AI has the wherewithal to create a fab to make its own chips and then do assembly w/o human intervention (something along the lines of Steve Jobs vision of a computer factory where sand goes in at one end and finished product rolls out the other) it doesn't seem likely to amount to much.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#85

Post by masto »

Vernor Vinge has an outstanding catalog of invention and accomplishments. One of that's threaded through many of his stories and has become even more relevant lately is ubiquitous computing and networking, and in particular augmented reality.

To truly understand the transformative potential of something like a VR headset if technology allowed it to be unobtrusive and omnipresent, one must read Vinge. The idea of consensual reality as portrayed in, e.g., Fast Times at Fairmont High, is kind of mind-blowing.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#86

Post by tetris11 »

nl wrote: post #70

One of the true greats. True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote. Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer ). RIP

The Cookie Monster was one of the best short novella's I ever read, and its influence can be seen everywhere from Greg Egan's Permutation City to episodes of Black Mirror.

Edit: I got it backwards, Egan's book came out first.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#87

Post by KineticLensman »

liotier wrote: post #51
adrianhon wrote: post #44

A lot of love here for A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies") and A Deepness in the Sky (great depiction of cognitive enhancement, slower-than-light interstellar trade), but less so for Rainbows End, which is perhaps a less successful story but remains, after almost two decades, the best description of what augmented reality games and ARGs might do to the world.

> A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies") Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns - although not at FaceTwitTok scale. But still, I love Vinge's take on information entropy across time, space and social networks. A Deepness in the Sky features the profession of programmer–archaeologist and I'm here for…

> Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns

I still remember the moment when I realised that the galactic network in 'Fire...' was in fact based on Usenet (which I used heavily at the time), especially how it was low bandwidth text (given the interstellar distances) and how it had a fair number of nutters posting nonsense across the galaxy ('the key insight is hexapodia'). Great author, who'll be sadly missed.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#88

Post by Voultapher »

smogcutter wrote: post #75
atemerev wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasoned decisions (if you think that empire building is reasonable) without morality and empathy _are_ evil. This is how Putin operates. Also, raping and torturing are very "evil for the sake of evil", if you ask me.

Yeah, discovering Nau’s chamber of horrors is meant to strip any illusions about his motivations.

Book spoilers.

IIRC wasn't it the chamber/ship of someone he worked with, that he tolerated? Read it like six or seven years ago, so the details are fuzzy. The impression I kept was that he did a lot of evil stuff not because he relished the suffering he created in others, but because he didn't mind it.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#89

Post by emptyfile »

rakejake wrote: post #33
jonathanleane wrote: post #9

This 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.

A Deepness in the Sky was perhaps the first "hard sci-fi" novel I ever read (this was before I knew of Greg Egan). The concept of spiders and the onOff planet was just awe-inspiring. While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwh…

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