Vernor Vinge has died

https://file770.com/vernor-vinge-1944-2024/

by sohkamyung • 2 years ago

1151 320 2 years ago

demaga• 2 years ago

Haven't read his fiction works yet, but his singularity piece is very interesting: https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

nabla95• 2 years ago

"Rainbows End" is his singularity book.

tialaramex2• 2 years ago

I would argue that all of Vinge's longer works are about Singularitarian disasters. In Tatja we eventually figure out that Tatja herself is arguably the disaster. In Fire it was asleep in the library, and I think in Rainbows there's both Rabbit obviously and the weapon the story focuses on.

You can think of the apparent survival of Rabbit as a hint of doom right at the end, like the fact R's diary is in the slush pile at the end of the Watchmen comic book.

NoMoreNicksLeft5• 2 years ago

I'm half-convinced that the Rabbit was an ancient trickster god, and not an AI. Is AI even the correct term? If the Rabbit was a technological non-human intelligence, then surely it was never created (even by accident), and emerged/grew from the computosphere. No governments seemed to be aware of any other government having created it, and two of the nearly-main characters were special operatives tasked with knowing about shit like that and shutting it down before it could result in doomsday scenarios.

I suspect very strongly that had we gotten a followup or two, it would have turned out that the Rabbit had been around for a very long time before even the first transistor.

hinkley3• 2 years ago

Marooned in Space Time is about people who missed the singularity.

progbits• 2 years ago

I knew "Fire upon the deep" would be a good book just few pages in, where in acknowledgements Vinge thanks "the organizers of the Arctic ’88 distributed systems course at the University of Tromsø".

growt• 2 years ago

Doesn’t he deserve the black bar on top of HN?

ilaksh• 2 years ago

Yes. I assume the admin is sleeping. @dang

layer8• 2 years ago

I don't think "@dang" is doing anything. You need to email hn@ycombinator.com.

dbuxton• 2 years ago

sdeer• 2 years ago

_0ffh2• 2 years ago

agreed!

ompogUe2• 2 years ago

arethuza• 2 years ago

"So High, So Low, So Many Things to Know."

re• 2 years ago

If you haven't read A Fire Upon The Deep (or even if you already have), you can read the prologue and first few chapters here: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/A_Fire_Upon_the_De...

jl6• 2 years ago

Oh man, this makes me sad.

I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wrote. A Deepness in the Sky is a worthy sequel.

He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy exposition, but by expert omission.

A true name in sci-fi.

emmelaich• 2 years ago

'true name'?

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

THE cyberpunk book.

Also, his later books are great but the "Across Realtime" trilogy has a special place in my heart. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/167844

homefree• 2 years ago

I’m pretty sure Yudkowsky read true names and it’s what caused him to focus his life on the alignment problem.

That novella is basically an illustrated warning of misaligned super intelligence (it’s also really good!)

hinkley3• 2 years ago

I still want augmented Chess to be a sport. You get a computer not weighing more than X pounds.

TimSchumann• 2 years ago

I'm stuck halfway through Deepness in the Sky, I should pick it up again.

Also stuck on book 8 of the Wheel of Time series, I was like 5 chapters in and didn't pick up a single thread I cared about from the previous book.

Agree about the expert omission part.

komaromy• 2 years ago

Deepness was well worth it.

Wheel of Time, on the other hand, I was very glad to give up on right around the same point as you.

joshstrange3• 2 years ago

I think WoT is worth pushing through, you got stuck in the same spot a number of people do. There is definitely a lull there.

Many times I've considered re-cutting the books/audio-books for WoT to remove what I find to a be drudgery but it would be a massive task that I'm not up to. I just skip over the parts in my re-reads of the series.

I'll be the first to say that WoT has /many/ flaws but it will forever hold a special place in my heart. You just have to get past the way women are written in the series (and I understand if you can't). That's something else I'd be happy to prune out or ideally fix but that's well beyond my skill set. Elaine and Egwene especially are horribly written in the last few books (and it's not all Brandon Sanderson's fault I assume, they aren't great in the prior books either).

hinkley3• 2 years ago

Book eight may have been about when I gave up and sold the set. The dull bit in the middle of each book is when I would practice my speed reading.

About once a season I contemplate the idea of approaching either Sanderson or the Jordan estate and ask that they consider an abridged edition edited by Sanderson. You could easily knock 1500 pages out of this series and not change a single thing.

Meanwhile Rosamund Pike is doing new audio books for the series and the samples sound much better than the old one. But the first one is about forty hours. As much as I might like to claim that I would listen to her read a phone book, I don’t think I can listen to 600 hours of audiobooks for one series.

bolasanibk• 2 years ago

Aah! The infamous ‘slog’ for the WOT series. Book 10 is where things pick up again my opinion.

lll-o-lll3• 2 years ago

Yes, the self indulgence reached record heights by timing death before completion. Just so we could have infinite fields of boring politics.

In the paperbacks, each chapter with the “bad guys” had a special symbol on it, so I just skipped through the middle books reading only those. Fortunately the Dark One was still trying to progress the plot, and I don’t think I missed much.

angiosperm4• 2 years ago

Let us not neglect The Peace War and Across Realtime. The former introduced memorable tragic figures, besides its singular vision.

dwaltrip• 2 years ago

Just finished this series literally an hour ago. Very fun reads! The second book was quite the page turner.

moomin• 2 years ago

Bizarrely, there's a second sequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, but it's never been digitised.

