The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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Storytelling, setting, everything just clicked. I know there is a third book in the trilogy but it seems a bit back to the roots in terms of setting and I haven't touched just out of the fear that I wouldn't love it as much as ADITS... Should I?
Suffered till the end, and lost any motivation to continue since following books proudly advertised that the form is there to stay.
There are vastly more diverse stories that still link well together, ie Hyperion cantos was an amazing experience for me. Literally 7 different stories coming together, from cyberpunk to high religious politics, but always connected to same technological universe.
That stuff has the Star Wars vibe where Ep 1-3 have much more grandiosity than the original series - luckily the weren't chronologically first.
I don't need an everyman perspective[1] on an epic science-fiction story! I am an everyman! I can form my own opinion of it!
They are also rather heavy on author-dictated philosophy (which is not particularly interesting, or insightful, and manages to fall flat in a pretty major self-contradictory way) - whereas the first two Hyperion books have much less of an author's voice in them, and are much more of a presentation of an interaction of different, competing value systems. That is interesting! Listening to the chosen one go on and on about choosing again (when none of their disciples actually do) is not!
The overall plot of them is fine. It's, unfortunately, all in the execution.
[1] Or at least, not one that's hammered into me for ~60% of the book.
Edit: thinking back, the ending of #2 was bloody spectacular as well. I think the sheer volume of character/world building must help as preparation for impactful endings.
They're sequels set in the same setting, with a few cool ideas, but the literary flair -- the magic -- just isn't there.
The Canterbury Tales in Space framing took me way to long to pick up on.
That was a major plot design point to me.
That pre-spacefaring civilizations have things that are incredibly important to them, but questionably important relative to order-of-magnitudes different power galactic civilizations.
One of the reasons I like Banks fiction as well -- in all likelihood, given evolution and technological maturity timescales, advanced civilizations will be wildly displaced in time as well as space.
I didn't love A Fire Upon the Deep because, while the sci-fi parts were amazing, the medieval fantasy telepathic dog society was much less interesting, basically a political fable with some children thrown in; it seemed like a different novel altogether, and in fact the plots don't really ever intersect except when the adults finally land. It felt like two very different books cobbled together from two different authors. The dog half reminded me of Terry Pratchett for some reason, another author whose schtick involves making the story go faster and increasingly more breathless towards the end, like some Hollywood action movie, often involving a bunch of running or flying.
I liked Deepness even less, because once again you have fantasy politics, and while I understood the conceit, the storytelling just didn't work for me. Like before, the science-fiction stuff was fantastic and full of great ideas, but the other half was the exact opposite.
Quite the opposite. The rot13(ybat enatr enqvb pybnxf) are an important plot point.
That isn't what I was referring to. You may have missed something important in your reading.
Since the showdown with the blight is in the medieval dogs’ turf, the effects of that minor squabble could determine the fate of the galaxy!
"As above, so below".
I could have done with more space archaeology, and less human children. Apart from that I felt it was pretty great.
Are you perchance channelling that space-Usenet poster who was utterly dismissive of the main plot until the very end? ;-)
Parent comment should be marked SPOILERS, this one also.
Srsly tho, I appreciate your perspective. I found the dog part a little slow at times but still super interesting due to their collective identity which was explored quite a lot. As such it wasn't just a medieval squabble, it was entirely in keeping with the nature-of-consciousness theme that permeated the space part of the story.
I went for that sci-fi book for the space and sci-fi parts, and found the other side not interesting. That's it. I think I generally like sci-fi happening in space or generally futuristic. For medieval I prefer reading fantasy (which I think would help story tremendously if included for folks like me, since there is already another 'magic' in that universe).
By contrast, the thrill I got when I first realized that the dog hive mind was evolution's stab at an acoustic modem was fantastic, and I read through all of this aspect of the book with great wonder.
Don't. It's nowhere near as good as either of the previous books, and the ending leaves some important plot points unresolved.
Worse: Children felt like the author stalling for time on the greater plot. Chekov's gun isn't just left unfired; the author takes it down, polishes it a bit, and puts it back on the mantle without firing a shot.
Assuming that it's still canon, The Blabber tells us how it ends, but there's some very interesting stuff in between we're still waiting for.
Among other things, he taught me how to write pre-emptive task switching in 68k assembly language.
Fun times!
"Hexapodia is the key insight"
It's got the right stuff.
His other stuff. A lot of it is pretty good. There's that trilogy with the layers of space. I guess I need to look at it again. But the group mind dogs. Interesting but not amazing. And then we have your usual good-bad conflict, which is boring. So anyway.
But ya. Cookie Monster. That shivers my things good.
In 1983 he wrote in the SF magazine Omni:
"We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between... so that the world remains intelligible."
Ten years later, in is his famous essay "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" he went into more detail and predicted the singularity to occur between 2005 and 2030: https://web.archive.org/web/20180410074243/http://mindstalk....
The spider were just great though!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Verno...
Some stories probably can only be told properly in written words, and that’s ok.