11 ms·

A Deepness In The Sky

91 points by DanielBMarkham 16y ago

ekidd 16y ago
There's a great scene where young Pham, a kid from a medieval world, learns to maintain a 5000-year-old legacy code base on a starship: http://books.google.com/books?id=GUUvxumMf6kC&lpg=PA226&ots=8pIM_7Rc9e&pg=PA225#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=GUUvxumMf6kC&lpg=PA226&... Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. "The word for all this is 'mature programming environment.' Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here." She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. "We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don't have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I've been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need." "Almost precisely." Bret was grinning again. "With some minor revisions."
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  I love the terms "programmer-at-arms" and "programmer archeologist." I wish more people read this book, so I could use the term and not have people look at me with a blank look in their eyes.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    The above excerpt is actually an accurate description of what I do at my day job! ("program archeology") My coworker, who's been working on and off with this code base for over 12 years, never fails to point out if any of my ideas was already implemented once before. So far, everything I've suggested since starting this job 3 months ago has already been done in the past.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - jsnell 16y ago
    My job title at a previous job was Software Archaeologist, inspired by ADitS. Though my boss then went on to explain it to a customer more as an Indiana Jones of programmers than as someone working on old and crufty systems.
- andrewgodwin 16y ago
  My favourite part of the program archaeology is when he digs right down to the core and discovers the computers are still keeping time in seconds since the time when man landed on the moon (and then discovers it's really a time a bit more than five months afterwards). I never did think of UNIX time as tied to the moon landings that closely, but it's a nice fact. It was still odd seeing small negative timestamps when we were working on spacelog.org, though...
- powertower 16y ago
  I started getting excited but then quickly realized that if I had to read a sci-fi novel about coding (or maintaining a codebase) I would throw up. I spend my days coding.
  - lukev 16y ago
    It's not what the book is about, just a few interesting/realistic scenes. The book itself is epic and brilliant and spans almost every genre.
  - vietor 16y ago
    Fortunately, not everybody hates their job. My worry about coding/hacking scenes in books is that authors usually do something dumb. That makes it all the more rewarding when they sidestep it with something amusing, as in the given example. Having read 'A Deepness in the Sky', it is good, interesting, and not about coding. You can probably read it safely without having flashbacks to your life.
jerf 16y ago
The first time I read this, the middle of the book tried my patience and I wanted it to just get to the conclusion; I started skimming a bit more until I got to the end. The second time I read the book, I had planned on just skimming the middle again, but this time without the drive to know the resolution (since I remembered it from last time), I discovered that the middle of the book is really the best part. It's very detailed and well-thought-out, and the second time I didn't even have a problem with the pacing. It's just a very big book, in a good way. The only other book I know of that I have had this reaction to was the Lord of the Rings series. The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time, but subsequently, the only thing I routinely skip over is the foot chase through Rohan. (Which I remembered as being 50-60 pages long but turns out to actually be only about 12. Still manages to feel 50 pages long to me. YMMV.) Strongly recommend, and despite being listed as a "prequel" you do not need to have read A Fire Upon the Deep first; only a handful of throwaway details will be mysterious as a result and none of them matter much to you. Vinge does not fall into any of the usual "prequel" issues that for instance the Dune prequels did ("Remember that expansive universe you loved that so carefully managed to feel like just a small part of the totality? No, it was the entire totality and the only people in the universe up to that point were the direct ancestors of the people you loved.") or other things. This is truly a prequel, a story that took place before a later story, and temporal ordering is honored.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  > The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time Final denouement? Man, I gave up trying to read it after what felt like seventeen chapters of "they walked through a field."
  - pjscott 16y ago
    In Tolkien's defense, the man had some of the finest field-describing skills I have ever seen.
    - Dylanlacey 16y ago
      I believe he came closest any author ever has to walking someone else through their imagination. Tolkien only wrote a story incidentally. What he did was show us the real Middle earth, the one in his mind. Most authors are the Lonely Planet Guide to their fantasy worlds. Tolkien... Tolkien was David Attenborough.
stcredzero 16y ago
I also recommend _A Fire Upon the Deep_ which is "space opera" written as intelligently as possible by "someone who should know better." (Vernor's words)
- billswift 16y ago
  You might find this interesting. An alternate fan-fic ending of A Fire upon the Deep (and what comes after for the direct participants) by Eliezer Yudkowsky. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ultimate_Meta_Mega_Crossover http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ulti...