SECProto• 2 years ago

Children Of The Sky is certainly available digitally.

throw12346512346• 2 years ago

VV is up there with Stephenson and Gibson as the top 3. I don't put Asimov, etc in there since Asimov was hard sci-fi to the max and couldn't write a character to save his life, much like later Stephenson.

I wish I could find something else like VV's work that's sort of under-the-radar. I do have to mention that things like The Three Body Problem get hype, but are several tiers below VVs work.

bosquefrio2• 2 years ago

Vinge is certainly one of the greats but so is David Brin. I would not consider him under the radar though. Some of his best are Earth, The Heart of The Comet, Glory Season.

FromOmelas• 2 years ago

not quite the same, but Iain M. Banks is in my top 5, along with Vernor Vinge.

jonathanleane• 2 years ago

This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.

Voultapher3• 2 years ago

Thomas Nau is such a fantastic villain. Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices.

atemerev• 2 years ago

Reasoned decisions (if you think that empire building is reasonable) without morality and empathy _are_ evil. This is how Putin operates.

Also, raping and torturing are very "evil for the sake of evil", if you ask me.

rakejake5• 2 years ago

I think Greg Egan in one of his novels has a line that goes like "Humans cannot be universe conquerors if they don't overcome their bug like tendencies to invade and destroy". Nah, it is this very tendency that makes them universe conquerors. Nothing to beat good old fashioned greed and discontent.

natechols3• 2 years ago

Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices

The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil, and there's never any indication given that they actually care about those terrible prices, or even reflect on them for long. Vinge is very good at channeling the Orwellian language that regimes like these use, but I didn't find his intent at all ambiguous.

The really compelling and ambiguous character in that book is [redacted spoiler], who really does grapple with the moral implications of his decisions, but ultimately chooses the not-evil path. Personally I think this also highlight's Vinge's biggest flaw as an author for me, which is that in all of his books, the most fully realized and believable protagonist is a scheming megalomaniac, with second place going to the abusive misanthrope of Rainbows End, and third to the prickly settlement leader in Marooned in Realtime. All of the more sympathetic characters feel like empty vessels that just react to the plot.

rakejake5• 2 years ago

A Deepness in the Sky was perhaps the first "hard sci-fi" novel I ever read (this was before I knew of Greg Egan). The concept of spiders and the onOff planet was just awe-inspiring.

While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwhelmed within the first paragraph of the first page). Highly entertaining and interesting.

I wonder what Vinge thought of LLMs. If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today.

A huge loss indeed.

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today.

I mean, I don't think LLMs have been notably useful in decoding unknown languages, have they?

n4r92• 2 years ago

Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language.

Could you elaborate on this? It's been a while since I read the novel. I remember the use of Focus to create obsessive problem-solvers, but not sure how it relates to generative models or LLMs.

Thinking about it, I'm not sure how useful LLMs can be for translating entirely new languages. As I understand it they rely on statistical correlations harvested from training data which would not include any existing translations by definition.

dpq• 2 years ago

I second that. Re-read it multiple times and enjoyed every minute and every page. The creative concepts making up this book such as localizers/smart dust or the Focus captivated by their plausibility, and the unsolved mystery of the onOff bothered me as much as it did Pham Nuwen.

R.I.P. dear friend, you will be missed and remembered.

rkachowski• 2 years ago

We spanned a pretty wide spectrum – politically! Yet, we KBs [Killer B’s] (Vernor was a full member ... )

Does this mean something other than a wu tang fan?

B1FF_PSUVM• 2 years ago

I think that was later ... In the 1980s there was a surfeit of B-initial SF writers (as in the article's picture).

Also there was some media noise about killer bees, and they became part of the standard dungeon zoo, I think. Plus, possibly just "the Bees" would prompt "What, the Bee Gees?", a terrible risk.

zem• 2 years ago

the "killer B's" originally referred to Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin

Voultapher3• 2 years ago

Currently reading The children of the sky. And wow I had somewhat forgotten how good sci-fi can be. So much depth, such coherent and well thought out worlds.

Klaster_1• 2 years ago

Oh man, that's sad to hear. I really loved his books, especially the ones that looked into the future from a modern day engineer point of view. "Rainbows End" comes to my mind quite often when as I read the tech news, it paints a picture of a future that seems to get closer day by day - a sci-fi that you can one realistically believe to live in one day.

reducesuffering• 2 years ago

It is astonishing how many of the great sci-fi writers are/were around California: Vernor, PK Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Huxley, Frank Herbert, Bradbury, Heinlein, Niven, etc. Per-capita has to be several orders of magnitude higher.

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Le Guin and Niven being the only ones of your list who were born there; all the rest explicitly chose to be there.

zabzonk• 2 years ago

you could probably say the same about the east coast, and NY in particular - pohl, bester et al.

sph• 2 years ago

They always had the best LSD. Not necessary, but won't hurt to explore and experience the depth of your creativity.

nabla95• 2 years ago

Scotland's per capita big name sci-fi writer contribution must be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude higher still.

aaron695• 2 years ago

Interview from ReasonTV - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alxyAeCPits (2011)

I love the cyberpunk vibe of "Prisoners of Gravity" (1992) but it only discusses "Marooned in Realtime"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERRA8qXvuyU&t=87s

steve1977• 2 years ago

He wrote some of my favorite sci-fi books. I was aware he wasn't in good health for a while already, it's still sad to hear about his passing of course. Thank you for the worlds you showed me.

