Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/21/hard-sf-master-vernor-vinge-dead-at-79.html
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Aww, man… This guy created some of the most unique non-human intelligences out there, the Tines being my favorite. Wow, need to do some re-reading, obviously.
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No, start with A Fire Upon the Deep
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Aw hell. I loved Fire Upon the Deep and Deepness in the Sky, and his essay on the Singularity.
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*darn, Rainbows End has been a roadmap for me personally, and has been prophetic. I’ve told people “You want to see where technology is going to go in 25 years, read Rainbows End!”
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I just finished re-reading Fire Upon the Deep and Deepness In the Sky, and finally got around to reading Children of the Sky.
Fire Upon the Deep floored me when I first read it ages ago. There were at least a dozen ideas in there that someone could have written a whole SF novel about, but having them all in one place and written so well was amazing.
I really liked Deepness and Children, but the threads they picked up from Fire were (to me) the less interesting ones. I kept hoping he’d write more books set in the Beyond rather than in the Slow Zone. Sadly, it looks like he won’t now.
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I’m not really one to fan-boy, but I did once ask Vinge “Some people say that ‘True Names’ was the first long-form cyberpunk story, and ‘A Fire Upon the Deep’ created the whole genre of post-singularity space opera. So I have to ask … what are you working on NOW?”
He laughed and said he was doing some stuff with epic fantasy.
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My copy of True Names went on a multi-year tour of readers at university before getting back to me.
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I loved how he incorporated the Geisel Library from his school into Rainbow’s End.
Accused by some of a grievous sin – that of ‘optimism’ – Vernor gave us peerless legends that often depicted human success at overcoming problems… those right in front of us… while posing new ones!
Vinge always insisted that a better technological future was possible if we focused on incorporating old stuff into the new rather than allowing the latter to replace the former. His books should be required reading in the tech industry.
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Reading isn’t understanding. Hasn’t Musk shown signs that he’s read them?
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I was hoping that he’d continue forward from the novella where the Tines and zones first appeared.
http://www.thurb.com/reviews/blabber.htm
Filling in the backstory, where this is (presumably) a copy of Pham and the Tines are still on the run from forces of the Blight only makes it more interesting.
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This is very sad news. He’s my favorite author. The only other person who comes close is Neal Stephenson.
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I was curious what his thesis Solutions to Exremal Problems in E^p Spaces was about.
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A sad loss. I highly recommend his The Peace War, and the sequel Marooned in Realtime. The first book is a rebellion against a despotic authority that took over the world, and the second is a murder mystery that takes place 50 million years later.
I thought both were great reads, with well-written characters that were easy to care about.
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That’s, ummm… That’s not, ummm…
Those are words. I have seen them before, but understand them in this way do I not… Math and me, not get along well, no.
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Psych!
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Welcome! Was it that traumatic? 
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Agreed. Still definitely read True Names, and be awed by the prescience, but it’s going to feel much more dated than a lot of his other work. Rainbow’s End was one of the earliest, and best, treatments of an AR mediated society.
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Nooo! Every few years I’d check in to see if he was working on another Fire Upon the Deep sequel (after Children of the Sky)… I really wanted to read more about the Blight, and maybe Pham coming back. Alas!
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And then Deepness In The Sky
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