35 ms·

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

131 points by cybernautique 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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jrootabega 5y ago
TIL archive.org has a lending library. This is a great book.
jodrellblank 5y ago
I had to google what "ENCRYPTED DAISY download. For print-disabled users" means. ""Print disabled" books are those that have been specially formatted in the DAISY format for users who can not read regular print books. These titles are only accessible on a specialized device to patrons having a key issued by the Library of Congress." "The Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) format is a means of creating digital talking books for people who wish to hear--and to navigate--written material presented in an audible format. DAISY helps those with "print disabilities," including blindness, impaired vision, and dyslexia, to read electronic texts that have been converted into its format. The DAISY consortium was formed in 1996 by talking book libraries around the world to lead the transition from analog talking books into digital format." Imagine; machine readable, content separated from presentation, no mandatory awful UI, no DRM; dreadful. Good thing it's restricted to special Library issued keyholders only. /s
- cybernautique 5y ago
  Good catch! I wonder how access to DAISY format can be made more accessible. Perhaps a service that automatically fills out the necessary paperwork?
  - User23 5y ago
    Every state has a library for the blind that will gladly assist eligible persons. The list is here[1]. [1] https://www.loc.gov/nls/braille-audio-reading-materials/find-a-local-library/ https://www.loc.gov/nls/braille-audio-reading-materials/find...
- User23 5y ago
  To the casual reader there may be some missing context here so let me fill it in. The overwhelming majority of “print disabled” persons in the USA are blind. The Library of Congress is funded to provide gratis talking books[1] for that community and provides an app that understands the DAISY format. There are also dedicated devices, but I don’t know anyone that uses them anymore. While I agree with you that better accessibility is good for all users, your framing of this is a bit offensive[2]. I know you don’t mean to be, but you’re framing a big accessibility win for a community that faces serious everyday challenges as somehow being bad. Maybe don’t do that? Edit: There is the potential for a big mutual win here. If sighted persons could pay fair value for DTBs, it would incentivize publishers to make more titles available. We would get the format's benefits and the blind community would get access to more titles. [1] https://nlsbard.loc.gov/ https://nlsbard.loc.gov/ [2] I'm not speaking for others, I'm relaying what I was told.
flint 5y ago
The first intelligent life from earth to meet extraterestial intelligent life will be a dog, and it will speak mandrin.
Causality1 5y ago
A fantastic book. It will really make you ache for more information, though. Why do ascended beings only hang around for a few years and where do they go? What fraction of living beings survived the Blight and the Countermeasure? What is the present-day status of Earth?
- jrootabega 5y ago
  I think looking at things like Stargate SG-1 seasons 9/10 show why it's better to be left with such questions than answers. And I think that no author would be able to satisfyingly describe concepts like that anyway, just the way that their "mortal" characters perceive such concepts.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Liu Cixin managed to provide some very interesting answers regarding the nature of the cosmic dark forest and higher dimensional space in Death's End, the third book in the Three Body Problem trilogy. The Expanse book nine, Leviathan Falls, will probably explain the advanced alien conflict and unknown aggressors that proceeded human discovery in the distant past. Given how the authors have handled mysterious alien stuff so far in the first eight books, looks like they can pull it off.
    - jrootabega 5y ago
      I'll have to check it out! I've been delinquent on reading those.
      - garmaine 5y ago
        See the sibling comments... those books are SF thriller junk. Don't let me stop you from reading them if you enjoy that, but their reputation for "deep ideas" is not deserved.
    - stormking 5y ago
      Oh come on, it's a nice book and I enjoyed reading it but his physics are pure bullshit and his game theory is based on pop psychology.
DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
Easily one of my favorite books of all time. It’s also always thoroughly enjoyable to reread, there’s lots of little details and foreshadowings you catch each time.
perihelions 5y ago
If anyone's purchasing this as an ebook, note that there is (unusually) a DRM-free version available [0]. I'm not sure if this is the publisher (Tor Books) or the author's decision -- the publisher's DRM philosophy been discussed on HN [1][2] but I don't know what the current information is. [0] for example (.epub), https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/a-fire-upon-the-deep-1 https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/a-fire-upon-the-deep-1 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630104 ("One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free") [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885513 ("More on DRM and ebooks")
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  Tor books is well known for publishing their entire library DRM-free. It's pretty awesome that such a reputable publisher has made their works accessible.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    It's also something that they (and a couple other publishers) forced Amazon to note in their catalog books published DRM-free and it has long amused me how passively-aggressively that note seems to be written from Amazon's side: > At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. It feels to me this is phrased as if this is a bad thing. Amuses me every time I see it, and it's at the bottom of a lot of book descriptions these days (certainly all of Tor's books, including A Fire Upon the Deep).
