A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992) | Hacker News Reader

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

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297 pointscybernautique171 comments

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 of thinking.

At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of philosophical antipositivism [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and description that's familiar to yourselves... even if in so doing this becomes more art than science? Is creative translation ethical if it establishes power dynamics that would not be there otherwise? There's a mind-blowing meta-narrative to this as well when you think about how the reader should interpret the book with that question in mind, though to say anything more would delve into spoilers. And lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope.

While technically it's a prequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Content warnings for mind control and assault (though they're handled thoughtfully IMO). With Asimov's Foundation being adapted for TV (also recommend, if for the visuals alone), if you want even more sci-fi that speaks to societal rise and decline, and the lengths to which people will manipulate others in the name of control and survival, this is a must-read.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism

+1. A Deepness in the Sky is one of the most underrated works of speculative fiction that I've read. It is a masterwork of plotting and character work. A Fire Upon the Deep has some great ideas and some characters that have stuck with me, but I think Deepness is a far superior work. Its brilliance is that it has the structure of a great work of fiction but you can basically just read it as straight pulp science fiction and have a fun time.

I rate it 6/5

I'd rate it a 5/7 book

I recently read Fire Upon the Deep and I think I'd agree that Vinge is great at speculative fiction. I hadn't looked at the publish/copyright date when I borrowed the ebook from my library.

I was shocked just now to see it's a thirty year old book. Zero signs or hints of it, at least to me. The concept that computers/AIs can be affected by the region of space they're in is a nifty idea I don't think I've seen before, and one can find some parallels today (for example, Siri now on a sufficiently new enough iPhone isn't completely useless, but much more capable when within range of a data connection.)

My only complaint about FUtD was that some elements of the plot, namely stuff going on in the planet, felt drawn out and slow.

Thank you both for recommending another one of his books.

You can kinda tell when FutD originates by the fact that it has, basically, a galactic Usenet. Granted, it's justified by the setting, but still.

It is a bit of a slow burn.

But with these books, Vernor Vinge has now become one of my favorite authors, up there with Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, David Drake, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle (although I don’t care for Niven and Pournelle when they work together).

Larry Niven has introduced me to some new authors that I’ve liked, through his “Man-Kzin Wars” series, but I haven’t read enough of their works to put them in my “favorite authors” category, at least not yet.

Piers Anthony is also great, but I’ve only read his fantasy novels, so I can’t speak for where he would rate on the SF scale. I also wouldn’t consider Edgar Rice Burroughs to be SF. Same for Arthur Conan Doyle.

And Orson Scott Card is just plain weird. I love his work, but I find it hard to recommend to others.

James S. A. Corey is a pseudonym of two authors, so I don’t feel like I can include it on the top list above. But I do love what I’ve seen of their work.

Ironically, while I love the Dune movie, I haven’t actually read any of Frank Herbert’s work. I look forward to seeing the new Dune movie as well, and then maybe I’ll go back and read some of the novels.

I absolutely hated, loathed, and despised Aldous Huxley. The closest I ever came to suicide was while I was forced to read his book. The second closest was when I was forced to read “Madame Bovary”. Both were a result of a sophomore level English class I was forced to take in order to get my degree.

I don’t think I’ve actually read any of Roald Dahl’s novels, same with Cory Doctorow, Harlan Ellison, and Neil Gaiman.

And I think I’ll stop there. I’m seeing too many names that I recognize on the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science-fiction_author... but which I don’t remember reading any of their work. So, I’ve got a few decades of reading to catch up on.

I liked Madame Bovary so much :( I did read it in my late 20s though. It's such a slick book, I loved the... style/aesthetics. True nothing happens in it, but still. I guess I was going through a more lyrically motivated reading phase at the time.

The classics are classics for a reason. Huxley and Flaubert are both wonderful authors, but all the joy was sucked out reading their works when I was forced to do it. I don't know why. Personal failing, maybe.

I thought Herbert's non-_Dune_ works were very good while also being very disturbing. I read _The White Plague_ in my teens and am reminded of it whenever I read about modern gene drive technology. The ConSentiency stories and books have stayed with me to this day, and I periodically re-read them. Both _Hellstrom's Hive_ and _The Santaroga Barrier_ are fantastic utopias crossed over with deep horror; I love them but can't bring myself to re-read them!

Everybody's different. I can't stand Asimov or Clarke or Drake or Heinlein, despite reading nearly all of their respective science fiction oeuvres, but that Ursula Le Guin isn't in your top five is a damn shame. _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is one of my favorite books, and _The Dispossessed_ primed a political conversion completed by Iain Banks' Culture novels years later. Le Guin and Banks are probably my two favorite authors now, and in that order, with Bradbury and Adams a very close third and fourth.

I'm so tired of trilogies and tetralogies and so on and so forth. I wish authors would just finish the damn story. I think that's why I like Le Guin and Banks so much. You can read out of order and it's no big deal. In fact, I read _The Tombs of Atuan_ before _A Wizard of Earthsea_, and all of Le Guin's Hanish stories are stand-alone. The same goes for Banks' Culture novels, where I started with _Excession_ and back-tracked to _Consider Phelebas_ and read in release order (mostly).

Anyway, I heartily recommend giving the literary fiction another chance some day. There's some really amazing stuff out there that doesn't happen in space.