  - Eliezer 16y ago
    That's fundamentally fanfic of Permutation City rather than AFutD.
russnewcomer 16y ago
Vinge is, in my opinion, the preeminent hacker SF writer. He was a CS professor at SDSU and both the two ZoT novels and Rainbows End show that he really grasps the end-to-end nature of technology and how hackers interact with the world. I also thought that Rainbows End was a great story about how hackers age, and it's just as well worth reading as Deepness.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
CoffeeDregs 16y ago
I'm really curious what draws people to these two books (and I've read both books and the review). I found them both to be somewhat slow and about half-wasted with all the stuff about the "Tines". While I love Vinge's writings on the future of technology, his books (including Rainbows End and The Peace War) have never worked for me. I have a pet theory that people who really like Stross' Accelerando (super-fast, super-speculative buzz-wordy, hard science fiction), Banks' Culture books or Morgan's Market Forces would have a harder time with A Fire Upon The Deep or A Deepness In The Sky. Yes/No?
- endtime 16y ago
  I haven't read Market Forces, but Vinge, Stross, and Banks are my three favorite sci-fi authors, so I'm a counterexample to your theory. I didn't find the Tines boring...honestly, the Zones bothered me more, because it was so central to the story and so unscientific. But it still didn't really bother me, and I enjoyed both Fire and Deepness a lot.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    I thought Zones were a great idea - what did you find "unscientific" about them? (Allowing for the fact that this is all fiction).
    - metageek 16y ago
      The fact that they were simply posited, with no explanation? There was no science there, just a mystical "this is the way it is".
      - michael_nielsen 16y ago
        There are a lot of hints about how the Zones work, spread through both books. The overall picture seems to be this: * What we think of as the "laws of physics" in any given Zone are actually a kind of VM layer, running on top of some (unknown) physics. * The implementation is done through extraordinarily tiny machines. What we see as quarks, leptons etc (and the laws they follow) are in reality complex machines made of far smaller constituents. * The implementation was probably done by some power-beyond-the-powers that lives in the center of the galaxy. It uses the Zones as a protective device - civilizations in the Slow Zone, the Beyond and the Transcend have only relatively limited abilities, unless they can break through the virtualization layer. (That, incidentally, is why the Blight is such a threat in AFUTD, and why the Zones change so much in response.) If you read both books with this set of ideas in mind, a whole lot of otherwise puzzling scenes and one-off observations in the books make a great deal more sense. There's no reason to call the Zones unscientific.
drakep 16y ago
I love this book. When I first read it I was really into real time strategy games. What I took away from this book was, focus on your economy and you can do wonders when you want to flex your military. Pham Nuwen is a real role model.
rst 16y ago
So, what do people think of "focus"? (A drug treatment regime used by the "emergents" to turn people into monomaniacs.) Vinge goes out of his way to show how it could be abused --- but I sometimes get the feeling that people crunching in early-startup mode would willingly use it, at least for a time, if they had it...
- spaznode 16y ago
  It's called adderall, I'm a fan.
- arethuza 16y ago
  Greg Egan has a similar concept ("neural mods") in his book Quarantine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_%28novel%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_%28novel%29
- pontifier 16y ago
  What I thought was extremely interesting was the way the way the some focused were used... as components behaving as the intelligence behind computational tasks. The creator of Mechanical Turk undoubtedly read this book... I sure thought about creating something like that after I read it.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  If I had a timer on it, I'd sign up for Focus in a heartbeat.
- bonafidehan 16y ago
  The concept of focus was mesmerizing. It's well-accepted that our brains do amazing things under the covers, and the idea of bending our brains to a single focus speaks volumes about human intelligence and genius. Very evocative.
spaznode 16y ago
F- yeah! This (don't forget to read the other book first - a fire upon the deep) is my third favorite sci fi novel series of all time. Right after foundation series and dune collection. A must read for all hn readers.
gwern 16y ago
> At one point I think Vinge showed his manuscript to somebody else, because after that he spends a bit of time defending his description of some of the aliens The author protests a bit too much. Because it's a prequel, there is just a bit too much detail. Almost surely. He had a number of consultants and others go through _A Fire Upon the Deep_ (which I liked better), as one can see from the annotated edition: http://news.slashdot.org/story/03/09/18/0411259/Review-A-Fire-Upon-the-Deep-Special-Edition http://news.slashdot.org/story/03/09/18/0411259/Review-A-Fir...
me_again 16y ago
It's kind of interesting that the review (and the other comments here so far) doesn't even mention the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs the evil socialistic Emergency. Is that view just so ingrained that it's not even worth mentioning?
