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The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

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Re: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

#51

Post by duskwuff »

hinkley wrote: post #26
duskwuff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't touched just out of the fear that I wouldn't love it as much as ADITS... Should I? Don't. It's nowhere near as good as either of the previous books, and the ending leaves some important plot points unresolved.

I just read it a couple of years ago, missed the memo that there was a third book. It feels like book 3/4 but he has not finished the story and I worry if he ever will.

> It feels like book 3/4 but he has not finished the story

Worse: Children felt like the author stalling for time on the greater plot. Chekov's gun isn't just left unfired; the author takes it down, polishes it a bit, and puts it back on the mantle without firing a shot.

Assuming that it's still canon, The Blabber tells us how it ends, but there's some very interesting stuff in between we're still waiting for.

Re: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

#53

Post by steve1977 »

hinkley wrote: post #26
duskwuff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't touched just out of the fear that I wouldn't love it as much as ADITS... Should I? Don't. It's nowhere near as good as either of the previous books, and the ending leaves some important plot points unresolved.

I just read it a couple of years ago, missed the memo that there was a third book. It feels like book 3/4 but he has not finished the story and I worry if he ever will.

AFAIK he’s not of very good health unfortunately and won’t be writing any further books.

Re: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

#54

Post by ajmurmann »

steve1977 wrote: post #52

His books certainly belong those where “I would love to see this as a movie but I know I would hate the movie and be disappointed”. Some stories probably can only be told properly in written words, and that’s ok.

You never know. I thought this about my favorite short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I didn't think it was possible to turn it into a movie at all and yet Denis Villeneuve did an amazing job with Arrival which is based on the story.

Re: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

#55

Post by cubefox »

Vinge was one who very early recognized that the invention of artificial intelligence didn't just imply androids (as Asimov or Roddenberry imagined them) on roughly the level of humans, but rather the existence of a vastly superhuman species that would change the future completely.

In 1983 he wrote in the SF magazine Omni:

"We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between... so that the world remains intelligible."

Ten years later, in is his famous essay "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" he went into more detail and predicted the singularity to occur between 2005 and 2030: https://web.archive.org/web/20180410074243/http://mindstalk....

Re: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

#56

Post by duskwuff »

atombender wrote: post #45
le-mark wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note that the dogs/Tines aren’t telepathic but communicated via high frequency sound. The idea was exploring an entity that existed as a society of minds and how that would look from a practical perspective. There’s a story in the compilation discussed here that feature the Tines in another setting one may find interesting.

Ah, it's been a while. It doesn't change anything, though. They might as well have been telepathic, since it appeared they formed a sort of hive mind when close to each other.

> It doesn't change anything, though.

Quite the opposite. The rot13(ybat enatr enqvb pybnxf) are an important plot point.

Re: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

#57

Post by atombender »

duskwuff wrote: post #56
atombender wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, it's been a while. It doesn't change anything, though. They might as well have been telepathic, since it appeared they formed a sort of hive mind when close to each other.

> It doesn't change anything, though. Quite the opposite. The rot13(ybat enatr enqvb pybnxf) are an important plot point.

But that could have been "psychic signal jammers" for all we cared. It doesn't change the mechanics of the plot at all.

Re: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

#58

Post by duskwuff »

atombender wrote: post #57
duskwuff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't change anything, though. Quite the opposite. The rot13(ybat enatr enqvb pybnxf) are an important plot point.

But that could have been "psychic signal jammers" for all we cared. It doesn't change the mechanics of the plot at all.

> But that could have been "psychic signal jammers"

That isn't what I was referring to. You may have missed something important in your reading.

Re: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

#59

Post by CWuestefeld »

jrgoff wrote: post #33
saiya-jin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably just me, but it first book was such a schizophrenic experience. Loved every single bit of space part but couldn't care less about medieval cluster dog minds part, eventually grew bored of it and it felt disturbing. Especially when author thinks some minor medieval squabbles are equally important as the galactic space part, giving it same page count. Suffered till the end, and lost any motivation to continue…

I've seen others who felt similarly about the enjoyability of the space part vs the dog part. But for some reason I felt the opposite, the space part was alright but I didn't really connect with any of the characters or plot there much. But I loved the part on the dog planet, for me that world felt like he started with a question of "What might it look like if a pack animal achieved human-like level of intelligence?"…

I'm completely with you. I found the space parts a chore to read through to get back to the most interesting stuff. The whole "zones of thought" concept just seems an obvious device to allow Vinge's ideas to work.

By contrast, the thrill I got when I first realized that the dog hive mind was evolution's stab at an acoustic modem was fantastic, and I read through all of this aspect of the book with great wonder.

Re: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

#60

Post by FactualOrion »

hvcc65 wrote: post #19

Have to say Rainbows End is one of my favorites. It's got everything AR, VR, AI, Social media/belief circles, mass behavior manipulation, reverse aglng etc etc. I felt like I was looking into the near future.

In the same vein that 'True Names' covered the last 10-20 years with AI, Anonymity, cyber crime, hacking, and virtual reality, I think 'Rainbows End' is our next 10-20 years.
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