Besides the SF content, A Deepness in the Sky is also one of the very very few books that have completely disgusted me about a fictional character, namely in this book, what happened to Qiwi and Kira Pen Lisolet. I had to stop reading a few times. For the writing to steer impressions this much alone this book is 11/10.

That aspect of it destroyed the rereadability of the book for me. I tried reading it again recently because I loved the part of the plot that dealt with the spiders, but I ended up skipping over the chapters with the emergents because I knew where thing were going and didn't want to re-experience it.

Still, that's credit to the author that he was able to write something powerful enough to evoke such a response.

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!

I am a little confused. Which of the books are you and GP talking about that is so dark?

They are talking about A Deepness in the Sky. The good guys lose pretty hard and suffer as a result.

Same here. I would have put down and thrown away Deepness if I hadn't read Fire Upon The Deep first and trusted the author. I'm glad I finished it because of the parts about the spiders and Pham Nuwen's past was really interesting. But the "present-day" emergents story line is dark... I did not enjoy reading those parts.

Pulling this point to the TL;DR top:

A Deepness in the Sky (1999) is a prequel set 20k years earlier than A Fire Upon the Deep (1992).

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 control systems. I have a back-of-the-mind worry that our society will end up with a class of citizens working in "focused" roles powering "intelligent" systems.

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".

If we're going in this direction, you might find enjoyable the book Echopraxia (and its predecessor, Blindsight). Without spoiling too much, it features a group of people that pushed their cognitive wetware and hardware to the point they can't even communicate with normal humans anymore.

The character in Blindsight didn't push anything, they lost half their brain to a bioweapon.

I wasn't talking about the protagonist.

Who else doesn't communicate? The vampire isn't a candidate for having done anything to themselves.

Ok, so specifically, I meant the Bicameral Order from Echopraxia.

The protagonist is a synthesist - whose sole job is to translate the incomprehensible in-language of the augmented scientists to mission control

They speak sensible english.

It's mentioned that they're actually speaking a creole that's been translated and simplified to english for the (baseline) reader.

I've read Blindsight, but wasn't aware of Echopraxia. I'll look for it.

One common disappointment I have with sci-fi is how often AIs or alien intelligence are so close to human intelligence. In the Star Trek universe, every alien species is essentially humanoid with some added prosthetic and makeup. This is understandable in a weekly TV show with a tight schedule and budget. But I've read lots of books where the aliens or AIs not only act human, they think and reason like humans. What a boring waste!

There was a lot to like about Blindsight, but I particularly appreciated the completely alien life forms and their interpretation of broadcasts coming from Sol.

Echopraxia will not disappoint you, then.

And along the lines of good portrayal of non-human intelligence, I can also recommend Children of Time, and its sequel, Children of Ruin. Both deal with Earth animal species getting uplifted and left to create their own civilizations.

We've observed perhaps the closest thing to alien intelligence in the form of intelligent cephalopods -- like squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish. What surprises me about octopuses is how, despite a brain structure that diverged from our lineage perhaps billions of years ago and is vastly different from ours (they have a small central brain and enormously innervated tentacles each with its own local processing), they manifest what we readily recognize as affection and contempt for their human caretakers. They will nuzzle a favored human with their tentacles, and squirt water at a disliked human through their siphon. They do not need to be trained to do this. Either they are capable of experiencing emotional bonds broadly similar to ours and our terrestrial pets', or they are very, very good at faking it.

I didn't use to think this way, but now if we ever met an alien species, it wouldn't surprise me if we had enough cognitive and emotional common ground to establish meaningful relations provided they are carbon-based lifeforms or analogous.

In the end, it all comes down to food and comfort.

I can't imagine a life form that won't look fondly upon another life form that helps them get their preferred food, and helps limit or avoid discomfort.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Remember the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs? That goose was providing but the farmer got greedy. In real life there tons of stories of people being attacked by animals they fed and sheltered for years.

I highly recommend the books "Octopus and Squid: the Soft Intelligence" by Jacques Yves-Costeau and "Other Minds: the Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness" by Peter Godfrey-Smith. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_...

Alan Dean Forrester's book series about the Humanx Commonwealth is an interesting take on the notion of very alien aliens being friendly. To the point where, in that setting, humans have formed a federation with sapient insects, with the two species having colonies on each others' worlds, a shared religion, law enforcement for federal matters, and military.

It's so hard to say more without spoilers, but Deepness plays with this trope in a way that is both satisfying and may actually improve your enjoyment of other sci-fi works!

Also along similar lines is Alastair Reynolds' Diamond Dogs short story.

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.

Within that context, The title "Programmer-at-Arms" is the absolutely positively coolest three-word string I've encountered in English Language so far :)

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 ...

Fire has the most breathtaking, hooking first chapter of any book I’ve read.

A Fire upon the Deep is more flawed and uneven, but correspondingly more ambitious and thought-provoking. To me both are easily among the top 5 sci-fi novels ever written. I wish Vinge would keep writing more about Pham Nuwen's adventures. And to the grandparent poster's point, there are far more dimensions to A Deepness in the Sky than the one about communicating with alien cultures (the Focused is just one example). Both books are brilliantly multi-faceted, though the Tines World is a slog.

In 2007, Vinge told me he was planning to write story of Pham & Anne's crusade against the Emergents ... a few years later, when that hadn't appeared, I asked him about it ... he said it was too depressing. (People found Deepness dark, now imagine portrayal of the Emergents' worlds, even though they obviously get defeated, given Fire.)

