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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

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.
      - abecedarius 16y ago
        Yeah, I agree except for the last parenthetical remark -- I don't recall any evidence for it in the text. Why would the powers-squared need us to invoke them for their own security? I suppose it was more about protecting the wildlife preserve, to the extent it makes any sense to us.
      - nikhilgk 16y ago
        Can't remember where I read it, but another way to look at the Zones was that it breaks the idea and occurance of a technological singularity from a temporal to a spatial dimension.
      - endtime 16y ago
        Given what we know in the realm of complexity theory, I see no justification for arbitrary thresholds in computing power based on space. Nanomachines can change matter but they can't change math, and the fact of the matter is we know a reasonable amount about what we can compute (and how long it takes) and what we can't. Either P = NP or it doesn't, for example; we don't know which, but we're pretty sure the answer doesn't change dependent on where you're standing. Leaving the galactic plane isn't going to enable me to solve the halting problem.
        michael_nielsen 16y ago
        If you change the underlying physics, computational power can change quite a bit. The best-known example of this is that quantum computers are widely believed to be more powerful than classical computers. An even more striking example, though less well known, is that certain non-linear variants of quantum mechanics allow NP-complete problems to be solved in polynomial time. This result was written up here: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801041 http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801041 We could imagine, then, that what's going on is that the Universe really runs according to the laws of one of these non-linear variants of quantum mechanics, but the power-beyond-the-powers has arranged so that at the length scales that can be probed by the races in Vinge's story things look effectively like standard (linear) QM. The thing that bothers me a bit about the Zones: how is it that humans think? We are, after all, just machines. So if AI can't be built, then how is human consciousness possible? I'd be interested to know what (if any) response Vinge has to this. A possible-but-not-very-satisfactory response is that life on Earth is really an artifact from another Zone, and one that goes beyond ordinary Slow Zone capabilities. What prevents us from building AI is that we can't reproduce those capabilities. Seems a bit of a stretch.
    - seiji 16y ago
      I thought the zones being unknowable was part of the story. The Magellanic Cloud aliens created (or at least can manipulate) the zones to stop transcendental "things" like The Blight from destroying all sentience (and then becoming a problem for the Cloudies?). The zones are two things: a few layers of "play nice, you guys" and a cheap way of avoiding singularity issues muddling up the plot.
      - endtime 16y ago
        >I thought the zones being unknowable was part of the story. I'm prepared to call unknowability unscientific. >a cheap way of avoiding singularity issues muddling up the plot. Yeah, exactly. They weren't an interesting idea so much as a cheap hack.
    - weavejester 16y ago
      They're heavily implied to have been created by an ancient civilisation, either as an weapon, or as a nature-reserve for less advanced species.
arethuza 16y ago
A definite No I'm afraid - I love most of Stross' work (particularly Accelerando, which has an insane idea density), the Culture books in all of their socialistic contrarian splendour but I also love all of Vinge's work - particularly A Fire Upon the Deep (for its sheer sensawunda) and Deepness.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Another counterexample here. I've loved everything of Vinge's to date, and even like the stuff Charlie wrote before he got published (it's pretty damn freaky stuff for idea density). Don't like all the Culture books, but I do like many of them.
- gort 16y ago
  "socialistic contrarian splendour" They're really post-scarcity; they have no need for capitalism or socialism.
CWuestefeld 16y ago
I loved the Vinge novels, and I'm also a fan of Accelerando. I looked at a couple of Culture books, but really didn't like them. So here's one data point saying that things don't break out that way. Never heard of the Morgan books before. Looking them up, it looks to me like the author is playing on popular conceptions of capitalism, without a solid grounding in real economic theory. Is that a fair impression?
arohner 16y ago
Yeah, both a Deepness in the Sky and Fire upon the deep didn't do a whole lot for me. The Aliens in DitS were too "human", which was a problem for me because he went to great lengths to describe what their planet was like, and their physiology and how and when they reproduce. Oh, and they have a major world war, and discover the exact same technologies in the exact same order as humans on earth! Additionally, Vinge has very litte "reward" in his stories. Very few deep insights. For my money, Neal Stephenson is a much more entertaining SF writer. Every time I read Anathem, it changes the way I see, well, everything, for weeks after I'm done.
- kbutler 16y ago
  > Every time I read Anathem shudder I've liked some Neal Stephenson, and I wanted to like Anathem, but just could not get "into" it. Maybe I'll have to try it again. kb
  - Panoramix 16y ago
    It may start slow (though personally I loved the start), but it sure picks up towards the last third. It blew my mind into many, many pieces.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    I'd give a strong recommendation to stick with it - at first all of the strange invented terms are a bit jarring but after a while they become natural and you get to enjoy what I would regard as one of the finest work of fiction of recent years.
- tripngroove 16y ago
  Initially, I also thought the spiders were a bit too "human"... however, in thinking about the way Vinge portrays them, it was important for me to realize there's a point later in the story where he reveals that the focused translators are heavily anthropomorphizing everything they relate to the rest of the crew. I think this is a really strong suggestion that everything told from the point-of-view of the spiders is passing through the same narrator. There's a point where he specifically mentions that the translators seem to know about events and conversations they shouldn't, and we can infer this is because they've been covertly communicating with the Underhill for a long time and he's given them the back-story. Also important, I think, is that a huge contributing factor to events and technologies developing similarly to those of human civilization, is that the humans were actively manipulating information and events on the planet from the moment they arrived. I agree with you about Stephenson being fantastic; his books make you think. While I've enjoyed what I've read from Vinge, in some sense it feels much closer to the fantasy genre. I'm curious as to what folks here thought of The Baroque Cycle. I loved Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anathem... but Quicksilver seemed to drag, and I didn't have the heart to pick up the next one in the series.
Eliezer 16y ago
I read Vinge but not Stross. Can't begin to tell you how much I hate buzzword fiction.
- khafra 16y ago
  I'm surprised at the lack of Stross--Accelerando describes a fairly Hansonian singularity.
technomancy 16y ago
I love everything I've read of Vinge and can't stand Stross, so that theory sounds reasonable.
geuis 16y ago
You pegged me perfectly. I've been reading Ian M. Banks since I was a kid. Love most of Stross's novels, not just Accelerando. I thought Rainbow's End was weak writing at best. Fire was decent, as was Deepness, but overall Vinge is hit or miss with me.
Ezku 16y ago
I love Stross and Banks (have not read Morgan yet), but also have a profound love for both of the Vinge books you mentioned. Other Vinge's material, not so much. :( I hope he'll continue with the zones of thought saga some day.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Number three is nearing publication - this year! (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706449 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706449)
geden 16y ago
No. Vinge fits rather nicely into the Banks/Stross/Reynolds/Gibson/Stephenson fold of decent recentish SF.
zem 16y ago
no, not read any of morgan, but i love all three of stross, banks and vinge. 'accelerando' felt like a far more minor novel than, say, 'player of games' or 'a fire upon the deep', though. if you want super-fast, super-speculative hard-science fiction, check out baxter's xeelee sequence ('vacuum diagrams' makes an excellent starting point)
bonafidehan 16y ago
> I'm really curious what draws people to these two books (and I've read both books and the review). As far as ADitS goes: it's the epic arc of human civilization over time and also the clash of different civilizations that really brings out the hidden assumptions we make based on our human condition. Especially memorable was the history of the Qeng Ho, and how the customer planets die off as civilizations rise and fall.
abecedarius 16y ago
Accelerando was all right, but unexciting if you already read of most of the ideas back in the 90s (in Extropy, etc.). Similarly Vinge's _Rainbows End_ was a much bigger deal to me than Stross's _Halting State_. I do read Stross, just without the same avidity. I like Banks; he's a first-rate writer, as a writer. Not really in the same category for me of writers who hit my hacker sweet-spot: Vinge and Stephenson. Haven't read Morgan. A bit of a Blub paradox here wrt Stross and Vinge. My author can beat up your author?
Dylanlacey 16y ago
I'm going to have to disagree with you, all of those are some of my favorite author/books

