The Hypertext annotated version of “A Fire Upon the Deep” (1993)
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I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today.
At the time of publishing, Vinge was one of the very few people who had a good grasp of the limits of computation and molecular nanotechnology were. Up until that point in mainstream SF writing, highly advanced technology was more akin to magic, even in "hard" SF. Aside from FTL tech (necessary for a novel with galactic scope), and the Zones of Thought (an artifice to help tell stories centering on people), Vinge sticks close to what is physically possible.
The prologue alone is packed with realistic details that was exceptional for its time.
Within the genre of Science Fiction there is a sub-genre of Hard Science Fiction in which it's considered more important that it could actually work. Fire Upon The Deep probably wouldn't generally be considered at all Hard because it has Faster-than-Light travel, which is one of the things you generally would rule out of Hard SF because of how conservation rules in Physics work, if you can do FtL then you can do time travel (because space and time being the same kind of thing), and then what's your story?
"The Martian" a novel subsequently made into a movie is pretty realistic, turns out the setup (a storm on Mars separates Mark from the rest of the crew) is the least realistic part of that entire story.
If that's a bit too realistic, some of Liu Cixin's shorts are pretty wild while remaining down to earth about what's practical. "The Wandering Earth" for example.
Greg Egan is very Hard, but you may find you think Greg's technically possible stuff seems harder to believe than faster-than-light travel which isn't possible at all. The Clockwork Rocket couldn't happen here, but it's set in a universe with a different dimensional symmetry, the Amalgam stuff is set in this universe, but with a society far more advanced than ours.
But then if it turns out "realistic"/ "believable" counts like Star Wars style laser blasters and stuff then I dunno, lots of things, maybe you'd like Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch stuff, (or indeed Iain M Banks' Culture novels) which aren't Hard at all.
This one follows a common pattern where it has a single piece of magic (in this case FTL travel via magical portals) and everything else is reasonably hard. Another example would be pretty much anything by Peter Hamilton (also an aficionado of magical portals, sometimes with trains).
Banks also has a magical FTL portal novel, actually (The Algebraist); they're quite popular.
In Three-Body Problem as I recall there's some pretty hand-waving stuff about sophons in particular. They're basically a MacGuffin which is used to explain whatever is necessary to the plot so as to have the Trisolarans able to interfere in Earth's affairs essentially at whim yet not obviate the invasion itself. So that's not very Hard SF.
Or sometimes it's the way something is set up in a particular way, only to be abandoned when it becomes inconvenient. For example, when they come up with a plan to set up a trap using monomolecular filament, it is specifically stated that it can only be made in that shape. But literally one page later, when the question of how to tie it to something without cutting through that something comes up, it's immediately dismissed by the same character saying that they can also make sheets of that material, so it can be used as a backstop. Either take is believable per se, but they're clearly mutually exclusive.
On the whole, the science in Three-Body Problem kinda felt like gratuitous insertion of random (and ften misunderstood) pieces of popular science into the story as a deus ex machina.
Weir's "The Martian" was good fun and felt believable. Most of Stephenson's "Seveneves", too, for me.
Enjoy! :)
In all-to-typical hard sci-fi fashion, you don't really care about any of the characters, but the concepts are truly mind-bending (what looks like a circle to creatures on the surface is an oval to an outside observer due to the extreme magnetic environment; extreme gravity leads to ultra-fast metabolism; etc).
* https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.sf.written/c/pbuT5Xty9Q...
Contrast it with say The Cold Equations which as I recall has FTL and everything else is bog standard physics and yet it was still criticized as unrealistic from an engendering standpoint. You can’t make that kind of criticism of A Fire Upon the Deep because everything is handwaved.
However, if you read carefully, and consider some of the consequences, it becomes clear that this is not a natural rule of the universe, but something technological, created by presumably one of the first civilizations to become highly technological as a defense against what would otherwise be a fairly vicious universe with constant high-tech civilizations fighting each other with frightfully powerful weapons, and perhaps a hint of compassion towards the not-yet-high-tech civilizations. That's why it can be manipulated with certain keys, in ways that would not be possible (lots of FTL signalling) if the Zones were truly a fundamental rule of the universe. (Notice also how the super-high-tech civilizations don't understand how the Zones work or why they exist, which if there were purely natural seems unlikely.) The Powers tend to last 10 years probably because that's how long it takes to either be accepted by the highly advanced civilization(s) that live in the galactic cores, or how long it takes to work out how to move there despite the Zones being in the way, or both. This creates an entrance gate against things like the main threat of the novel getting into your high-tech civ.