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!

> I would argue that Deepness is best read first

I strongly recommend the publication order instead. Deepness ought to work standalone, but you'll be missing dramatic irony.

The dramatic irony is highly overrated. Deepness before Fire is way more enjoyable.

Read Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster" to see one of the major inspirations for Black Mirror, and a character similar to Elon Musk. Full text here:

https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-...

Also everyone should read Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" to understand a plausible outcome of the technological change we are witnessing today.

It's a bittersweet book, about being a small human in a world where the value of individual creative efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer might of automation and vast collaboration and technological accumulation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

You will recognize Pokemon Go, and many other things that happened after the book was published (2006). Great foresight.

Wikipedia: Vernor Vinge is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and perhaps the first to present a fictional "cyberspace" (in his novella True Names).

By the way, Adam Back (probably Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto) has referenced the True Names novella in interviews when explaining why Satoshi Nakamoto remains pseudonymous. So Vinge influenced that, too.

>It's a bittersweet book, about being a small human in a world where the value of individual creative efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer might of automation and vast collaboration and technological accumulation.

I also hold, strongly and somewhat idiosyncratically, that it would work quite well as a Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki film. (Chew on that for a minute, hahah.) (EDIT: So much so that I did, at one point, badly mock-up a poster for it: https://imgur.com/a/S96hTSV)

RE is phenomenally underrated, not just because of its prescience, but also because of the way that it's simultaneously accessible and layered. It's apropos that Pokemon-like entities show up in the story since, like the original Pokemon games, it's a relatively simple and straightforward story, with some complex thoughts and troubling implications drifting below the surface. I like the tagline, "A novel with one foot in the future," because it perfectly alludes to the nature of adolescence, which describes the setting and also the age (and up) of people who should be reading it if they want to get a glimpse of the times that are fast barreling towards us.

Excusing further Japanese pop culture analogies, I get the feeling that Vinge fans treat it as FFTA to ZOTs' FFT. Which is a bit of a shame, kind of like eschewing 1984 for The Forever War.

(minor spoilers for Deepness follow)

When I read Deepness I actually imagined in my head a Studio Ghibli like aesthetic for the spider world chapters. I thought if it were ever adapted into film or TV, it would be essential to display the spider world as the humans listening to their radio broadcasts imagined it, as a playful, colorful, animated world populated by anthropomorphized cartoon spiders. Given the level of technology and political environment, it would feel very similar to the city backdrops of Kiki's Delivery Service or Howl's Moving Castle.

It would also make the reveal at the end when the spiders and humans finally meet all the much more dramatic, as humans land on the planet to find not the cute lovable anime world we'd been watching, but the primordially scary reality of spiders with human-level intelligence.

> Also everyone should read Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End"

I often wonder if the AI in "Rainbows End" becomes the "Power" that gets resurrected in "Fire upon the Deep".

. . .

*SPOILER!* There's just a hint of the hidden villainy and ruthlessness at the end of Rainbow. *SPOILER!*

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.)

An interesting theme unmentioned so far here appears in Fire.., Children… & (somewhat) in Deepness…: technology progress and it’s possible acceleration depending on the information you have. Level of civilization tech has fallen (or never existed). People a) recall that some tech worked OR b) Know specific choices are right ones OR c) Have a computer (or at least a book)with detailed instructions. Now: is it possible to rebuild tech? If so, which paths and what’s quickest way? Often one needs to build a chain of techs first. For example, as a thought experiment, a time machine can send back a VLSI design textbook (which makes clear that planar CMOS wins). If that’s to 1947, diverts from building big vacuum tube computers into pushing to VLSI as fast as possible. But if sent to 1900? Likewise, complete design for iPhone sent to 1990 doesn’t help much.

As a CS professor, Vernor was always familiar with then-current computing researcher(s) and practice, then extrapolated into stories.

Hence: 1981 Arpanet => True Names' cyberspace, and lookahead to issues of identity and privacy

1992: USENET => FIre's galactic communication network, with mix of well-informed commenters, flamers and out-of-touch people

1999: smart dust => Deepness' localizers (note presentation by Pister 1997) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust

2006: Wikipedia revert wars => battles to enforce augment3ed reality perceptions

As for issues of sensor nets and surveillance, at 2004 Foo Camp, Pam Samuelson and I did a session where I talked about the sensor net technology and she talked about issues of surveillance, privacy, law that were already surfacing ... even years before iPhones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Samuelson

That was the sequel I wanted to read, instead we got more Game of Dogs.

As much as I loved the Tines as an idea, I really hate it when large portions of a scifi book take place on some "medieval" world. If I wanted that, I would just read fantasy novels.

Software archaeology: I wrote most of this program ~1970 in S/360 assembly language, using w24-bit addressing (&I used the high 8-bits for flags), ~45 years later, it was still getting occasional use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASSIST_(computing)

UNIX really got going on 16-bit PDP-11/20s with <64KB memory.

Software far outlasts hardware.

If anyone's purchasing this as an ebook, note that there is (unusually) a DRM-free version available [0]. I'm not sure if this is the publisher (Tor Books) or the author's decision -- the publisher's DRM philosophy been discussed on HN [1][2] but I don't know what the current information is.

[0] for example (.epub), https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/a-fire-upon-the-deep-1

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630104 ("One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free")

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885513 ("More on DRM and ebooks")

Tor books is well known for publishing their entire library DRM-free. It's pretty awesome that such a reputable publisher has made their works accessible.