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs the evil socialistic Emergency I enjoyed that in the books, but I'll point out that his Realtime books are much more explicitly anarcho-capitalist. As an aside, I think you're wrong to characterize the economics as politics. It's very common to assume that such as "minimum wages increase unemployment at the margin" as a direct condemnation of minimum wage policies. But that presupposes a given set of values. It's quite quite possible to make a political statement in favor of minimum wages (for example), while acknowledging the economics of it. Economics and politics are two separate things. They are related, they inform each other, but there's always a case to be made for things like "I accept that doing X would have a negative effect on total economic efficiency, but we have a moral obligation to pay that price."
  - wnewman 16y ago
    For some evidence that your point "it's quite possible" isn't merely some idle hypothetical, search for "Webb" and "Seager" in http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf The same author (Leonard) also published a paper in _History of Political Economy_, "More Merciful and Not Less Effective." I remember it as similar, but I'm not finding an ungated version online.
- wildwood 16y ago
  The Emergents were socialists? I've always seen them much more as fascists. For me, the sensor network plus 'focused' monitoring was a pretty terrifying exploration of a technologicially perfect fascist state.
koevet 16y ago
Ah, the Kindle version is not available in Europe.
AndrewGreen 16y ago
What most impressed me about ADITS was how I was brought to feel great empathy and even affection for the spiders, not till the end do we see just how truly alien they and their environment are.
- wildwood 16y ago
  I agree, the 'golden age' narration was a great inversion, where the spiders seemed more human than the humans did.
simonista 16y ago
Daniel, you've really fleshed out the site since last time I looked at it -- I think when you first posted it here. It's looking really good. Any update as to how the project as a whole is going for you?
leon_ 16y ago
> Your search "A Deepness In The Sky" did not match any products in: Kindle Store Oh come on. I'm thinking about selling my kindle. Not one of the books that really interest me are available for it :/
- frossie 16y ago
  ?? It's there, and also on the B&N nook: http://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-ebook/dp/B002H8ORKM/ http://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-ebook/dp/B002H8ORKM/ http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Deepness-in-the-Sky/Vernor-Vinge/e/9781429915090/ http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Deepness-in-the-Sky/Vernor-...
  - leon_ 16y ago
    Oh, yes. You're right. But when I click on your like I get: > This title is not available for customers from your location in: > Europe :/
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
keithburgun 16y ago
Just want to point out, that the reason he cites is NOT, at all, the reason why most sci-fi sucks. The real reason that most sci-fi (and fantasy and romance and most 'genre' novels) suck is that they focus too much on the "stuff", and not on the things which actually matter in narrative fiction writing. The things that really matter in a story are characters, strong motivations, good dialogue, plot, conflict, etc... techniques of the writing craft. These are what make a book good or not, but they are kind of an afterthought to all the "STUFF" in Sci Fi books.
CratosGodOfWar 16y ago
I found it really really hard to gather with it and never finished it. Same was with "A Fire Upon Te Deep", but after the first quater it was okay for me, and I finished and liked it. What I really found hard was, that this takes all place in it's own Universe with it's own Rules. And no where is described/explained what the these things or rules are. Just like you would dive into e.g. Star Trek TV Show for the first time and see someone beam. The person would disapear and repear somewhere. Due to the fact that you see it, you understand what this beaming thing is. Not so in Vinges Universe. Same applies to Gibson and the Sprawl. It's hard to mess around with it, when no where things are explained. Mabye this is due to the translation of these books (I am a german reader). Any others experienced the same/similar ?
BoppreH 16y ago
It may be a different medium, but I was impressed with the technobabble in Mass Effect. It actually made sense. Every single detail, from astrobiology to weapon systems and shields, had a plausible explanation if you cared enough to visit the Codex. The whole game seemed like it was expanded from a giant "what-if element zero". Maybe I'm deeply wrong about all this, but I think the game is not receiving enough praise for this side.
- khafra 16y ago
  All my physicist/video gamer friends love it for that.
- Dylanlacey 16y ago
  I think the entire game was a labor of intense depth. The internal fantasy was watertight, from the technology, to the politics, to the way the story changed dynamically depending on your choices.
abecedarius 16y ago
The author has a sequel to _A Fire Upon the Deep_ coming out in the fall -- Children of the Sky. Set in the same universe.
- AlexC04 16y ago
  I've read all of Vinge's work and it really is phenomenal. It's been years since I read it and can only remember vague concepts now... the singularities, the 'focus' drug that makes his programmers super-human. I really must read them again. Quite excited to hear a new book is coming out.
istari 16y ago
Blabber is a short story, Vinge's first foray into the Zones of Thought Universe, and features several cameos from A Fire Upon the Deep: http://books.google.com/books?id=txBNZiQw2GUC&pg=PA78&dq=blabber+vinge&hl=en&ei=8N5JTePkJIqcsQOR-4XwCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=blabber%20vinge&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=txBNZiQw2GUC&pg=PA78&#3...