I don't deny I'm extrapolating a bit, but there's a lot of hints, especially if you add A Deepness in the Sky to the mix. Pham was probably sent from this central civ to fight A Fire Upon the Deep's main threat, if you read where he came from. The entire planet of A Deepness in the Sky is clearly from a super-high tech civ far beyond what Earth's depth could support, but it's from closer to the galaxy's core, not farther, which is why Pham went in to the galaxy's core after that story rather than out looking for more intelligent life. He in fact found it, or it found him, if you prefer.
Once you see there's a probably-even-beyond-Transcend civilization living under the Zones of Thought it mostly comes together.
One correction: the Zones impact BOTH the speed of computation AND the laws of physics (whether FTL travel and communication are physically possible). They also make pretty explicit in Fire Upon the Deep that mechanical failure rates of certain complex systems (especially automation) increase rapidly as you approach the Slow Zone. And then within the Slow Zone they increase again as you approach the Unthinking Depths.
It is made explicit -- as you note -- that the Zones of thought are controlled somehow by the Countermeasure (or some Control System it speaks to). It is also clear that this system do not like the Blight and actively opposes it.
One other interpretation that struck me is that the Control System may have put in place the Zones of Thought simply because stars become so dense as one approaches the Galactic Core. Forcing the Transcend to the Galactic edges limits the rate at which any change can spread and allows for civilizations (and the System itself) to respond to threats such as the Blight.
A high-tech civilization in the core is IIRC spelled out in A Deepness in the Sky because the planet there comes from the core. On its own that means nothing, but combined with A Fire upon the Deep it means there's more down there than the Upper Beyond realizes.
Gating civilizations entering it is a bit of my own interpolation. One alternative is that powers simply die out after 10 years because there is some reason they need to advance to the next level, but they're locked out by the Zones.
"BOTH the speed of computation AND the laws of physics (whether FTL travel and communication are physically possible)"
My read is that that is cause and effect, though, not two effects. The amount of computation you are allowed is limited; super high tech becomes impossible, then FTL, then our tech, then even any system that performs simple and meaningful mechanical computations. Even a car engine can be viewed as performing computations to stay running.
This is a particularly sci-fi element. I don't think it's immediately obvious how to separate the universe into "meaningful" computation and the sort of computation a stationary rock is "performing" as its atoms jiggle around, such that one can distinguish at the level of the laws of physics themselves between a rock and a car engine or other simple mechanical device. Then again, I'm not a superintelligent civilization with nearly unbounded resources and deeper access to the laws of physics than I have. (Arguably, under the circumstances, it could simply be an enormous computation of its own, in which they aren't doing it via clever rewrites of the universe, but basically by executive fiat, or, to put it another way, the standard may literally be "I know it when I see it" for some sufficiently intelligent "judge", rather than any sort of physical law.)
It sounds like what you’re asking boils down to “is entropy a real thing, or is it subjective / relative to our purposes and measurements.” And that the Zones essentially work by enforcing an “entropy quota” on things according to where they are in the galaxy- things in the Slow Zones must be very high-entropy (and somehow are forced to become so if they weren’t before) and things in the Transcend can be low-entropy in ways we couldn’t currently imagine.
As for the FTL limit, I always thought the causality is the reverse - that compute power that the Beyond has is because their computers run on the same physics that allows FTL travel.
If FTL was driven solely by compute, then you'd never have a clear boundary in the first place - just shorter and shorter hyperspace jumps, perhaps until the point where they become infeasible (because the amount of time it takes to make one, including compute, is more than just travelling there). But the way the book describes it, the boundary is qualitative, and FTL drives plainly don't activate once in the Slow Zone. Ditto for FTL comms.
0th level obviousness: weight is at a premium on the ship, yet there is a closet with space for a small person and a solid closet door that makes it a hiding location. If there is a need for storage space, netting is a much more sensible protection mechanism than a door.
There are literally dozens of similar objections, including those made by Tom Goddard, the author, who explained that he was writing specifically at the direction of John W. Campbell, the editor.
And not only is it completely unrealistic in order to make the point of the title but everything about the characters is so 1950s feeling that it feels incredibly dated.
I never liked this very much, because the whole "we can only take exactly this mass, and an extra 60kg or whatever will doom us" thing is such an obvious design and/or process flaw. If you really are dependent on that (though I don't think the author made the case that they were, convincingly), you need to ensure it (by, for instance, weighing the craft); it's ridiculously optimistic to think that someone never accidentally leaves a piece of equipment lying around, say.