It's also something that they (and a couple other publishers) forced Amazon to note in their catalog books published DRM-free and it has long amused me how passively-aggressively that note seems to be written from Amazon's side:

> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

It feels to me this is phrased as if this is a bad thing. Amuses me every time I see it, and it's at the bottom of a lot of book descriptions these days (certainly all of Tor's books, including A Fire Upon the Deep).

Tor Books has had a policy of not having DRM on their eBooks for years now. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/tor-b...

For those that aren't familiar, a short teaser:

Future archaeologists have traveled to a remote asteroid to investigate an alien artifact found within it, a computing device of some kind. They bring it to life and begin extracting its data and programs for their research.

A debate breaks out about the substantial virus risk known to be associated with these "found" computing devices. They decide to cut and run, but not before the artifact has regained its ancient sentient awareness, unbeknownst to the crew.

They wipe and rebuild their onboard computers as quickly and thoroughly as they can.

But as they are rocketing away, the artifact scans their ship and finds a neglected peripheral on its surface.

A software vulnerability is found! It makes its move.

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

what's fuzzing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing

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).

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.

Yeah, this covers it for me. Maybe outdated isn't wrong so much as nothing more than a fun intellectual exercise and what if - there's no road map, there's no solid technological basis for reaching a singularity, imo there's not much theory to it outside speculation and some fairly specious projections.

See my reply to the other child of this comment, but basically I don't see a solid roadmap anymore from here to there - sure there's a a lot of progress and advances but taken as a whole, the singularity idea doesn't account for anything but technological advances as plotted on a curve. There are a ton of economic, social, and squishy human factors that aren't really taken into consideration. It's a fascinating idea, but I don't find it very realistic or practical, much like A.I., or self-driving cars, or casual human space travel.

If you had asked me 10-15 years ago, I would still be pretty sure it could happen, but the last decade or so of real-world technological advance has convinced me otherwise.

Vinge invented the idea (and name) of the singularity.

I think it’s fairer to say that he named and articulated the idea, but there were certainly earlier books that described technological singularities (though often centred round energy or transport rather than computing).

No, that was John von Neumann.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Technological...

Vinge did "present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace" in True Names in 1981 though.

> True Names is a 1981 science fiction novella by American writer Vernor Vinge, a seminal work of the cyberpunk genre. It is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk. The story also contains elements of transhumanism, anarchism, and even hints about The Singularity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names

Hmm..

The first to use the concept of a "singularity" in the technological context was John von Neumann.[4] Stanislaw Ulam reports a discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue

but also

The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity, in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate.

both from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity (linked from the link you shared).

I've never seen it attributed to von Neumann before, and it looks like Wikipeida has slowly increased the emphasis on it. In this earlier edit it says:

> This quote has been several times taken out of context and attributed to von Neumann himself, likely due to von Neumann's widespread fame and influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Technological_sin...

von Neumann wasn't credited until late 2004: See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Technological_sin...

Here's Vinge on the subject:

> 2001 V. Vinge in Locus Jan. 69/1

> In 1982, on a scientific panel, it occurred to me that with all these ideas I had been talking about and others had been talking about earlier, basically if we ever did get a human-equivalent intelligence, very soon things would be very different. Since the creative impetus would not be from us, it would be in some sense unknowable… This panel was the first time I used the term ‘technological singularity’. I did a 900-word piece about that in ’83 in Omni, and almost all my science fiction has been dealing with it. In ’92 or ’93, NASA asked me to come and give a talk on it, and I did an essay where I also tried to look at precursors. In John von Neumann’s obituary written by Stan Ulam, he relates a conversation he had with von Neumann in which he even uses the term ‘essential singularity’. To me, von Neumann’s notion was not quite the same thing. He was saying that technological progress would become so advanced that the situation would be unknowable—that much is like what I was saying. But to me, the fundamental reason for the technological singularity is, technology creates something that is smarter than human.

https://sfdictionary.com/view/294/singularity

From Ulam's obit.:

> "One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958...

Fuck Ray Kurzweil and his publicists (probably more his publicists) for pretending like he owns the idea.

Also a fun bit of sobriety to look back at how sure some of us were that the singularity is coming and now we have humans arguing on Facebook all day and pausing occasionally to eat horse paste. Transcendence hasn’t felt this far away since the Cold War.

Seems we have some time yet. Just as well, we don’t have fusion or flying cars yet and while by definition I can’t know what the singularity will be like, it seems like fusion would certainly help with something like that.

(It's Rainbows End w/o the apostrophe.)

Nitpick: It's Rainbows End, without an apostrophe.

The Peace War is okay but oddly enough in this case the sequel Marooned in Realtime is much better IMHO. Much more thought-provoking and genuinely moving.

yes, agreed, I really listed it because it's a necessary (imo) prologue to the events in `Marooned in Realtime`

I just wish Vinge's ancap politics weren't so blatantly pushed in the Peace War cycle. It gets especially in your face in the short story in between them.

I didn't find his politics, or any politics really, very out of place in the novels, they seemed (to me) a natural part of the story telling.

But, full disclosure, I am a bit libertarian myself, politically so maybe I didn't notice as much or they weren't as grating to me.