ekidd 16y ago

There's a great scene where young Pham, a kid from a medieval world, learns to maintain a 5000-year-old legacy code base on a starship: http://books.google.com/books?id=GUUvxumMf6kC&lpg=PA226&ots=8pIM_7Rc9e&pg=PA225#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=GUUvxumMf6kC&lpg=PA226&... Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. "The word for all this is 'mature programming environment.' Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here." She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. "We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don't have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I've been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need." "Almost precisely." Bret was grinning again. "With some minor revisions."

pavel_lishin 16y ago
I love the terms "programmer-at-arms" and "programmer archeologist." I wish more people read this book, so I could use the term and not have people look at me with a blank look in their eyes.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  The above excerpt is actually an accurate description of what I do at my day job! ("program archeology") My coworker, who's been working on and off with this code base for over 12 years, never fails to point out if any of my ideas was already implemented once before. So far, everything I've suggested since starting this job 3 months ago has already been done in the past.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- jsnell 16y ago
  My job title at a previous job was Software Archaeologist, inspired by ADitS. Though my boss then went on to explain it to a customer more as an Indiana Jones of programmers than as someone working on old and crufty systems.
andrewgodwin 16y ago
My favourite part of the program archaeology is when he digs right down to the core and discovers the computers are still keeping time in seconds since the time when man landed on the moon (and then discovers it's really a time a bit more than five months afterwards). I never did think of UNIX time as tied to the moon landings that closely, but it's a nice fact. It was still odd seeing small negative timestamps when we were working on spacelog.org, though...
powertower 16y ago
I started getting excited but then quickly realized that if I had to read a sci-fi novel about coding (or maintaining a codebase) I would throw up. I spend my days coding.
- lukev 16y ago
  It's not what the book is about, just a few interesting/realistic scenes. The book itself is epic and brilliant and spans almost every genre.
- vietor 16y ago
  Fortunately, not everybody hates their job. My worry about coding/hacking scenes in books is that authors usually do something dumb. That makes it all the more rewarding when they sidestep it with something amusing, as in the given example. Having read 'A Deepness in the Sky', it is good, interesting, and not about coding. You can probably read it safely without having flashbacks to your life.