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Tor Books has had a policy of not having DRM on their eBooks for years now. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/tor-books-says-cutting-drm-out-of-its-e-books-hasnt-hurt-business/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/tor-b...
chrisweekly 5y ago
Great book. I put Vinge in the same small group of criminally-underappreciated scifi authors who can really think and really write as Adrian Tchaikovsky and Nick Harkaway. Highly recommended.
mawise 5y ago
This is in my list of top 10 (ish) books I've read. If you've enjoyed it, He's got two more books in the Zones of Thought universe: A Deepness In The Sky, which follows Pham in his Queng Ho days before A Fire Upon The Deep (recommended!) as well as Children Of The Sky, which follows Ravna and the children on the Tines world as a direct sequel to Fire Upon The Deep.
- cybernautique 5y ago
  Thanks for the recommendations! I'll put them on the top of my reading list. I generally consider A Fire Upon the Deep to be one of the great achievements of human imagination. Reading this book and discovering Vinge's unique vision of a variable physics universe was akin to reading Tolkien and discovering his vision of a divine universe.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Vinge already cemented himself with the peace war books, but his ability to present otherness in the Zones of Thought books is probably his most impressive accomplishment. Spiders you both can and can’t understand, and then hive mind mammals… The facile approach would be to cut out the middleman and make hive insects, and he did not. The speed of sound aspect of his hive mind was a brilliant stroke, the intergenerational element was the cherry on top.
- jrootabega 5y ago
  I acknowledge that I'm digressing into general Vinge talk here instead of Zones of Thought, but Rainbow's End was good, too, as more of a near-future vision that, these days, would barely be considered sci-fi. It's also got some elements that are scarily analogous to current trends in government/social media/political dialogue.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    On the more general Vinge theme, his "True Names" novella is probably overlooked compared to his novels. But, along with Varley's "Press Enter" (written about the same time) is a really good early take on the "Net" and its intersection with the real world.
sillyquiet 5y ago
Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on right-to-repair issues in a way.
- roca 5y ago
  The Peace War is okay but oddly enough in this case the sequel Marooned in Realtime is much better IMHO. Much more thought-provoking and genuinely moving.
  - sillyquiet 5y ago
    yes, agreed, I really listed it because it's a necessary (imo) prologue to the events in `Marooned in Realtime`
- rout39574 5y ago
  It was my impression that he was the first articulator of the singularity concept. Other than fashion, why do you think it's outdated? I consider Rainbow's End to be a pretty good picture of what it might be like to live through the singularity. Especially evocative: the kid at the end chipping a skill his (grandfather?) worked for a career to accumulate, using it for a weekend, and then discarding it.
  - _jal 5y ago
    > why do you think it's outdated? I don't know if 'outdated' is the right word. Maybe just not that useful, except as mind-candy? It is mostly a computationally-focused reformulation of the Rapture.
    - sillyquiet 5y ago
      Yeah, this covers it for me. Maybe outdated isn't wrong so much as nothing more than a fun intellectual exercise and what if - there's no road map, there's no solid technological basis for reaching a singularity, imo there's not much theory to it outside speculation and some fairly specious projections.
si1entstill 5y ago
One of my favorites to be sure - I kept pushing this on my book club for weeks until they finally caved. Its one of those works where, when people ask "what is it about?" I can never land on a succinct answer, and I love it.
jordanpg 5y ago
These are the only sci-fi books I'm aware of that include a believable, fleshed-out secular explanation for the existence of supernatural, god-like beings in the Transcend. As an atheist who usually can't say out loud what I really think about facile, Earth-bound supernatural beliefs, I was enchanted to find this feature included in this already-mesmerizing world.
- stormking 5y ago
  When I read that Ravna had a degree in "Applied Theology", I loughed out loud.