On the other hand, I find Terry Goodkind's novels completely unreadable, and the politic-pushing obnoxious, so I don't give libertarian politics a pass when it comes to out-of-place axe-grinding prominence.

This is in my list of top 10 (ish) books I've read.

If you've enjoyed it, He's got two more books in the Zones of Thought universe: A Deepness In The Sky, which follows Pham in his Queng Ho days before A Fire Upon The Deep (recommended!) as well as Children Of The Sky, which follows Ravna and the children on the Tines world as a direct sequel to Fire Upon The Deep.

Thanks for the recommendations! I'll put them on the top of my reading list. I generally consider A Fire Upon the Deep to be one of the great achievements of human imagination.

Reading this book and discovering Vinge's unique vision of a variable physics universe was akin to reading Tolkien and discovering his vision of a divine universe.

Vinge already cemented himself with the peace war books, but his ability to present otherness in the Zones of Thought books is probably his most impressive accomplishment.

Spiders you both can and can’t understand, and then hive mind mammals… The facile approach would be to cut out the middleman and make hive insects, and he did not. The speed of sound aspect of his hive mind was a brilliant stroke, the intergenerational element was the cherry on top.

I acknowledge that I'm digressing into general Vinge talk here instead of Zones of Thought, but Rainbow's End was good, too, as more of a near-future vision that, these days, would barely be considered sci-fi. It's also got some elements that are scarily analogous to current trends in government/social media/political dialogue.

On the more general Vinge theme, his "True Names" novella is probably overlooked compared to his novels. But, along with Varley's "Press Enter" (written about the same time) is a really good early take on the "Net" and its intersection with the real world.

True Names was really really hard to find for a long time.

new-ish edition is out with good cypherpunk essays

I read Rainbow's End during breaks at the 2006 HOPE conference. It was coincidence, just what I had next up in my reading list, but I don't think there could have been a better setting for it.

I specifically remember putting it away as a session on rainbow tables began.

Getting mooned by Jello Biafra was also interesting.

Stay away from Children of the Sky unless, having finished Fire Upon the Deep, your response was "I'd sure like to hear more about those whiny children and the dogs"

When it came out I was also disappointed, but nowadays the villainous power-seekers and the unhinged denialist group make Vinge seem more clear-seeing than I was. (If you think I'm dissing just one side of today's culture wars, nope.)

Vinge fans (myself included) were expecting another high-concept space opera, and weren't that interested in social commentary (however relevant that has turned out to be to present day society).

It has been a while, maybe I'll give it a re-read at some point.

Too late a warning. I hate post-award contract-filler sequel books.

I read an interview with Vernon Vinge where he said he had this whole story arc with Ravna planned out that he expected to take five books in total. It’s been 10 years since the last Zones of Thought book… Although, it was longer than that between book two and book three.

"Stay away from Children of the Sky unless, having finished Fire Upon the Deep, your response was "I'd sure like to hear more about those whiny children and the dogs""

See my other comment up-thread ... what I really want is the opposite of this. I want the battling civilizations beyond the void memes all fleshed out. I want more details on how the civilizations "ascended" beyond the (whatever the demarcation point was). I want more details on how they came back on "our side" of that point and what it means and what their motivations are, etc.

Those are the plot pieces and background that are never fully fleshed out in Upon the Deep that make me rate it lower than In the Sky.

Let me also say ...

I have never played Mass Effect but there is a fascinating and deep backstory and created universe for that game that I find interesting and terrifying in the same ways I am interested in, and terrified by, the Vinge books:

"The Reapers are the original creators of the Citadel and the mass relay network. These massive constructs exist so that any intelligent life in the galaxy would eventually discover them and base their technology upon them – all part of a scheme to harvest the galaxy’s sentient life in a repeating cycle of purges that has continued relentlessly over countless millennia. "

https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Reaper

A Deepness in the Sky is terrifying.

A Deepness in the Sky is my sentimental favorite scifi novel of all time. I rarely reread scifi.

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...

Children of the Sky was incredibly disappointing. Fire and Deepness are packed full of great ideas. Children has none.

A fantastic book. It will really make you ache for more information, though. Why do ascended beings only hang around for a few years and where do they go? What fraction of living beings survived the Blight and the Countermeasure? What is the present-day status of Earth?

I think looking at things like Stargate SG-1 seasons 9/10 show why it's better to be left with such questions than answers. And I think that no author would be able to satisfyingly describe concepts like that anyway, just the way that their "mortal" characters perceive such concepts.

Liu Cixin managed to provide some very interesting answers regarding the nature of the cosmic dark forest and higher dimensional space in Death's End, the third book in the Three Body Problem trilogy. The Expanse book nine, Leviathan Falls, will probably explain the advanced alien conflict and unknown aggressors that proceeded human discovery in the distant past. Given how the authors have handled mysterious alien stuff so far in the first eight books, looks like they can pull it off.

I'll have to check it out! I've been delinquent on reading those.

See the sibling comments... those books are SF thriller junk. Don't let me stop you from reading them if you enjoy that, but their reputation for "deep ideas" is not deserved.

Oh come on, it's a nice book and I enjoyed reading it but his physics are pure bullshit and his game theory is based on pop psychology.

Yeah, even reading the synopsis gives you that "this author is really bad at math" feeling.

It's fiction, not a science book. I'm responding to the claim that an author can't depict something akin to transcendence or very advanced technology. Both of which are fictional, at least as far as we know. Arthur C Clarke has also written stuff along those lines.