jerf 16y ago

The first time I read this, the middle of the book tried my patience and I wanted it to just get to the conclusion; I started skimming a bit more until I got to the end. The second time I read the book, I had planned on just skimming the middle again, but this time without the drive to know the resolution (since I remembered it from last time), I discovered that the middle of the book is really the best part. It's very detailed and well-thought-out, and the second time I didn't even have a problem with the pacing. It's just a very big book, in a good way. The only other book I know of that I have had this reaction to was the Lord of the Rings series. The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time, but subsequently, the only thing I routinely skip over is the foot chase through Rohan. (Which I remembered as being 50-60 pages long but turns out to actually be only about 12. Still manages to feel 50 pages long to me. YMMV.) Strongly recommend, and despite being listed as a "prequel" you do not need to have read A Fire Upon the Deep first; only a handful of throwaway details will be mysterious as a result and none of them matter much to you. Vinge does not fall into any of the usual "prequel" issues that for instance the Dune prequels did ("Remember that expansive universe you loved that so carefully managed to feel like just a small part of the totality? No, it was the entire totality and the only people in the universe up to that point were the direct ancestors of the people you loved.") or other things. This is truly a prequel, a story that took place before a later story, and temporal ordering is honored.

pavel_lishin 16y ago
> The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time Final denouement? Man, I gave up trying to read it after what felt like seventeen chapters of "they walked through a field."
- pjscott 16y ago
  In Tolkien's defense, the man had some of the finest field-describing skills I have ever seen.
  - Dylanlacey 16y ago
    I believe he came closest any author ever has to walking someone else through their imagination. Tolkien only wrote a story incidentally. What he did was show us the real Middle earth, the one in his mind. Most authors are the Lonely Planet Guide to their fantasy worlds. Tolkien... Tolkien was David Attenborough.

stcredzero 16y ago

I also recommend _A Fire Upon the Deep_ which is "space opera" written as intelligently as possible by "someone who should know better." (Vernor's words)

billswift 16y ago
You might find this interesting. An alternate fan-fic ending of A Fire upon the Deep (and what comes after for the direct participants) by Eliezer Yudkowsky. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ultimate_Meta_Mega_Crossover http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ulti...
- Eliezer 16y ago
  That's fundamentally fanfic of Permutation City rather than AFutD.

russnewcomer 16y ago

Vinge is, in my opinion, the preeminent hacker SF writer. He was a CS professor at SDSU and both the two ZoT novels and Rainbows End show that he really grasps the end-to-end nature of technology and how hackers interact with the world. I also thought that Rainbows End was a great story about how hackers age, and it's just as well worth reading as Deepness.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

CoffeeDregs 16y ago

I'm really curious what draws people to these two books (and I've read both books and the review). I found them both to be somewhat slow and about half-wasted with all the stuff about the "Tines". While I love Vinge's writings on the future of technology, his books (including Rainbows End and The Peace War) have never worked for me. I have a pet theory that people who really like Stross' Accelerando (super-fast, super-speculative buzz-wordy, hard science fiction), Banks' Culture books or Morgan's Market Forces would have a harder time with A Fire Upon The Deep or A Deepness In The Sky. Yes/No?