- cybernautique 5y ago
  You might like the Nooniverse series by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, also known for their terrific work "Roadside Picnic."
btown 5y ago
Highly, highly recommend Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky [0], which won the Hugo in 2000. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony over centuries of time (in many ways thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation is in helping people to understand foreign ways of thinking. At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of philosophical antipositivism [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and description that's familiar to yourselves... even if in so doing this becomes more art than science? Is creative translation ethical if it establishes power dynamics that would not be there otherwise? There's a mind-blowing meta-narrative to this as well when you think about how the reader should interpret the book with that question in mind, though to say anything more would delve into spoilers. And lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope. While technically it's a prequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Content warnings for mind control and assault (though they're handled thoughtfully IMO). With Asimov's Foundation being adapted for TV (also recommend, if for the visuals alone), if you want even more sci-fi that speaks to societal rise and decline, and the lengths to which people will manipulate others in the name of control and survival, this is a must-read. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355 https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism
- cdogl 5y ago
  +1. A Deepness in the Sky is one of the most underrated works of speculative fiction that I've read. It is a masterwork of plotting and character work. A Fire Upon the Deep has some great ideas and some characters that have stuck with me, but I think Deepness is a far superior work. Its brilliance is that it has the structure of a great work of fiction but you can basically just read it as straight pulp science fiction and have a fun time.
CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
This is the book that reignited my love for sci-fi after college. It’s the only book I’ve ever read twice.
- db48x 5y ago
  You should read A Deepness in the Sky then :)
marstall 5y ago
For those that aren't familiar, a short teaser: Future archaeologists have traveled to a remote asteroid to investigate an alien artifact found within it, a computing device of some kind. They bring it to life and begin extracting its data and programs for their research. A debate breaks out about the substantial virus risk known to be associated with these "found" computing devices. They decide to cut and run, but not before the artifact has regained its ancient sentient awareness, unbeknownst to the crew. They wipe and rebuild their onboard computers as quickly and thoroughly as they can. But as they are rocketing away, the artifact scans their ship and finds a neglected peripheral on its surface. A software vulnerability is found! It makes its move.
- dsm9000 5y ago
  This scene in the book is maybe one of the earliest examples of fuzzing being used n fiction :-) ?
  - marstall 5y ago
    what's fuzzing?
    - detaro 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing
  - kabdib 5y ago
    Fuzzing was used in Thomas J Ryan's The Adolescence of P-1, circa 1977 (in an attack against some IBM mainframe's supervisor). (TAoP1 is a much-overlooked example of . . . well, I wouldn't call it cyberpunk, but definitely counter-culture computing. In the IBM world, I think that means you refuse to wear a tie. It's technically dated -- think modems-and-megabytes -- but still kind of fun).
    - bitwize 5y ago
      Vernor Vinge did write True Names, which is often considered a foundational cyberpunk text (even predating Gibson).
Kaibeezy 5y ago
Rainbows End No apostrophe. The last chapter is “The Missing Apostrophe”. See also: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/RainbowsEnd https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/RainbowsEn... Memorable book. The method of digitizing the library is unforgettable.
cletus 5y ago
This is one of several books I read in the 90s that I still think about and love so much. Startide Rising and Downbelow Station are the other ones that immediately springs to mind. This book (and Startide Rising) are very much in the space opera camp. There's really no basis in physics for the zones in this book but I really love the ideas. I love the Tines. I also love the idea of the arms race that was unwittingly started on this world. If you like the theme of sudden technological advance, I highly recommend CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series. They're sets of trilogies and I think it's up to ~15 books now? This series is set in the same world as Downbelow Station (tangentially). The central premise is that FTL jumping is possible but difficult. In this series, a group of would-be colonists awake from jump sleep to find they have no idea where they've jumped to. They can't get any star bearings and they end up ultimately settling on a world that has an alien species on it that technologically is around the 19th century. It's not a fast-paced series but I love the thoughtfulness and introspection of it.
- db48x 5y ago
  > There's really no basis in physics for the zones That’s because the Zones are artificial.
travisgriggs 5y ago
Have read all of Vinges works. They’re all great reads at different levels except Rainbows End (that one is a bust IMO). The nice thing about them, is that while some are loosely related, there is no order they need to be read in.
- lproven 5y ago
  Agreed. It was striking to see so many people in this thread praising _Rainbows End_, which I personally found unreadable. Context: personal SF collection of a few thousand volumes, can devour a good book in a day even it's 1000-pager. But RE defeated me.
atombender 5y ago
I enjoyed the sci-fi parts of this book. The whole thing about the ship trying to evade the Blight was some of the best hard sci-fi I've come across. What I liked less was the subplot about the children marooned in a medieval-style society of dog-like aliens, which got a bit Game of Thrones-y for my taste, and felt like a completely different book. I considered reading A Deepness in the Sky, but then learned it involves a civilization of spider-like aliens. How is it?