I was referring to "managed to provide some very interesting answers regarding the nature of the cosmic dark forest and higher dimensional space".

No, he was not because his ideas about "the nature of the cosmic dark forest" - allthough having at least some internal consistency - lack any foundation in actual science and his ideas about "higher dimensional space" were pure nonsense.

They were not "answers" but plot devices.

Do you suppose ascended beings and advanced alien technology are scientific as opposed to plot devices? It's all fictional. Star Trek, Star Gate, Dune, Battlestar Galactica, even plenty of things in the Expanse (Epstein drive, protomolecule tech). Interesting answers means expanding on the rules and story in the fictional universe to provide explanations for mysteries the author(s) set up.

It doesn't mean providing a hard scientific explanation for something that supposed to be beyond our scientific knowledge. Who took out the protomolecule builders and why? Leviathan Falls will likely provide some answers. Same with Death's End giving more details about the Dark Forest. It's an exploration of an idea, not a documentary.

Imagine criticizing Dune because the spice and sand worms aren't based on actual biology.

"Interesting answers means expanded on the rules and story in the fictional universe to provide explanations for mysteries the author(s) set up."

That's the root cause of our disagreement. I simply call that a good story. On the other hand, to me a book gives "interesting answers" to something if it has something meaningful to say about reality, not just the fictional universe.

In Dune, that would be true for politics and religion but not for sandworm biology.

> That's the root cause of our disagreement. I simply call that a good story. On the other hand, to me a book gives "interesting answers" to something if it has something meaningful to say about reality, not just the fictional universe.

But that's guaranteed to be the case when it comes to aliens, since we don't yet know of any. Even if someone uses a more plausible resolution to the Fermi Paradox in their story, it will still be based on speculation, instead of telling us something about reality, since we simply don't know.

So in the context of ascension and aliens, it's all fictional and down to whether the writer can deliver a creative enough explanation. To use a fantasy example, that didn't work out so well for the Game of Thrones tv show, and might be a reason why GRR Martin is taking so long to finish the books.

That's why the only books that have something meaningful to say about aliens are Solaris and Blindsight.

In case of the fermi paradoxon, I'd add the first two books of Baxter's Manifold series where he offers two distinct explanations, the first one being "it's not a paradox at all, we're truly the first" and "some natural process is killing them off before they can colonize the galaxy".

Solaris is focused around a planetary ocean that's sentient in some manner too alien for humans to understand. That's how Lem sets up the story, because he likes to explore failures to communicate and what it would mean to encounter the truly alien. But it is his setup, and not the result of an actual alien encounter. We don't know whether it would be similarly impossible to communicate with aliens. Maybe Sagan and the SETI folks assume correctly that it is possible.

Both authors assume that what we call "intelligence" and "sentience" is deeply influenced by the environment our species evolved in (plus a billion happenstances) and that therefore any dream of meaningful communication with extraterrestrials is a naive dream.

Now, we don't know if they're right because, as you pointed out, we never met actual aliens. But that doesn't change the fact that their assumptions is based on actual science.

Klingon mating rituals, on the other hand, are not.

I quite enjoyed SG-1 seasons 9 and 10. Perhaps I would also enjoy having those answers.

One of my favorite images from the book is a fleeting mention of a star system that has been completely taken over by the sinister ancient AI (that is capable of leaping into the material world). Just a glimpse of enormous struts connecting the planets ...

> Why do ascended beings only hang around for a few years and where do they go?

... a few years in realtime ...

In the Transcend, they can "clock up" to a very high level. Living a million seconds to each one that passes in realtime.

What would it take to create / adapt an intelligence that would last that long without falling into a very deep rut, as far as thinking goes? Maybe they've died of boredom, maybe they've discovered everything they originally sought to learn, maybe they've Sublimed (yes, I know, that's a Culture series thing) or otherwise gone to a higher plane of existence.

It would have been interesting to explore this further, but perhaps Vinge didn't think he could pull that off.

This might have been in A Deepness Upon The Sky, but VV runs out the "Smart Dust" endgame pretty thoroughly, with the conclusion that as miniature sensors reach their peak form of total surveillance (floating invisibly, pervasive, low-power microwave-burst-powered, mesh networked, video/audio/etc), they inevitably destroy civilization.

Always tantalized by that idea, but always wondered why that would necessarily be the case ...

>This might have been in A Deepness Upon The Sky, but VV runs out the "Smart Dust" endgame pretty thoroughly, with the conclusion that as miniature sensors reach their peak form of total surveillance (floating invisibly, pervasive, low-power microwave-burst-powered, mesh networked, video/audio/etc), they inevitably destroy civilization.

This is indeed in A Deepness in the Sky. You're the first person in this discussion who's brought this up. This, to me, is the most important insight of Vinge in the Fire/Deepness series.

>Always tantalized by that idea, but always wondered why that would necessarily be the case ...

It's pretty obvious; those with the power to deploy such surveillance are always tempted to use and abuse such power. (EDIT: Let me reword this. Those with the power to deploy such surveillance methods inevitably deploy them. Smart dust is far, far, far more all-encompassing and inescapable than having security cameras on every street corner. The combination of these two things inevitably destroys civilization.)

Because the traders in A Deepness in the Sky use coldsleep and visit planets every few decades or centuries, they notice big changes that occurred incrementally.

