Screenshot: "A Fire Upon the Deep" sequel (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Screenshot: "A Fire Upon the Deep" sequel (2011)

norwescon.org

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If you're a Vinge fan, the annotated version of A Fire Upon the Deep is a great find (available on Kindle); it has his emacs notes (linked in-text) and you can watch the characters develop, his editor suggest improvements, etc. Looks like his system hasn't changed all that much, either.

Emacs is suggesting improvements? I want that extension!

Clippy for Emacs?

Argh, the "special edition" appears to no longer be available on Amazon!

Odd, I can not find anything for "Vinge" in the kindle store. I wonder how well this kindle thing really works :-/ I only have the Android Kindle app though.

I haven't interacted with him much, but Vinge was a speaker at this year's main North American AI conference (AAAI), and was impressively engaged. Unlike many famous speakers he didn't just fly in for his 2 hours and fly out again, but attended a whole bunch of sessions for several days, and he was asking pretty intelligent questions. Mostly normal questions about the specific research at hand, too, not singularity-related questions or "how will this research help the robot revolution". ;-) Seemed like a very down-to-earth guy; I don't think most of the researchers who got asked a question by him realized that he was a famous sci-fi author at the time.

Well, he was a professor of computer science (San Diego State University: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/) No surprise he asked smart questions!

A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favourite books ever. It successfully combines hard sf and space opera and doesn't get bogged down in either. It is large like many of its space opera kin but the plotting is such you never feel like you are slogging through fluff. And the technologies and physics are well thought out and their effects on the universe at large are well presented. The aliens in it are probably the most interesting since Niven's Puppeteers.

I'm a huge Vinge fan, but I was really underwhelmed by Rainbow's End. (Was it aimed at the YA market and I didn't notice?) Hope CotS is better.

I thought Rainbow's End was slightly disappointing, too.

Of course, that mean it was probably only in the top 10 SciFi books of the year instead of indisputably the book of the year.

I understand the sentiment... but completely disagree.

_Rainbows End_ is less fun than his other novels, but it deals directly with near-future issues in a way that only a few other SF authors are doing well (Stross, Stephenson, recent Gibson, and who else?). It changed how I think---much more than did, eg, _A Deepness in the Sky_. In terms of relevance to the times, I'd rank it next to _True Names_.

True Names is perhaps the most underrated SciFi story of all time. From 1981, and hasn't aged at all.

Wooooo! I've always thought of the proper title for this hypothetical book as "Sky fire" (to bring it full circle, you see). "Sky children" makes me think it's a stealth quadrilogy. Sooner or later it's got to cycle. "Children of Fire?"

Does anyone know what text editor that is? Emacs?

Yes.

Now, the title is just mean: I assumed they are making a movie now!

But, oh well, the fact that Vinge uses Emacs is interesting although not surprising given he was a CS teacher.

Interesting that he reads Slashdot, and not one of the more modern news sites.

Also, ugh eugh Papyrus in the site header, argh.

He only says "places like slashdot". Though in my experience there are plenty of smart geeks and "hackers" who haven't even heard of sites like HN or Reddit. It always surprises me, but sites like HN certainly seem to primarily attract the progressive "eye on the ball" types who are into trying out new sites. The traffic to some of the older, staid, more conservative sites indicates there's still a hardcore of people enjoying them.

Slashdot has a much bigger population of "normal" developers and engineers, I think, especially from big corporate places that aren't Google, and areas of engineering that aren't software engineering. That's sometimes useful in the comments area; there's plenty of junk, but there are also sometimes good comments from people who work at places like IBM/HP/Boeing/Motorola/Exxon, which is less common here. I think there's probably also more scientists of the non-computer variety.

Papyrus is the font? What is so bad about it, it seems fitting for a fantasy context? Which one would be better? (I'm obviously not a designer).

New Vinge, new Richard Morgan and maybe new Neal Stephenson (depending on how you count The Mongoloid) all in 2011.

The Morgan & Stephenson books might be fantasy and historical fiction (?), but if everything lives up to its promise this could be the best year for SciFi/Fantasy since 2000, when Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" beat Stephenson "Cryptonomicon" for the Hugo Award.

What formatting system is that?

Initial Reaction to the site: "Ahhhhhh! The Papyrus!"

I'm really excited about the sequel. I read "A Fire Upon the Deep" only a year or two ago. Amazing book. Not sure where he'll go from the end of it but should be interesting.

Make sure to read "A Deepness in the Sky" first. It's a prequel to "A Fire Upon the Deep", and also a Hugo award winner.

love the insight of all the notes and use of emacs!

This blog post is nearly a year old. Why is it coming up now?

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