And even if you accept the absurd premise, it still doesn't work; the stowaway would presumably have used consumables (oxygen, if nothing else), and if you're that weight constrained you won't be carrying excess consumables anyway, so you're still doomed even if you lose the stowaway.
If anything, it's the same thing that bothers me about some 'softer' sci-fi; take a story you want to tell, and construct some completely implausible rules to make it work. To add insult to injury here, it's... not a very good story, IMO. Also, I believe Clarke hinted at a similar scenario in Islands in the Sky, published two years previously, though it didn't actually _happen_ there.
That said, what allows us to make such criticisms is an understanding of the physics and economics involved. We can’t reason about what say Iain Banks’s Culture is going to do on economic grounds because things aren’t fleshed our enough to make such judgements. Bat at least we can reason about distances involved. Even softer in say the Star Wars universe economics and physics is such an afterthought that we can’t objectively judge if say the Death Star was a sound use of resources or a pointless vanity project. Worse, because hyperspace lanes are so hand-wavy we can’t even reason about movement speeds and and distance.
I enjoyed tremendously _A Deepness in the Sky_ and continue to find the ideas interesting and thought-provoking - especially the localizer networks, etc.
Based on that I read _Fire Upon the Deep_ and found it very enjoyable and interesting throughout, but then deeply disappointing at the end. I was expecting explanations and resolutions of the deep background events and actors that were shaping the story and none were given.
If you read carefully, and make a couple of reasonable deductions, I think you can come to mostly satisfactory conclusions. There's room for a couple of different interpretations of what's in the center of the galaxy, but not all that many, really.
I have read both novels, but on that reading do not feel I could be sure of understanding what's at the galactic center at all. In fact, I recall feeling puzzled and wishing it was explained, much like the parent poster. I'd love to hear some deductions and to find out what hints in the book I missed.
Edit: I see you also wrote this comment - very informative, thanks! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24869467
I now no longer solely purchase Kindle versions of books that have some characteristic I value, and I think Vinge would solidly approve of that stance. Not sure about the reaction of the Blight, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-ki...
It took me a few back-and-forths with Amazon's customer support to get them to even acknowledge that this had happened. Most of the reps I communicated with weren't even aware that Amazon had sold ebooks before the Kindle. They wanted to just give me the Kindle version of the regular eBook, but grudgingly gave me a refund instead, because I insisted on either the full annotated version in any form or a refund (I already own two copies of the regular book in paper form).
Anyone interested in Vinge's annotation scheme can get a sense of it from this interview with Norwescon [1], which includes a screenshot of his working draft for The Children of the Sky. Short answer: he writes in Emacs, and uses a convention to incorporate reviewer comments, annotations, and his own tags intermingled with the actual text, and has a set of text processing tools for navigating it.
Edit: I just remembered a bit of trivia some readers might find interesting: there was a whole minor character he cut fairly late in writing, who survives in fragments 'commented out' in the annotated version. I think it might have been one of Ravna's fellow librarians at Relay, and he cut the character to streamline the storytelling. I think there might have been notes from his early readers supporting the decision too.
[1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...
I have never read such an apt analogy for the what remains of "purchased" content after the DRM servers go away.
"Reminded that the Microsoft ebook store closes next week. The DRM'd books will stop working.
I cannot believe that sentence.
"The books will stop working."
I keep saying it and it sounds worse each time."
- Rob Donoghue
[1] https://twitter.com/rdonoghue/status/1144011630197522432?s=2...
Brad Templeton wrote about it: "I believe this CD is now a piece of history, as the world's first major eBook project using current fiction. At the time it was the largest anthology of current fiction ever published in one volume, and it may retain that title even today. Prior ventures were small or featured either unpublished writers or public domain works. This anthology featured novels that in most cases had not yet come out in paperback."
“These directories contain the "raw" form of the anthology, which is to say RTF, GIF and JPEG files, along with a few ASCII files. They are found in the online version, and in a special directory on the CD for people without MS-Windows or a Macintosh.” [read.me]
The format description for the .txt annotations is at: "hugo-nebula anthology 1993/hugo/novel/vinge/exnotes.txt"
To take a first quick look at the notes:
unzip hugo.zip
cd 'hugo-nebula anthology 1993/hugo/novel/vinge/'
rg '^\^ ' # or grep -rn '^\^ ' .The code I used is here: https://gist.github.com/bocajnotnef/f3f43acc065a2a1a4dd433b8...