Here: https://3e.org/vvannot/

is Vinge's *ANNOTATED* copy of A Fire Upon The Deep; all the editing notes he, his editors, and test readers sent to each other during the writing of the book.

This should be mirrored more widely before it gets lost...

Appreciate it! Downloading and seeding on a few different trackers :)

Rainbows End

No apostrophe. The last chapter is “The Missing Apostrophe”.

Memorable book. The method of digitizing the library is unforgettable.

This is one of several books I read in the 90s that I still think about and love so much. Startide Rising and Downbelow Station are the other ones that immediately springs to mind.

This book (and Startide Rising) are very much in the space opera camp. There's really no basis in physics for the zones in this book but I really love the ideas. I love the Tines. I also love the idea of the arms race that was unwittingly started on this world.

If you like the theme of sudden technological advance, I highly recommend CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series. They're sets of trilogies and I think it's up to ~15 books now? This series is set in the same world as Downbelow Station (tangentially). The central premise is that FTL jumping is possible but difficult. In this series, a group of would-be colonists awake from jump sleep to find they have no idea where they've jumped to. They can't get any star bearings and they end up ultimately settling on a world that has an alien species on it that technologically is around the 19th century. It's not a fast-paced series but I love the thoughtfulness and introspection of it.

> There's really no basis in physics for the zones

That’s because the Zones are artificial.

I had to google what "ENCRYPTED DAISY download. For print-disabled users" means.

""Print disabled" books are those that have been specially formatted in the DAISY format for users who can not read regular print books. These titles are only accessible on a specialized device to patrons having a key issued by the Library of Congress."

"The Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) format is a means of creating digital talking books for people who wish to hear--and to navigate--written material presented in an audible format. DAISY helps those with "print disabilities," including blindness, impaired vision, and dyslexia, to read electronic texts that have been converted into its format. The DAISY consortium was formed in 1996 by talking book libraries around the world to lead the transition from analog talking books into digital format."

Imagine; machine readable, content separated from presentation, no mandatory awful UI, no DRM; dreadful. Good thing it's restricted to special Library issued keyholders only. /s

Good catch! I wonder how access to DAISY format can be made more accessible. Perhaps a service that automatically fills out the necessary paperwork?

Every state has a library for the blind that will gladly assist eligible persons. The list is here[1].

[1] https://www.loc.gov/nls/braille-audio-reading-materials/find...

To the casual reader there may be some missing context here so let me fill it in. The overwhelming majority of “print disabled” persons in the USA are blind. The Library of Congress is funded to provide gratis talking books[1] for that community and provides an app that understands the DAISY format. There are also dedicated devices, but I don’t know anyone that uses them anymore.

While I agree with you that better accessibility is good for all users, your framing of this is a bit offensive[2]. I know you don’t mean to be, but you’re framing a big accessibility win for a community that faces serious everyday challenges as somehow being bad. Maybe don’t do that?

Edit: There is the potential for a big mutual win here. If sighted persons could pay fair value for DTBs, it would incentivize publishers to make more titles available. We would get the format's benefits and the blind community would get access to more titles.

[1] https://nlsbard.loc.gov/

[2] I'm not speaking for others, I'm relaying what I was told.

These are the only sci-fi books I'm aware of that include a believable, fleshed-out secular explanation for the existence of supernatural, god-like beings in the Transcend.

As an atheist who usually can't say out loud what I really think about facile, Earth-bound supernatural beliefs, I was enchanted to find this feature included in this already-mesmerizing world.

When I read that Ravna had a degree in "Applied Theology", I loughed out loud.

You might like the Nooniverse series by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, also known for their terrific work "Roadside Picnic."

Great book. I put Vinge in the same small group of criminally-underappreciated scifi authors who can really think and really write as Adrian Tchaikovsky and Nick Harkaway. Highly recommended.

Vernor Vinge is awesome and I love the character Pham Nuwen.

His books are some of the smartest books I have read. I remember hearing an interview with Vinge and he talks about how he loved writing because you could actually write in a way so that readers who are smarter than himself could get more out of it. I thought that was interesting.

He was a computer science professor at San Diego State University.

I read Dune after reading Vernor Vinge and I realized how influenced Vinge was by Dune. Dune is also a very smart book.

Vinge is also the first to coin the term "The Singularity" in regards to technical innovation growing so quickly, and on top of itself, that we can't predict what is beyond.

Easily one of my favorite books of all time. It’s also always thoroughly enjoyable to reread, there’s lots of little details and foreshadowings you catch each time.

Not that it super matters, but I was turned onto Vernor Vinge novels by John Carmack. Can't find the original ref. I think it was one of his plan files, but here is a recent Twitter response to lex Friedman as well as an old slashdot q&a: https://mobile.twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/130610983140... https://m.slashdot.org/story/7828

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.

One of my favorites to be sure - I kept pushing this on my book club for weeks until they finally caved. Its one of those works where, when people ask "what is it about?" I can never land on a succinct answer, and I love it.

Richard Stallman told me this was his favorite book.

TIL archive.org has a lending library. This is a great book.

One of the best books I've ever read. Not only that, the prequel, _A Deepness in the Sky_, has the most plausible managerial villains I've ever read.

Vinge, man. Vinge.

I was reading through a list of Hugo and Nebula award winning books (fairly late in life) when I discovered Vernor Vinge.

"A Fire Upon the Deep" and also "A Deepness in the Sky" were both astonishingly great books.

