Dang. RIP.
Rainbows End has a special place in my heart. As a teen a buddy and I used to explore the UCSD tunnels and labs at night and let our imaginations run wild about what we’d see.
Vernor Vinge has died
321–330 of 334 posts
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wish he had wrapped everything up.
Eh, I have mixed feelings on that. There are cliff-hanger endings, or clearly unfinished works, but I don't mind a bit of uncertainty at the edge of the story. Compare The Wheel of Time to The Lord of the Rings. At the end of LotR, it is over . Not only is the Dark Lord defeated forever, the elves, the wizards, all magic, and our two protagonists leave the world for the Undying Lands. We're told of the lives and deat…
Tolkien did start writing a sequel to LOTR set a generation or two later, but he abandoned it because it was coming out too grimdark for him.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
from http://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.3Q97/4356.html The bobble is a speculative technology that originated in Vernor Vinge's science fiction. It allows spherical volumes to be enclosed in complete stasis for controllable periods of time. It was used in _The Peace War_ as a weapon, and in _Marooned in Realtime_ as a way for humans to tunnel through the Singularity unchanged. As far as I know, the bobble is phy…
A few people have pointed out that Sandor at the Zoo was more likely a reference to someone else, of course: ""The Zoo" etc. was a reference to Henry Spencer, who was known on Usenet for his especially clear posts. He posted from utzoo (University of Toronto Zoology.)"
This is a little concerning because it means there might be references to Archimedes Plutonium, Kibo and Elf Sternberg in there I might've missed.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not zombies, but loving slaves. People able to apply all of their creativity and problem–solving skills to any task given to them, but without much capacity for reflection or any kind of personal ambitions or desires.
Or ability to remember to feed, clean, or toilet themselves. It’s that hyper-focus that I suspect many of us have experienced, but without agency and permanent. Worse than slavery.
Lack of agency is right. No ability to request medical aid even when suffering crippling pain from a burst appendix.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I’ve read, cryonics seems like a massive scam pulled on rich people. The tissue damage in these frozen corpses is extensive and irreparable.
Then you obviously haven't read much about cryonics, which involves vitrification rather than freezing to avoid such tissue damage.
Well, I've read an article about some people getting flushed down the drain because the company that was supposed to keep them frozen kinda went out of business.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed. If you go in with a more open mind then you may find that there’s actually an interesting philosophical point to be examined and a decent story built around it.
Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed. Except half of Fire Upon the Deep was characters on the same planet but it was actually cool. The first two books are definitely among my favorite sci-fi of all time, the third one was a dud. My main gripe is that these three books all share the same trope that underpins one of the…
Does anyone know if he got started on another book in the series?
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
not quite the same, but Iain M. Banks is in my top 5, along with Vernor Vinge.
I'd put Banks in the Asimov/Stephenson tier at best. His ideas were brilliant enough to sustain a long series - but not one book in it actually makes for a good read . Neal Asher doesn't have anything like the same ambition, but Hilldiggers is a better Culture novel than any of the actual Culture novels if you actually want to read and enjoy it.
I am glad someone else has the same view point: Asimov and Stephenson are great hard sci-fi, but they can't write characters. Except Stephenson COULD, and did in Snow Crash and Diamong Age to some degree, but then stopped being interested in it. While VV had good characters in his books, even though I would argue he wasn't "excellent" at it either, and maybe Stephenson even surpassed VV in characters/story in Snow Crash.
I can't really judge Asimov - so many people stole from him that he just reads like War & Peace to me in the sense that it was probably awesome and novel at some point, but at this point it's just a little stale, even though Foundation was still cool...at least the first few books.
With that said, I don't put VV above Stephenson. Maybe above Gibson because I really appreciate the technical details, but not quite sure. To me VV, Stephenson, and Gibson are all the absolute top tier, at least in the sci fi realm. No one even comes close, as cool as some one offs by other authors, like Forever War, are.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an interview with Vinge from 2009 [0] which contains a screenshot [1] of him using Emacs with his home-brewed proto-Org-mode annotation system (which appears in parent's link). [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170215121054/http://www.norwes... [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170104130412/http://www.norwes...
Based on the modeline, it's just text-mode using RCS as version control. It must be a minor mode that he wrote.
Based on what I read in the annotations mentioned above, I didn't see any implication of software support for his special markup beyond using search etc basic text editing features.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
People wanted to read how Pham Nuwen defeated the Emergents, learn more about the Zones of Thought or see the Blight finally destroyed once and for all. No one wanted more Game of Dogs.
Well, I wanted more "Game of Dogs". But it turned out that I didn't want that much more.
I liked the dog stuff, although that might be because I read The Blabber before I got into the novels.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I like it better than Fire Upon the Deep but I do like both of them. I didn’t like A Deepness in the Sky as it was feeling kinda grindy like Dune . (I wish we could just erase Dune so people could enjoy all of Frank Herbert’s other novels of which I love even the bad ones)
Can you recommend a non-Dune Herbert book? I recall seeing Dosadi when I was a kid in the sci fi section of the library and just never picked it up. I generally like hard sci-fi and my main issue with Dune was that it went off into the weeds too many times.
I loved 'The Jesus Incident' [0], which he co-authored with Bill Ransom - when I read it as a teenager in the 80s, it felt so 'adult' compared to a lot of the other science fiction I had read to that point.
I later read the prequel and did not like it. I never read the third book in the trilogy.