Simon321• 2 years ago

He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all.

The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",[8] and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity,[4][7] 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. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.

Looks like he was spot on.

trenchgun• 2 years ago

He popularized and advanced the concept, but originally it was by von Neumann.

nabla95• 2 years ago

The concept predates von Neuman.

First known person to present the idea was mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet in the late 1700s. Not surprising, because he also laid out most ideals and values of modern liberal democracy as they are now. Amazing philosopher.

He basically invented the idea of ensemble learning (known as boosting in machine learning).

Nicolas de Condorcet and the First Intelligence Explosion Hypothesis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1609/aimag.v40i1.2855

gcr• 2 years ago

with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.

mnsc• 2 years ago

Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.

angiosperm4• 2 years ago

It has, anyway, already had a profound effect on the IT job market.

jart10• 2 years ago

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

Blackwell.

o Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I'm suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [22] has done wonderful work in this direction.

Stable Diffusion.

o Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on it.)

iPhone and Android.

o Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance.

Cicero.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

Trump.

o Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more effective than their component members). This is generally the area of "groupware", already a very popular commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from ego issues such that the contribution of different members is focussed on the team project. And of course shared data bases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team operations rather than political meetings. In a political setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the power of the persons making the rules!)

Ingress.

o Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren't for the edge that the USENET "group mind" gives the system administration and support people!) The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis' [14] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

Twitter.

o Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [13]. This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct communcation.

Atom Limbs.

o Similar direct links into brains may be feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.

Neuralink.

---

https://justine.lol/dox/singularity.txt

CuriouslyC3• 2 years ago

What we're seeing right now with LLMs is like music in the late 30s after the invention of the electric guitar. At that point people still have no idea how to use it so, so they were treating it like an amplified acoustic guitar. It took almost 40 years for people to come up with the idea of harnessing feedback and distortion to use the guitar to create otherworldly soundscapes, and another 30 beyond that before people even approached the limit of guitar's range with pedals and such.

LLMs are a game changer that are going to enable a new programming paradigm as models get faster and better at producing structured output. There are entire classes of app that couldn't exist before because there there was a non-trivial "fuzzy" language problem in the loop. Furthermore I don't think people have a conception of how good these models are going to get within 5-10 years.

throw12346512346• 2 years ago

Singularity doesn't necessarily rely on LLMs by any means. It's just that communication is improving and the number of people doing research is increasing. Weak AI is icing on top, let alone LLMs, which are being shoe-horned into everything now. VV clearly adds these two other paths:

            o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users
              may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
            o Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural
              human intellect.

https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

jimbokun• 2 years ago

Still has 6 years to be proven correct.

beambot• 2 years ago

Probably just a question of time constant / zoom on your time axis. When zoomed in up close, an exponential looks a lot like a bunch of piecewise linear components, where big breakthroughs just are a discontinuous changes in slope...

gumby• 2 years ago

Just to clarify, the “singularity” conjectures a slightly different and more interesting phenomenon, one driven by technological advances, true, but its definition was not those advances.

It was more the second derivative of future shock: technologies and culture that enabled and encouraged faster and faster change until the curve bent essentially vertical…asymptotimg to a mathematical singularity.

An example my he spoke of was that, close to the singularity, someone might found a corporation, develop a technology, make a profit from it, and then have it be obsolete by noon.

And because you can’t see the shape of the curve on the other side of such a singularity, people living on the other side of it would be incomprehensible to people on this side.

Ray Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” explored this phenomenon years before Toffler wrote “Future Shock”

ethagnawl• 2 years ago

Here's a link to the full text of _Slow Tuesday Night_: https://web.archive.org/web/20060719184509/www.scifi.com/sci...

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

Note that the "Singularity" turns up in the novel

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

where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is one of the best pretenses ever in sci-fi. (I am left wondering though if the best cultural comparison is "The Rapture" some Christians believe in making this more of a religiously motivated concept as opposed to sound futurism.)

I've long been fascinated by this differential equation

  dx
  -- = x^2
  dt

which has solutions that look like

  x = 1/(t₀-t)

which notably blows up at time t₀. It's a model of an "intelligence explosion" where improving technology speeds up the rate of technological process but the very low growth when t ≪ t₀ could also be a model for why it is hard to bootstrap a two-sided market, why some settlements fail, etc. About 20 years ago I was very interested in ecological accounting and wondering if we could outrace resource depletion and related problems and did a literature search for people developing models like this further and was pretty disappointed not to find much also it did appear as a footnote in the ecology literature here and there. Even papers like

https://agi-conf.org/2010/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/agi10si...

seem to miss it. (Surprised the lesswrong folks haven't picked it up but they don't seem too mathematically inclined)

---

Note I don't believe in the intelligence explosion because what we've seen in "Moore's law" recently is that each generation of chips is getting much more difficult and expensive to develop whereas the benefits of shrinks are shrinking and in fact we might be rudely surprised that the state of the art chips of the new future (and possibly 2024) burn up pretty quickly. It's not so clear that chipmakers would have continued to invest in a new generation if governments weren't piling huge money into a "great powers" competition... That is, already we might be past the point of economic returns.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 2 years ago

He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.