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.
    - abecedarius 16y ago
      Yeah, I agree except for the last parenthetical remark -- I don't recall any evidence for it in the text. Why would the powers-squared need us to invoke them for their own security? I suppose it was more about protecting the wildlife preserve, to the extent it makes any sense to us.
    - nikhilgk 16y ago
      Can't remember where I read it, but another way to look at the Zones was that it breaks the idea and occurance of a technological singularity from a temporal to a spatial dimension.
    - endtime 16y ago
      Given what we know in the realm of complexity theory, I see no justification for arbitrary thresholds in computing power based on space. Nanomachines can change matter but they can't change math, and the fact of the matter is we know a reasonable amount about what we can compute (and how long it takes) and what we can't. Either P = NP or it doesn't, for example; we don't know which, but we're pretty sure the answer doesn't change dependent on where you're standing. Leaving the galactic plane isn't going to enable me to solve the halting problem.
      - michael_nielsen 16y ago
        If you change the underlying physics, computational power can change quite a bit. The best-known example of this is that quantum computers are widely believed to be more powerful than classical computers. An even more striking example, though less well known, is that certain non-linear variants of quantum mechanics allow NP-complete problems to be solved in polynomial time. This result was written up here: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801041 http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801041 We could imagine, then, that what's going on is that the Universe really runs according to the laws of one of these non-linear variants of quantum mechanics, but the power-beyond-the-powers has arranged so that at the length scales that can be probed by the races in Vinge's story things look effectively like standard (linear) QM. The thing that bothers me a bit about the Zones: how is it that humans think? We are, after all, just machines. So if AI can't be built, then how is human consciousness possible? I'd be interested to know what (if any) response Vinge has to this. A possible-but-not-very-satisfactory response is that life on Earth is really an artifact from another Zone, and one that goes beyond ordinary Slow Zone capabilities. What prevents us from building AI is that we can't reproduce those capabilities. Seems a bit of a stretch.
  - seiji 16y ago
    I thought the zones being unknowable was part of the story. The Magellanic Cloud aliens created (or at least can manipulate) the zones to stop transcendental "things" like The Blight from destroying all sentience (and then becoming a problem for the Cloudies?). The zones are two things: a few layers of "play nice, you guys" and a cheap way of avoiding singularity issues muddling up the plot.
    - endtime 16y ago
      >I thought the zones being unknowable was part of the story. I'm prepared to call unknowability unscientific. >a cheap way of avoiding singularity issues muddling up the plot. Yeah, exactly. They weren't an interesting idea so much as a cheap hack.
  - weavejester 16y ago
    They're heavily implied to have been created by an ancient civilisation, either as an weapon, or as a nature-reserve for less advanced species.

