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A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

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

#71

Post by _jal »

rout39574 wrote: post #30
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"The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on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.

It was my impression that he was the first articulator of the singularity concept. Other than fashion, why do you think it's outdated? I consider Rainbow's End to be a pretty good picture of what it might be like to live through the singularity. Especially evocative: the kid at the end chipping a skill his (grandfather?) worked for a career to accumulate, using it for a weekend, and then discarding it.

> why do you think it's outdated?

I don't know if 'outdated' is the right word. Maybe just not that useful, except as mind-candy?

It is mostly a computationally-focused reformulation of the Rapture.

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

#72

Post by btown »

joe-collins wrote: post #64
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh I just recommended that some do go forward with a deepness in the sky, but read a fire upon the deep first because of the aforementioned content warnings. I think if I didn't already have some faith in the author I would have just stopped because the theming is so dark

It was definitely dark, and before I was halfway through I was desperate for the alien chapters just because all of the humans were just so damned miserable.

It’s almost like the way in which a society is described to you affects how engaged you are in their success… which is entirely the meta-textual point!

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

#73

Post by bitwize »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #57
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…

Deepness introduced me to the concept of software archaeology. I won't spoil it, but there's a really fun bit when a character, digging deeply into the bowels of software systems in this far-future human society, makes an observation about the basis for timekeeping in the oldest systems. The "focused" remind me of the mentats from the Dune universe, but less general purpose-- more like replicating feedback-based cont…

There's a meme phrase that applies quite literally to Focus, and has similar implications in the real world to those in the novel. That phrase is "weaponized autism".

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

#74

Post by JohnMashey »

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 Prof Kris Pister (smart dust), whose Dust Networks company I advised.) Second day, I took Vernor around the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for the morning to tour.

He said he was doing a sequel to Deepness in the Sky, about Pham & Anne's battle with the Emergents (obviously winning, given Fire Upon the Deep). Years later, I asked him what happened, as the sequel never appeared. He said it was too depressing(i.e., for those who thought Deepness dark, imagine the portrayal of the Emergents worlds.)

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

#75

Post by philipswood »

I loved his "Tatja Grimm's World" for its depiction of a human of "superhuman" intelligence.

There's a bit of dialog where the one character tells the other about information theory in a sentence - and the other groks it like Shannon did.

In the same genre is "Understand" by Ted Chiang.

For me good science fiction (if it's not for the physics or math) is often about the believable alien or superhuman intelligence.

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

#76

Post by bitwize »

kabdib wrote: post #58
dsm9000 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This scene in the book is maybe one of the earliest examples of fuzzing being used n fiction :-) ?

Fuzzing was used in Thomas J Ryan's The Adolescence of P-1 , circa 1977 (in an attack against some IBM mainframe's supervisor). (TAoP1 is a much-overlooked example of . . . well, I wouldn't call it cyberpunk, but definitely counter-culture computing. In the IBM world, I think that means you refuse to wear a tie. It's technically dated -- think modems-and-megabytes -- but still kind of fun).

Vernor Vinge did write True Names, which is often considered a foundational cyberpunk text (even predating Gibson).

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

#77

Post by blincoln »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #57
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…

Deepness introduced me to the concept of software archaeology. I won't spoil it, but there's a really fun bit when a character, digging deeply into the bowels of software systems in this far-future human society, makes an observation about the basis for timekeeping in the oldest systems. The "focused" remind me of the mentats from the Dune universe, but less general purpose-- more like replicating feedback-based cont…

I also really appreciated the software archaeology, and the projection forward of what were then common ways of communicating on the internet (Usenet, etc.) into the distant future where they might actually make sense again due to the transmission times and bandwidth for interstellar messages.

I definitely recommend both. I didn't realize he'd written a third in the series, but I'll be giving that a look.

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

#78

Post by duskwuff »

undersuit wrote: post #65
ineedasername wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked Children of The Sky, but in terms of plot it seems clearly meant to be a bridge to a next book, and seemed to suffer from the "middle book" syndrome of trilogies, losing a lot of the faster pace of the first book as it slowly builds up the details and tension to be resolved in the next book.

There is a short story "The Babbler" set after Children but I don't think there will be another full book.

"The Blabber" (not Babbler!) was actually written some time before "A Fire Upon The Deep". Some of the details in Blabber aren't fully consistent with the later novels; it's best seen as a first draft of the Zones of Thought universe.

In an interview, Vinge has stated his hope to continue Children, but without much conviction: https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/reprint-in-dee...

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

#79

Post by rsync »

jvanderbot wrote: post #63
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…

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.

Agreed that _Deepness in the Sky_ is better than _Fire Upon the Deep_.

However, in my opinion, _Fire Upon the Deep_ should be the better book and has, in many ways, deeper and more thought-provoking concepts at play.

The problem is, none of them get fully explained or resolved.

The book wraps up the character driven story arcs and the much deeper, conceptual story arcs involving non-human actors just peter out ...

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

#80

Post by jf »

amosj wrote: post #70
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…

This is an extraordinary book and one of my top 5 among many a science fiction novel. "You want a deepness that endures, a deepness that [we] can depend on? there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever" it's got VR headsets, distributed computers - hacking plays a major role. Only way it could be better is if I could forget the plot so I could read it again

I’ve enjoyed each reread almost as much as the first. What a book!
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