Being surprised is also an exciting outcome. Was he thinking about that too?

holoduke• 2 years ago

"We should destroy all AI out there before its taking over"

pontifier4• 2 years ago

Oh man, I sincerely hope he was signed up for cryonics. If there was someone who deserved to see what the future holds, it was him.

unnamed76ri• 2 years ago

From what I’ve read, cryonics seems like a massive scam pulled on rich people. The tissue damage in these frozen corpses is extensive and irreparable.

gamblerrr• 2 years ago

irreparable

That’s the gamble. I think you’re right though, it’s far lower odds than the snake oil salesmen present.

niplav2• 2 years ago

What evidence do you base those beliefs on?

adastra225• 2 years ago

Then you obviously haven't read much about cryonics, which involves vitrification rather than freezing to avoid such tissue damage.

Cryogenator2• 2 years ago

Oregon Brain Preservation offers cryopreservation for $5,000 (or less if you can't afford that), Cryonics Germany offers free cryopreservation, and even the most expensive providers (Tomorrow Biostasis, Alcor, and Yinfeng) are affordable through life insurance. Most of us aren't wealthy and some of us are working class. Since 2000, vitrification has replaced freezing, dramatically reducing damage, and even frozen people might be recoverable centuries from now. It's offered on a nonprofit, experimental basis by organizations with public financial statements.

niplav2• 2 years ago

Checking Alcor¹ and the Cryonics Institute² suggests no :-/

¹: https://www.alcor.org/news/ ²: https://cryonics.org/case-reports/

pontifier4• 2 years ago

I doubt either site would be updated with info about an ongoing cryopreservation.

Patrick_Devine• 2 years ago

I just finished reading Children of the Sky and re-reading A Deepness in the Sky. I've been finding with Vinge's work, along with Iain Bank's works, a lot of it is better the second time around. There's just so much to take in.

kristianp2• 2 years ago

Unfortunately Banks passed away more than 10 years ago now. It doesn't seem like that long ago that his last book came out.

boffinAudio2• 2 years ago

I once worked with a guy who was a close personal friend of Vernor, and I remember with much joy the enormous collection of science fiction he (the friend) had at his place .. literally every wall was covered in paperback shelves, and to my eyes it was a wonderland.

I casually browsed every shelf, enamoured with the collection of scifi .. until I got to what I can only describe as a Golden Book Shrine Ensconced in Halo of Respect - a carefully maintained, diligently laid out bookshelf containing every single thing Vernor Vinge had written. Everything, the friend said, including stuff that Vernor had shared with him that would never see the light of day until after he passed away. I wonder about that guy now.

It wasn't my first intro to Mr. Vinge, but it was my first intro to the fanaticism and devotion of his fan base - that in itself, was a unique phenomenon to observe. Almost religious.

Which, given Mr. Vinge's works, is awe-inspiring, ironic and tragic at the same time.

For me, it was a singular experience, realizing that science fiction literature as a genre was far more vital and important to our culture than it was granted in the mainstream. (This was the mid-90's)

Science Fiction authors are capable of inculcating much inspiration and wonder in their fans yet "scifi" is often used in a derogatory way among the literature cognescenti. Alas, this myopia occludes a great value to society, and I thank Mr. Vinge - and his fanboix - for bringing me to a place where I understood it was okay to value science fiction as a motivational form. That Golden Book Shrine Ensconced in Halo was itself a gateway to much wonder and awe.

bsenftner• 2 years ago

Science Fiction - the literature - is so different from all other media forms of SciFi there needs to be a formal separate of Science Fiction Literature from SciFi films, live action and animated series, games, and comic books. These other forms, SciFi, are the cartoon abbreviated to something else that is fun, adventure but is not Science Fiction (Literature) and the existential examination of how Science Changes Reality.

boffinAudio2• 2 years ago

Absolutely, in the same way that there are tabloid forms of journalism, citizen, and authoritative forms, also.

For me the distinction is in the nature of speculation. If you speculate about some facet, and it seems feasible but fantastic, this is the event horizon at which the subject becomes useful as well as entertaining. It was no doubt of great utility to the original developers of satellites to have had Arthur C. Clarkes' models in their minds.

However, its hardly viable to speculate about regular use of teleportation or faster than light travel .. unless, of course, we end up getting these things because some kid read a story and decided it could be done, in spite of the rest of the worlds feeling about it ..

webmaven4• 2 years ago

Well, you have a point, but the separation is hardly as stark as all that. Both film and television have works that definitely qualify as Science Fiction, and some are even original rather than adaptations from books.

A few examples: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fantastic Voyage, Moon, much of Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, Prospect, etc.

And for that matter there is plenty of SciFi in print as well, and it isn't all novelizations of movies and TV shows.

There is certainly more room for exposition in a novel (a fact which plenty of authors have abused over the decades, and plenty of directors have abdicated responsibility for by tacking on lengthy voiceover or on-screen text introductions), which often allows for more complete worldbuilding to explore whatever contrafactual premise the story is built around, but it is possible on-screen as well, as long as you don't rely solely on the dialog to convey it. For that matter, books shouldn't rely solely on the dialog for that purpose either.