endtime 16y ago
I haven't read Market Forces, but Vinge, Stross, and Banks are my three favorite sci-fi authors, so I'm a counterexample to your theory. I didn't find the Tines boring...honestly, the Zones bothered me more, because it was so central to the story and so unscientific. But it still didn't really bother me, and I enjoyed both Fire and Deepness a lot.
- arethuza 16y ago
  I thought Zones were a great idea - what did you find "unscientific" about them? (Allowing for the fact that this is all fiction).
  - metageek 16y ago
    The fact that they were simply posited, with no explanation? There was no science there, just a mystical "this is the way it is".
    - michael_nielsen 16y ago
      There are a lot of hints about how the Zones work, spread through both books. The overall picture seems to be this: * What we think of as the "laws of physics" in any given Zone are actually a kind of VM layer, running on top of some (unknown) physics. * The implementation is done through extraordinarily tiny machines. What we see as quarks, leptons etc (and the laws they follow) are in reality complex machines made of far smaller constituents. * The implementation was probably done by some power-beyond-the-powers that lives in the center of the galaxy. It uses the Zones as a protective device - civilizations in the Slow Zone, the Beyond and the Transcend have only relatively limited abilities, unless they can break through the virtualization layer. (That, incidentally, is why the Blight is such a threat in AFUTD, and why the Zones change so much in response.) If you read both books with this set of ideas in mind, a whole lot of otherwise puzzling scenes and one-off observations in the books make a great deal more sense. There's no reason to call the Zones unscientific.

drakep 16y ago

I love this book. When I first read it I was really into real time strategy games. What I took away from this book was, focus on your economy and you can do wonders when you want to flex your military. Pham Nuwen is a real role model.

rst 16y ago

So, what do people think of "focus"? (A drug treatment regime used by the "emergents" to turn people into monomaniacs.) Vinge goes out of his way to show how it could be abused --- but I sometimes get the feeling that people crunching in early-startup mode would willingly use it, at least for a time, if they had it...

spaznode 16y ago
It's called adderall, I'm a fan.
arethuza 16y ago
Greg Egan has a similar concept ("neural mods") in his book Quarantine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_%28novel%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_%28novel%29
pontifier 16y ago
What I thought was extremely interesting was the way the way the some focused were used... as components behaving as the intelligence behind computational tasks. The creator of Mechanical Turk undoubtedly read this book... I sure thought about creating something like that after I read it.
Vivtek 16y ago
If I had a timer on it, I'd sign up for Focus in a heartbeat.
bonafidehan 16y ago
The concept of focus was mesmerizing. It's well-accepted that our brains do amazing things under the covers, and the idea of bending our brains to a single focus speaks volumes about human intelligence and genius. Very evocative.

spaznode 16y ago

F- yeah! This (don't forget to read the other book first - a fire upon the deep) is my third favorite sci fi novel series of all time. Right after foundation series and dune collection. A must read for all hn readers.

gwern 16y ago

> At one point I think Vinge showed his manuscript to somebody else, because after that he spends a bit of time defending his description of some of the aliens The author protests a bit too much. Because it's a prequel, there is just a bit too much detail. Almost surely. He had a number of consultants and others go through _A Fire Upon the Deep_ (which I liked better), as one can see from the annotated edition: http://news.slashdot.org/story/03/09/18/0411259/Review-A-Fire-Upon-the-Deep-Special-Edition http://news.slashdot.org/story/03/09/18/0411259/Review-A-Fir...

me_again 16y ago

It's kind of interesting that the review (and the other comments here so far) doesn't even mention the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs the evil socialistic Emergency. Is that view just so ingrained that it's not even worth mentioning?

CWuestefeld 16y ago
the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs the evil socialistic Emergency I enjoyed that in the books, but I'll point out that his Realtime books are much more explicitly anarcho-capitalist. As an aside, I think you're wrong to characterize the economics as politics. It's very common to assume that such as "minimum wages increase unemployment at the margin" as a direct condemnation of minimum wage policies. But that presupposes a given set of values. It's quite quite possible to make a political statement in favor of minimum wages (for example), while acknowledging the economics of it. Economics and politics are two separate things. They are related, they inform each other, but there's always a case to be made for things like "I accept that doing X would have a negative effect on total economic efficiency, but we have a moral obligation to pay that price."
- wnewman 16y ago
  For some evidence that your point "it's quite possible" isn't merely some idle hypothetical, search for "Webb" and "Seager" in http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf The same author (Leonard) also published a paper in _History of Political Economy_, "More Merciful and Not Less Effective." I remember it as similar, but I'm not finding an ungated version online.
wildwood 16y ago
The Emergents were socialists? I've always seen them much more as fascists. For me, the sensor network plus 'focused' monitoring was a pretty terrifying exploration of a technologicially perfect fascist state.

koevet 16y ago

Ah, the Kindle version is not available in Europe.