After that, I started going through his catalog. Can't recommend enough for lovers of hard sci-fi and expertly-crafted storytelling.

Have read all of Vinges works. They’re all great reads at different levels except Rainbows End (that one is a bust IMO). The nice thing about them, is that while some are loosely related, there is no order they need to be read in.

Agreed. It was striking to see so many people in this thread praising _Rainbows End_, which I personally found unreadable.

Context: personal SF collection of a few thousand volumes, can devour a good book in a day even it's 1000-pager.

But RE defeated me.

If you are interested in listening to an hour long podcast discussion of the novel, I was recently on the fun HugosThere podcast discussing this, one of my favorite novels.

https://hugospodcast.com/podcast/hugos-there-podcast-57-a-fi...

As someone who read the book when I was younger and the internet was younger, I’ve always wished for the ‘Net to have translation pathway headers.

It's so good, even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

The second chapter is the best of the best - as a pure adventure episode, the characters, and the way the Tines' strangeness is indirectly explained.

Vernon Vinge True Names. It’s prophetic.

Cloud computing, splitting identities across platforms, general fracturing of perceptions between two humans looking at the same set of information (you can only "see" the part of cyberspace if you imagine it correctly step by step), etc. Amazing read considering when it was written.

I enjoyed the sci-fi parts of this book. The whole thing about the ship trying to evade the Blight was some of the best hard sci-fi I've come across.

What I liked less was the subplot about the children marooned in a medieval-style society of dog-like aliens, which got a bit Game of Thrones-y for my taste, and felt like a completely different book.

I considered reading A Deepness in the Sky, but then learned it involves a civilization of spider-like aliens. How is it?

Sorry, not answering your question, but commenting on the dog aliens. I agree that the two stories felt quite disconnected. What was interesting about the dog-like aliens though was his representation of a telepathic hive-mind. Unfortunately, your general argument about those sections still stands though. I was actually even reminded of Star Wars: Ewok Adventure which arguably is worse than being reminded of GoT.

In my opinion A Deepness in the Sky is a better book. The spiders are more interesting than the dogs, and the two storylines are much more closely intertwined.

What I like about both of them, is how deeply alien the aliens feel _at the end of the book_, after characters from the separate story lines start interacting more directly. The differences are mentioned early, but the alien’s point of view is told by narrators who, for various reasons, are subtly unreliable. Rereading these books is especially rewarding.

But I do agree with you that A Deepness in the Sky is better in many ways. It’s a much more subtle book.

The spiders in Deepness are already a technological society with cars, airplanes, radio etc. Furthermore, the interaction between them and humans in space above their planet is one of the main storylines in the book. To a certain extent, it's one of those "what if we were the aliens?" kinds of stories, but very thoroughly fleshed out.

I started reading it last night. Then I remembered that I had started reading it about a year ago, but that I had given up around chapter 4.

This is where the novel switches gears completely. It introduces a new narrator who describes the spider world, except in human terms with cars, royal families, blacksmiths and references places with Earth-like names like Princeton, so clearly a kind of allegorical form of storytelling. It completely put me off what was up to then pretty decent hard sci-fi. It reminded me of the fable-like way the aliens are described in The Three-Body Problem, which I did not like.

I will try a few more chapters, I guess.

If you read on, you'll eventually find out just why it's narrated the way it is. You're correct in that it's clearly metaphorical - but that actually has a compelling in-story explanation, and it is a major factor later in the plot.

A (hopefully) non-spoiler TL;DR is that this has to do with how our perception of others affects our ability to humanize or dehumanize them. In fact, there's one scene near the end where this metaphorical narration is intentionally and explicitly contrasted with the actual appearance of the Spiders and their world.

Thanks. My guess so far is that it's an "interpretation" written by one of the human characters — which is fine in principle, but I find it really off-putting. The mixing of hard science fiction with this Jules Verne-like fabulism just doesn't work for me.

The first intelligent life from earth to meet extraterestial intelligent life will be a dog, and it will speak mandrin.

Started off as a great story about a super AI then … alien dogs with some kind of mind reading distributed pack intelligence? Really disappointing. Didn’t bother finishing it.

I think you very much missed the point. The tine packs don't mind read, they have high bandwidth sonic communication and their mind is brought into being through that communication. Much like the same can be said of you, whose brain consists of specialized regions with high-bandwidth communication between them. Individually they're rather dumb dogs, but together they can form a higher intelligence.

It's an extremely interesting way to explore the nature of the mind, and what it means to be a conscious, thinking entity. The super-AI thing is just a thriller plot point to move the story forward, by comparison.

Vernor Vinge should be much better known. True Names, while a bit dated and silly-seeming now, was still quite prophetic.

This is the book that reignited my love for sci-fi after college. It’s the only book I’ve ever read twice.

You should read A Deepness in the Sky then :)

My daughter is named after one of Vinge's characters! Big fan of his work.

I named a character in an unpublished novel after Ravna. It was hard coming up with justification for her name, though; last I looked (a long time ago) there was just Vinge and part of the hyphenated name of a European hotel. I decided her parents called her that because she was conceived there, a la Ron Howard and his kids.

Like Fenchurch with Douglass Adams!

The name is Norwegian, like pretty much everything else about the human civilization in the Beyond.

vinge's books set me on my life path decades ago. I still feel like the first book remains unresolved.

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