Of course, on-screen dramatic works aren't the only ones that face the problem of conveying a setting in few words. Novellas, novelettes, and short stories have similar constraints to various degrees.

gitfan86• 2 years ago

Having read rainbows end just a few years before COVID was interesting.

reticulan• 2 years ago

it even name mentions the wuhan labs early on in the book

turing_complete2• 2 years ago

Just a couple years before the singularity. Sad.

turing_complete2• 2 years ago

If you never read Vernor Vinge (except for his essay on the Technological Singularity), what would be the best book to start?

geden• 2 years ago

A Fire Upon The Deep, shortly followed by A Deepness In The Sky (which is even more page turny but kinda requires AFUTD.

Across Real Time is also great and shorter.

db48x6• 2 years ago

I disagree with the notion that A Deepness in the Sky requires having read A Fire Upon the Deep. In fact, I would go so far as to say that each ends with an open question that is answered by the other, so that no matter which one you read first you will discover the answer in the second.

cwillu• 2 years ago

A Fire Upon the Deep, without question.

angiosperm4• 2 years ago

The Peace War is closer to home than Fire. Read both.

stormking2• 2 years ago

The Peace War is a mediocre adventure story followed by a brilliant sequel, Marooned in Realtime.

loudmax• 2 years ago

Agreed about A Fire Upon The Deep, optionally followed by A Deepness In The Sky. Those are classically styled hard science fiction novels with spaceships and aliens. But much more thoughtful than you might expect from a typical spaceships and aliens scifi novel.

If you're looking for something more germane to present concerns, Rainbows End is about a near future where people's interaction with the world is mediated by augmented reality and various forces are fighting over access to information.

And since I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, Marooned In Realtime is also really good.

But if you're looking for a single book, then you won't go wrong with A Fire Upon The Deep.

rdl• 2 years ago

True Names, particularly because it is short.

natechols3• 2 years ago

Seconded, and it touches on the key themes he developed later. I love how a throwaway plot element became a central part of an unrelated novel later, like he had more ideas than he had time to fully explain.

adrianhon• 2 years ago

A lot of love here for A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies") and A Deepness in the Sky (great depiction of cognitive enhancement, slower-than-light interstellar trade), but less so for Rainbows End, which is perhaps a less successful story but remains, after almost two decades, the best description of what augmented reality games and ARGs might do to the world.

liotier• 2 years ago

A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies")

Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns - although not at FaceTwitTok scale.

But still, I love Vinge's take on information entropy across time, space and social networks. A Deepness in the Sky features the profession of programmer–archaeologist and I'm here for that !

KineticLensman2• 2 years ago

Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns

I still remember the moment when I realised that the galactic network in 'Fire...' was in fact based on Usenet (which I used heavily at the time), especially how it was low bandwidth text (given the interstellar distances) and how it had a fair number of nutters posting nonsense across the galaxy ('the key insight is hexapodia'). Great author, who'll be sadly missed.

floren• 2 years ago

I recently re-read Rainbows End, and I think "do to the world" is an appropriate phrasing. It's a strikingly unpleasant vision of a world in which every space is 24/7 running dozens of microtransaction AR games... I found the part where Juan walks through the "amusement park" particularly effective, where little robots would prance around trying to entice him into interacting with them (which would incur a fee).

natechols3• 2 years ago

I think it's also one of the best descriptions of living at the onset of massive, disruptive technological changes, and how disorienting (and occasionally terrifying) this would feel. The fundamental problem with that book, for me, is that the main protagonist is (deliberately) an utterly loathsome individual, who somehow ends up as a good guy but doesn't seem to do very much learning or self-reflection.

AlwaysRock2• 2 years ago

The ARG in Rainbows end seems more realistic and somehow even enjoyable than anything ive ever heard pitched by a real company.

denton-scratch• 2 years ago

I found a text/plain copy of A Fire Upon The Deep, and read it in a single sitting. I later found a paperback edition in a second-hand bookshop, and bought it. I've since re-read it at least twice.

I'm sorry he's died.

lycopodiopsida• 2 years ago

What a great mind - the concept of computer archeology from "A Deepness in the Sky" is something I often think about looking at legacy code and maybe something our children will think about even more often.

ois_ultra• 2 years ago

Considering his novel Rainbows End is about a very sick author in his 70s getting brought back to the world by modern technological breakthroughs in the mid 2020s, I feel like we’ve let him down in some way. Maybe he knew he was already sick, even back then, maybe not. Your meticulous and inspiring level of detail will be missed.

ptero• 2 years ago

His larger works are getting a lot of praise (justifiably, I read "A fire upon the deep" on a friend recommendation, then everything else Vinge wrote), some of his short stories strongly resonated with me, too.

The cookie monster is, IMO, a thought-provoking marvel.

dgacmu• 2 years ago

Thank you for recommending this! I hadn't read it, and it was delightful. It's online: https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-...

Baeocystin• 2 years ago

Oh, that was a great read! I'd never come across it before. Thank you for posting it.

ompogUe2• 2 years ago

Oh No! So Saddened! Found The Peace War at an airport book rack in the late '80's. Then, found True Names at a library sale in the early '90's and fell in love.

"Zones of Thought" was a really smart idea once you got it. I put him as 2nd generation genius like "Hendrix -> Van Halen": "Asimov -> Vinge". Also (only real nitpick ever), like Asimov, was a little weak in dialogue and the poetry of words (comparing to Tolkein and Heinlein), but they were literally both STEM "Dr.s/PhD's".