arethuza 16y ago

A definite No I'm afraid - I love most of Stross' work (particularly Accelerando, which has an insane idea density), the Culture books in all of their socialistic contrarian splendour but I also love all of Vinge's work - particularly A Fire Upon the Deep (for its sheer sensawunda) and Deepness.

Vivtek 16y ago
Another counterexample here. I've loved everything of Vinge's to date, and even like the stuff Charlie wrote before he got published (it's pretty damn freaky stuff for idea density). Don't like all the Culture books, but I do like many of them.
gort 16y ago
"socialistic contrarian splendour" They're really post-scarcity; they have no need for capitalism or socialism.

CWuestefeld 16y ago

I loved the Vinge novels, and I'm also a fan of Accelerando. I looked at a couple of Culture books, but really didn't like them. So here's one data point saying that things don't break out that way. Never heard of the Morgan books before. Looking them up, it looks to me like the author is playing on popular conceptions of capitalism, without a solid grounding in real economic theory. Is that a fair impression?

arohner 16y ago

Yeah, both a Deepness in the Sky and Fire upon the deep didn't do a whole lot for me. The Aliens in DitS were too "human", which was a problem for me because he went to great lengths to describe what their planet was like, and their physiology and how and when they reproduce. Oh, and they have a major world war, and discover the exact same technologies in the exact same order as humans on earth! Additionally, Vinge has very litte "reward" in his stories. Very few deep insights. For my money, Neal Stephenson is a much more entertaining SF writer. Every time I read Anathem, it changes the way I see, well, everything, for weeks after I'm done.