AndrewGreen 16y ago

What most impressed me about ADITS was how I was brought to feel great empathy and even affection for the spiders, not till the end do we see just how truly alien they and their environment are.

wildwood 16y ago
I agree, the 'golden age' narration was a great inversion, where the spiders seemed more human than the humans did.

simonista 16y ago

Daniel, you've really fleshed out the site since last time I looked at it -- I think when you first posted it here. It's looking really good. Any update as to how the project as a whole is going for you?

leon_ 16y ago

> Your search "A Deepness In The Sky" did not match any products in: Kindle Store Oh come on. I'm thinking about selling my kindle. Not one of the books that really interest me are available for it :/

frossie 16y ago
?? It's there, and also on the B&N nook: http://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-ebook/dp/B002H8ORKM/ http://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-ebook/dp/B002H8ORKM/ http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Deepness-in-the-Sky/Vernor-Vinge/e/9781429915090/ http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Deepness-in-the-Sky/Vernor-...
- leon_ 16y ago
  Oh, yes. You're right. But when I click on your like I get: > This title is not available for customers from your location in: > Europe :/
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keithburgun 16y ago

Just want to point out, that the reason he cites is NOT, at all, the reason why most sci-fi sucks. The real reason that most sci-fi (and fantasy and romance and most 'genre' novels) suck is that they focus too much on the "stuff", and not on the things which actually matter in narrative fiction writing. The things that really matter in a story are characters, strong motivations, good dialogue, plot, conflict, etc... techniques of the writing craft. These are what make a book good or not, but they are kind of an afterthought to all the "STUFF" in Sci Fi books.

CratosGodOfWar 16y ago

I found it really really hard to gather with it and never finished it. Same was with "A Fire Upon Te Deep", but after the first quater it was okay for me, and I finished and liked it. What I really found hard was, that this takes all place in it's own Universe with it's own Rules. And no where is described/explained what the these things or rules are. Just like you would dive into e.g. Star Trek TV Show for the first time and see someone beam. The person would disapear and repear somewhere. Due to the fact that you see it, you understand what this beaming thing is. Not so in Vinges Universe. Same applies to Gibson and the Sprawl. It's hard to mess around with it, when no where things are explained. Mabye this is due to the translation of these books (I am a german reader). Any others experienced the same/similar ?

BoppreH 16y ago

It may be a different medium, but I was impressed with the technobabble in Mass Effect. It actually made sense. Every single detail, from astrobiology to weapon systems and shields, had a plausible explanation if you cared enough to visit the Codex. The whole game seemed like it was expanded from a giant "what-if element zero". Maybe I'm deeply wrong about all this, but I think the game is not receiving enough praise for this side.

khafra 16y ago
All my physicist/video gamer friends love it for that.
Dylanlacey 16y ago
I think the entire game was a labor of intense depth. The internal fantasy was watertight, from the technology, to the politics, to the way the story changed dynamically depending on your choices.

abecedarius 16y ago

The author has a sequel to _A Fire Upon the Deep_ coming out in the fall -- Children of the Sky. Set in the same universe.

AlexC04 16y ago
I've read all of Vinge's work and it really is phenomenal. It's been years since I read it and can only remember vague concepts now... the singularities, the 'focus' drug that makes his programmers super-human. I really must read them again. Quite excited to hear a new book is coming out.

istari 16y ago

Blabber is a short story, Vinge's first foray into the Zones of Thought Universe, and features several cameos from A Fire Upon the Deep: http://books.google.com/books?id=txBNZiQw2GUC&pg=PA78&dq=blabber+vinge&hl=en&ei=8N5JTePkJIqcsQOR-4XwCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=blabber%20vinge&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=txBNZiQw2GUC&pg=PA78&#3...