Rainbow's End seemed to be the FAANG playbook for many years: drones, AR (google glass on), haptics, autonomous automobiles, and on and on. Was thinking literally yesterday about how the biotech and architecture/earthquake ideas hadn't made it to today (which is around when the story takes place), but the latency issues seem to have been licked well before now.

Requiescat in Pace

nl• 2 years ago

One of the true greats.

True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote.

Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer).

RIP

adamgordonbell• 2 years ago

The Bobbler was a strange idea. It made for a fun concept. I think there was more than one story in that world, if I'm remembering correctly.

Rainbow's End was very good!

phrotoma• 2 years ago

The shift of the use of bobbles from Peace War to Marooned in Realtime is _wild_. Fantastic stories, wildly creative, delightfully different.

KineticLensman2• 2 years ago

I think there was more than one story in that world

Two separate novels: 'The Peace War' and 'Marooned in Realtime', sold collectively as 'Across Realtime'. Enjoyed them both a lot, but for me 'Marooned...' had a more emotional punch, especially as it becomes clearer what had happened to the victim.

There is also a short story 'The Ungoverned' whose main character is Wil W. Brierson, the protagonist in 'Marooned...'.

Overviews without plot spoilers: 'The Peace War' describes a near-future in which bobbles (apparently indestructible stasis fields where time stands still) are used by 'hacker' types to launch an insurrection against the state. 'Marooned...' is set in the far future of the same world, where bobbles are used to support one-way time travel further into the future, where the few remaining humans try to reconnect following the mysterious disappearance of 99.9% of humanity. Both are high-concept SF, but 'Marooned...' also has elements of police procedural where a low-tech detective (Brierson) shanghaied into his future has to solve the slow murder of a high-tech individual (someone from the far future, relative to him).

at_a_remove• 2 years ago

He had the Bobbler and he also had the Babbler, the later being a short story involving the Tines ...

shostack• 2 years ago

Rainbows End was very prophetic and changed how I view technology.

tetris11• 2 years ago

The Cookie Monster was one of the best short novella's I ever read, and its influence can be seen everywhere from Greg Egan's Permutation City to episodes of Black Mirror.

Edit: I got it backwards, Egan's book came out first.

jordanpg• 2 years ago

A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are the books that opened my eyes to the utter incomprehensibility and weirdness of what intelligent alien life would really be like if it's out there.

I also credit the Transcend as being the first plausible, secular explanation for "gods" that I ever came across back in my militant atheist days.

These stories will be with me until I am gone, too. Thank you, Vernor. RIP.

Hortinstein• 2 years ago

Came here to post almost this exact sentiment. I am not sure why but in college I checked out the Peace War and I largely credit that book and a few others for getting me back into reading. A couple years ago I decided to order a first edition and it's sitting on my shelf. The deepness books were great as well. "Software archaeologists" was a fantastic concept, I felt like that today digger through excel VBA

Additionally I think he was the first sci Fi author I found who was a computer science practitioner/professor. This led me to discover other great authors like Greg Egan.

acdha• 2 years ago

I’ll echo everyone else saying you should read his books (and not just Fire/Deepness) but wanted to note that while I never met him in person, I know a few people who have and literally everyone has started by describing him as one of the nicest people they met. That seems like an accomplishment of its own.

hyperific• 2 years ago

My introduction to Vinge was Rainbow's End. As a fellow San Diegan raised in East County I found it hilarious that he represented El Cajon as a wasteland.

salojoo• 2 years ago

Vinge introduced me to space opera with zones of thought. Such amazing books I've read multiple times.

masto• 2 years ago

Vernor Vinge has an outstanding catalog of invention and accomplishments. One of that's threaded through many of his stories and has become even more relevant lately is ubiquitous computing and networking, and in particular augmented reality.

To truly understand the transformative potential of something like a VR headset if technology allowed it to be unobtrusive and omnipresent, one must read Vinge. The idea of consensual reality as portrayed in, e.g., Fast Times at Fairmont High, is kind of mind-blowing.

RecycledEle• 2 years ago

Rest In Peace, old man.

I loved A Fire Upon the Deep. It gave me many hours of pleasure and many things to think about.

nanolith• 2 years ago

His Zones of Thought series, especially, A Deepness in the Sky, remain some of my favorite science fiction. This one hits hard.

griffey• 2 years ago

I had the privilege to interview Vernor back in 2011, and continued to have interactions with him on and off in the intervening years. He was, as others have said, just immeasurably kind and thoughtful. I'm sad that I'll not have the opportunity to speak with him again.

ca98am79• 2 years ago

I emailed him out of the blue and asked him to write more stories about Pham Nuwen. He replied and was really nice and we corresponded over a couple of emails.

fl73055• 2 years ago

I had him as a CS teacher at SDSU for a class. I had no idea he was a sci-fi author when I started the class. Bought his books and was hooked.

He taught me how to implement OS thread context switching in 68000 assembly language. We also had a lab where we had to come up with a simple assembly function that executed slow or fast depending on whether it used the cache efficiently or not.

Great teacher and author, and a very nice guy in general.

burrish• 2 years ago

Did you ever ask him what he thought of today AI advancement ?