kbutler 16y ago
> Every time I read Anathem shudder I've liked some Neal Stephenson, and I wanted to like Anathem, but just could not get "into" it. Maybe I'll have to try it again. kb
- Panoramix 16y ago
  It may start slow (though personally I loved the start), but it sure picks up towards the last third. It blew my mind into many, many pieces.
- arethuza 16y ago
  I'd give a strong recommendation to stick with it - at first all of the strange invented terms are a bit jarring but after a while they become natural and you get to enjoy what I would regard as one of the finest work of fiction of recent years.
tripngroove 16y ago
Initially, I also thought the spiders were a bit too "human"... however, in thinking about the way Vinge portrays them, it was important for me to realize there's a point later in the story where he reveals that the focused translators are heavily anthropomorphizing everything they relate to the rest of the crew. I think this is a really strong suggestion that everything told from the point-of-view of the spiders is passing through the same narrator. There's a point where he specifically mentions that the translators seem to know about events and conversations they shouldn't, and we can infer this is because they've been covertly communicating with the Underhill for a long time and he's given them the back-story. Also important, I think, is that a huge contributing factor to events and technologies developing similarly to those of human civilization, is that the humans were actively manipulating information and events on the planet from the moment they arrived. I agree with you about Stephenson being fantastic; his books make you think. While I've enjoyed what I've read from Vinge, in some sense it feels much closer to the fantasy genre. I'm curious as to what folks here thought of The Baroque Cycle. I loved Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anathem... but Quicksilver seemed to drag, and I didn't have the heart to pick up the next one in the series.

Eliezer 16y ago

I read Vinge but not Stross. Can't begin to tell you how much I hate buzzword fiction.

khafra 16y ago
I'm surprised at the lack of Stross--Accelerando describes a fairly Hansonian singularity.

technomancy 16y ago

I love everything I've read of Vinge and can't stand Stross, so that theory sounds reasonable.

geuis 16y ago

You pegged me perfectly. I've been reading Ian M. Banks since I was a kid. Love most of Stross's novels, not just Accelerando. I thought Rainbow's End was weak writing at best. Fire was decent, as was Deepness, but overall Vinge is hit or miss with me.

Ezku 16y ago

I love Stross and Banks (have not read Morgan yet), but also have a profound love for both of the Vinge books you mentioned. Other Vinge's material, not so much. :( I hope he'll continue with the zones of thought saga some day.

Vivtek 16y ago
Number three is nearing publication - this year! (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706449 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706449)

geden 16y ago

No. Vinge fits rather nicely into the Banks/Stross/Reynolds/Gibson/Stephenson fold of decent recentish SF.

zem 16y ago

no, not read any of morgan, but i love all three of stross, banks and vinge. 'accelerando' felt like a far more minor novel than, say, 'player of games' or 'a fire upon the deep', though. if you want super-fast, super-speculative hard-science fiction, check out baxter's xeelee sequence ('vacuum diagrams' makes an excellent starting point)

bonafidehan 16y ago

> I'm really curious what draws people to these two books (and I've read both books and the review). As far as ADitS goes: it's the epic arc of human civilization over time and also the clash of different civilizations that really brings out the hidden assumptions we make based on our human condition. Especially memorable was the history of the Qeng Ho, and how the customer planets die off as civilizations rise and fall.

abecedarius 16y ago

Accelerando was all right, but unexciting if you already read of most of the ideas back in the 90s (in Extropy, etc.). Similarly Vinge's _Rainbows End_ was a much bigger deal to me than Stross's _Halting State_. I do read Stross, just without the same avidity. I like Banks; he's a first-rate writer, as a writer. Not really in the same category for me of writers who hit my hacker sweet-spot: Vinge and Stephenson. Haven't read Morgan. A bit of a Blub paradox here wrt Stross and Vinge. My author can beat up your author?

Dylanlacey 16y ago

I'm going to have to disagree with you, all of those are some of my favorite author/books