It's pretty hacky, but you end up with a single HTML file with Vinge's notes in a side margin, with numbers and everything. There's probably ways that the title bits could be improved, but I'm too lazy to fix it now that I have the actual HTML file.
Good luck! Let me know if you have questions, I may be able to help.
It looks like some files are missing from the photos directory, or maybe the index is just wrong.
Also, it was lucky I had A Deepness In The Sky on my e-reader as I had no idea how long it was and it would have been far more intimidating in its physical form!
Vinge retired from lecturing compsci in 2000. Deepness was 1999. Children was 2011, was competent, but lacked almost all the clever insights of the previous novels. I wish he'd go back.
Oh well, he gave us several very good novels and 2 great ones. He deserves a break!
I think it can happen in some circumstances though. For example, Dilbert still feels largely locked in some 1990s PacBell cubicle land.
I feel I know the stories well, so it's disconcerting that maybe I missed something. I'll keep an eye out if I read them again.
Personally, I think Deepness is the better work, but Fire is pretty good too. If you read Deepness first then, because it was written second, at least one character may seem a little off for reasons that will become obvious.
[0] The characters we follow the most are human anyway.
The actual On/Off star was presumably powering a zone changing device of some kind - antigravity technology had remained working for millions of years which made me think it was in a bubble of High Beyond or Transcendent zone levels (like the ending of AFUTD).
Did we every get an in universe or author-commentary explanation confirming the theories about the On/Off? I always figured it was some high-tech artifact based on Beyond or Transcend tech that was going to remain mostly unexplained?
- Deepness in the Sky: super mustache twirling, one of the worst.
- Fire upon the Deep: I consider the blight to be twirling. Why treat lower civ that way? AFAIK, for mustache twirling.
- Iain M Banks: lotsa mustache twirling. Surface details and Player of Games in particular. My view of the culture AI is that they are constantly sarcastically toying with humans, and are thus secretly twirling.
- Fifth Season (Jemisin): no twirling. One of the most balanced novel on that front, every faction has believable reason to act the way they do.
- Book of the New Sun: no twirling, but OMG, stop what you're doing a good read these books! The tone and story was just perfect for me. Sure, it looks like a weird cross of SF and fantasy, but there is no fantasy at all in the novel in reality. Book of New Urth is, in comparison, just merely very good.
- Ancillary Justice (Lecki): some small twirling, but justified since it's an empire: absolute power corrupt. The twirling is commensurate with having a empress as head of state. She even becomes mostly sympathetic later.
- Left hand of Darkness: not only no twirling, but the power struggle is extremely believable. Great illustration of an interesting alien civilisation. Great for both world-building and character building. Another of those stop everything and just read it now novel.
- Roadside Picnic: no twirling. The conflicts and abuse of power are all believable.
- Collapsing Empire (Scalzi): lot of mustache twirling. Not DotS level, but not that far off. Plus, there is a plot point in the first novel that made me quit reading for a week. Incomprehensible because it was all of unbelievable (given the multiple characters behaviour before), idiotic and had zero impact on the rest of the book... so why write it. (Page 260 in my paperback version, for the record)
I think both the Hell faction in Surface Details and the empire in Player of Games have reasons to be as nasty as they are; they're somewhat internally consistent, in that the social stability of both the Hell faction societies and the empire are dependent on the nastiness. There are, unfortunately, real life examples of this. Veppers is a bit gratuitous, granted.
Hunting down the OOBII comes down to the escaped personae having data that could be used against it by another power.
(Sure, it's revenging past wrongs... on humans, some of whom are far, far descendants of the original perpetrators, and none of whom have any idea what they're even been punished for.)
It works best to read them both, in publication order (aFutD first), because you only see the second book's layer of dramatic irony with that background. More on this in Jo Walton's review: https://www.tor.com/2008/07/19/deepnessreview/
Also the first book is shorter, and if you're like "meh" about it then I doubt you'd be into the second either.
I'd say that the barrier to entry for both is the same, though: Vinge's writing, while rich, is also quite hard for reading, in a sense that you have to go slow to parse things correctly. FOTD has a bit more action in it that speeds things up sometimes, so it's an easier read. But if you could read and enjoy it, you shouldn't have troubles with DITS.
A Deepness in the Sky, took more than one reading to appreciate as much as the original.
Vinge's later work, Rainbows End, has some interesting ideas about AR integrated into everyday life.