UniverseHacker2• 2 years ago

A true visionary, he will be missed. His fiction was entertaining, but also filled with important lessons that will help us prepare for the future in a better and more humane way. Thank you Vernor Vinge.

vhodges• 2 years ago

Ah, sad news indeed. I just finished re-reading The Peace War RIP

remram• 2 years ago

@dang Can't this thread be titled "Vernor Vinge has died"? I feel like this is the usual title for those. With this title it's not obvious that the news is he died yesterday.

abraxas• 2 years ago

This merits the black ribbon atop the HN banner, I think.

ViktorRay• 2 years ago

After reading this and all the comments on this thread I think I will pick up some of his books.

Too much science fiction nowadays is dystopian, cynical and pessimistic. I don’t have a problem with any individuals writing stuff like that if they really want to. People should have the freedom to write whatever they want. I just personally feel like there is too much of the cynical pessimistic stuff being written nowadays.

So seeing that Vernor Vinge wrote stores that portray science and humanity in positive hopeful and optimistic ways makes me very interested in reading his work.

djaychela• 2 years ago

Yes, do! I've only read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon The Deep but they were absolute joys, despite their intimidating page count. Just mind-bendingly inventive and continually interesting. I won't ruin anything for you, but as a reader you make assumptions which then turn out not to be true via progressive revelation as the books go on. Brilliant stuff.

dmd4• 2 years ago

Please mirror, because more people should have a copy of this: https://3e.org/vvannot

This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.

NoMoreNicksLeft5• 2 years ago

The key insight always was hexapodia.

jerf4• 2 years ago

IIRC from the annotations (it's been a while), Vinge did not intend that Twirlip was right about everything; Twirlip was merely meant to a representation of the weird things you used to get on Usenet. But it worked out fairly well. (On the one hand, this might technically be a spoiler, but on the other, I think in practice even knowing this tidbit won't actually give anything away.)

(I'm glad someone linked to this. I actually bought the annotated edition a while back and was reading it back in the Palm Pilot era, I think, but I've lost it and never quite finished it. So I'm happy to see it and have no qualms for myself about grabbing it.)

thrtythreeforty• 2 years ago

Thanks for mirroring this! This was only published on an old CD for the '93 Hugo winners, and I had a devil of a time trying to find a copy (inter-library-loan, etc) before realizing someone had archived it on archive.org. It is indeed well worth the time spent if you're a fan of Fire.

dmd4• 2 years ago

Is this annotated version on the archive.org CD? I couldn't find it in https://archive.org/download/hugo_nebula_1993

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://3e.org/vvannot

rcarmo• 2 years ago

I actually read a Fire Upon The Deep over Christmas, and then went on with the rest. The entire trilogy is pretty amazing.

dekhn3• 2 years ago

I really wish he had wrapped everything up.

joshstrange3• 2 years ago

That's interesting but I found it it incredibly difficult to read/parse through. I've read A Fire Upon the Deep many times (the whole trilogy) but the comment syntax is not easy for me to follow at all. There are snippets that make a little sense but I don't think I could read this as-is.

e402• 2 years ago

I got this on CD-ROM back in the 90's. It was really fun looking through stuff.

jhbadger2• 2 years ago

Yes, the Hugo-Nebula 1993 CD-ROM. That included some of the earliest (some say the earliest) examples of ebooks based on current fiction (rather than on out-of-copyright classic books). I have it myself still somewhere.

_emacsomancer_2• 2 years ago

There's an interview with Vinge from 2009 [0] which contains a screenshot [1] of him using Emacs with his home-brewed proto-Org-mode annotation system (which appears in parent's link).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170215121054/http://www.norwes...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170104130412/http://www.norwes...

Casteil• 2 years ago

Thank you - I love HN for things like this! A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite books/series. RIP

dleslie• 2 years ago

Based on the modeline, it's just text-mode using RCS as version control. It must be a minor mode that he wrote.

jrussino• 2 years ago

Wow! This is the internet find of the week for me. How long until this appears as its own post on the HN front page? Thanks for mirroring.

dooglius• 2 years ago

The read-first file says

In this form, it is possible to read the story without being bothered by the comments -- yet be able to see the comments on demand. (Because of production deadlines I have not seen the exact user interface for the Clarinet edition, and so some of this discussion may be slightly inconsistent with details of the final product.)

Did the final product not hold up, or is the page not presenting it right?

EdwardCoffin3• 2 years ago

The page is not presenting right, I think. This HN comment from a few years ago [1] points to a script that purports to munge the files into modern HTML, but I have not tried it myself.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876236

justinclift• 2 years ago

This seems to do the trick:

    wget -mkx -e robots=off https://3e.org/vvannot/

nessus42• 2 years ago

A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the all-time great science fiction novels.

mercutio2• 2 years ago

My favorite author of all time. 80 years is a good run, but I wish he’d seen another 20.

I would’ve loved to read his reaction to the 2020s. Rainbow’s End is by far the best prediction of what this decade has been like, from 30 years ahead.

I wish we’d gotten to read a few more books from Vinge.

Eliezer• 2 years ago

Ow.

sl-1• 2 years ago

RIP. His work is excellent and deep

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

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

r00fus2• 2 years ago

The first chapter of Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites of all time. I really some of the concepts introduced (ie, universal constants aren't universal) to resolve Fermi paradox.

r00fus2• 2 years ago

The first chapter of Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites of all time. I really love some of the concepts introduced (ie, universal constants aren't universal) to resolve Fermi paradox.

joshstrange3• 2 years ago

I've read a lot of SciFi but there was something special about Vernor Vinge IMHO. Something about the way he wrote and what he wrote about that "unlocked" various concepts for me. I'd have to sit down and think about them to list it all out but I can trace my interests in a number of concepts back to his books.

725686• 2 years ago

Don't know who Vernor Vinge was, but his name rocks!

fl73055• 2 years ago

He got his last name from his Norwegian ancestors.

r2_pilot• 2 years ago

Do yourself a favor and check out any of the books in this thread, if that's your jam. I woke up to sad news, but if someone can be introduced to his work by his passing, then it wouldn't be all bad news.

schoen• 2 years ago

On Vernor Vinge's connection to free software:

https://lwn.net/Articles/310463/

fl73055• 2 years ago

He was no slouch when it came to programming.

He taught classes that going through the actual 68000 assembly to perform the context switch between threads in an interrupt service routine (copy the saved registers from the running thread on the stack to a separate area, and overwrite them on the stack with the registers from the thread you want to switch to).

epivosism• 2 years ago

+1 on the recs for his main work. I also wanted to mention that I loved his book Tatja Grimm's world, too. It's great, alternate world fantasy, but with Vingean depth of thought about what it all might mean... Looking it up now, I see this is a rework of what must have been a very early novel for him, based on a work that came out in 1969!

Thinking about this too, I'm sure he did a great job as a professor, supporting his family and teaching. But in addition, he had this greater creative gift to reach millions, too! I think this pattern probably applies to a lot of us. Working and doing useful things during the day out of necessity... and like him, I hope everyone on HN puts in the effort and time to do something creative, too, and finds their audience. It'd have been a shame of the creative side of Vinge had never gotten out!

nodesocket2• 2 years ago

I went to San Diego State and majored in CompSCi in 2006. Vernor was a bit before my time but heard legendary stories. Rest in peace.

fl73055• 2 years ago

I had a CS class with him in the 90s, the stories were true :)

nodesocket2• 2 years ago

Nice, let’s go Aztecs in the tournament!

TheMagicHorsey• 2 years ago

This makes me so sad. He was my favorite sci-fi author. I was looking forward to more books in the Fire Upon The Deep and Deepness In The Sky universe.

supportengineer• 2 years ago

RIP to author of one of my favorite books.

If Vernor Vinge doesn't deserve the black banner atop HN, then nobody does.

TMWNN• 2 years ago

No one else has mentioned what I think are his two greatest insights besides the Singularity:

* A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.

The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>

* In said future human society pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>

(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)

underlipton2• 2 years ago

Aw, man. This is a bummer, considering how deep into "replicating Rainbows End" we are (despite everyone and their mother's insistence that we try for a "Ready Player One" future). I find it funny that it seems to be one of his least-liked novels, because the concepts and characters it plays with have always been more approachable and relatable - and less terrifying - than in much of his other work (insofar as I can tell, being wary of reading them).

I still maintain that Miyazaki needs to adapt RE before he heads out himself: https://imgur.com/a/8PeXHlb

fnordpiglet• 2 years ago

I like to think history is like the greatest book ever written. When we are born we get to open it somewhere in the middle, spend a while figuring out what’s going on, then have to close it and never know the end. But vinge clearly peaked ahead a few chapters.

_0ffh2• 2 years ago

Amazing, I came up with the same thing. There's probably more of us out there!

then have to close it and never know the end

That bit has irked me to no end since I was young!

nxobject• 2 years ago

I wonder whether, as a sci-fi writer from the golden age, it would've been a blessing or a curse to have lived this far into the 21st century.

pigeons• 2 years ago

That's a black bar event.

hyperthesis• 2 years ago

An exceptional author, A Fire Upon the Deep was his very best IMHO, and chapter 4 its best: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/0812515285___4.htm

A sensational adventure story, with the particular science-fiction skill of communicating strangeness, effortlessly.

gildandstain• 2 years ago

Such a loss! He fused good-hearted optimism and mindbending data-architecture (and mind-architecture) into ripping plots.

And +1 for Marooned in Realtime. The awesome scale reminds me of Greg Egan, but it highlights Vinge's particular genius for imagining side-effects of the technological premise.

adastra225• 2 years ago

Can we get a black line for Vernor Vinge?

auroralimon• 2 years ago

damn. one of the best SF books - a fire upon the deep - ever. RIP Vernor

AlwaysRock2• 2 years ago

So sad. I love the deep books and have read most of what Vinge has published. I was just looking to see if he had anything new coming out earlier this week. RIP Vinge.

blowsand• 2 years ago

Dang. RIP.

Rainbows End has a special place in my heart. As a teen a buddy and I used to explore the UCSD tunnels and labs at night and let our imaginations run wild about what we’d see.

uslic001• 2 years ago

I am bummed out. I first read The Witling by Vernor Vinge in the early 1980's while in high school. I have read every novel and most of his short stories/novellas since then. I have reread most of his books at least once if not more. I am currently rereading The Peace War, Time to break out my paperback of the The Witling that is falling apart and read it again in tribute to VV.

Vernor Vinge has died

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