- int_19h 5y ago
  The spiders in Deepness are already a technological society with cars, airplanes, radio etc. Furthermore, the interaction between them and humans in space above their planet is one of the main storylines in the book. To a certain extent, it's one of those "what if we were the aliens?" kinds of stories, but very thoroughly fleshed out.
  - atombender 5y ago
    I started reading it last night. Then I remembered that I had started reading it about a year ago, but that I had given up around chapter 4. This is where the novel switches gears completely. It introduces a new narrator who describes the spider world, except in human terms with cars, royal families, blacksmiths and references places with Earth-like names like Princeton, so clearly a kind of allegorical form of storytelling. It completely put me off what was up to then pretty decent hard sci-fi. It reminded me of the fable-like way the aliens are described in The Three-Body Problem, which I did not like. I will try a few more chapters, I guess.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      If you read on, you'll eventually find out just why it's narrated the way it is. You're correct in that it's clearly metaphorical - but that actually has a compelling in-story explanation, and it is a major factor later in the plot. A (hopefully) non-spoiler TL;DR is that this has to do with how our perception of others affects our ability to humanize or dehumanize them. In fact, there's one scene near the end where this metaphorical narration is intentionally and explicitly contrasted with the actual appearance of the Spiders and their world.
dekhn 5y ago
vinge's books set me on my life path decades ago. I still feel like the first book remains unresolved.
zimmertr 5y ago
Richard Stallman told me this was his favorite book.
37ef_ced3 5y ago
Read Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster" to see one of the major inspirations for Black Mirror, and a character similar to Elon Musk. Full text here: https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-%20The%20Cookie%20Monster.htm https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-... Also everyone should read Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" to understand a plausible outcome of the technological change we are witnessing today. It's a bittersweet book, about being a small human in a world where the value of individual creative efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer might of automation and vast collaboration and technological accumulation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End You will recognize Pokemon Go, and many other things that happened after the book was published (2006). Great foresight. Wikipedia: Vernor Vinge is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and perhaps the first to present a fictional "cyberspace" (in his novella True Names). He also wrote "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky", but those are more escapist.
- bsanr 5y ago
  >It's a bittersweet book, about being a small human in a world where the value of individual creative efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer might of automation and vast collaboration and technological accumulation. I also hold, strongly and somewhat idiosyncratically, that it would work quite well as a Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki film. (Chew on that for a minute, hahah.) (EDIT: So much so that I did, at one point, badly mock-up a poster for it: https://imgur.com/a/S96hTSV https://imgur.com/a/S96hTSV) RE is phenomenally underrated, not just because of its prescience, but also because of the way that it's simultaneously accessible and layered. It's apropos that Pokemon-like entities show up in the story since, like the original Pokemon games, it's a relatively simple and straightforward story, with some complex thoughts and troubling implications drifting below the surface. I like the tagline, "A novel with one foot in the future," because it perfectly alludes to the nature of adolescence, which describes the setting and also the age (and up) of people who should be reading it if they want to get a glimpse of the times that are fast barreling towards us. Excusing further Japanese pop culture analogies, I get the feeling that Vinge fans treat it as FFTA to ZOTs' FFT. Which is a bit of a shame, kind of like eschewing 1984 for The Forever War.
undoware 5y ago
One of the best books I've ever read. Not only that, the prequel, _A Deepness in the Sky_, has the most plausible managerial villains I've ever read. Vinge, man. Vinge.
JohnMashey 5y ago
1) In a 2004 article for ACM Queue magazine, I couldn't resist excerpting the software archaeology bit as a an introductory section:https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039532 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039532 and of course, as an ancient Unix person, recognized the date.' 2) In 2007, I was Program Co-Chair for the Hot Chips conference, and got Vernor to give a keynote first day. We used keynotes for fun topics. (I had a connection via UC Berkeley Prof Kris Pister (smart dust), whose Dust Networks company I advised.) Second day, I took Vernor around the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for the morning to tour. He said he was doing a sequel to Deepness in the Sky, about Pham & Anne's battle with the Emergents (obviously winning, given Fire Upon the Deep). Years later, I asked him what happened, as the sequel never appeared. He said it was too depressing(i.e., for those who thought Deepness dark, imagine the portrayal of the Emergents worlds.)
- JohnMashey 5y ago
  An interesting theme unmentioned so far here appears in Fire.., Children… & (somewhat) in Deepness…: technology progress and it’s possible acceleration depending on the information you have. Level of civilization tech has fallen (or never existed). People a) recall that some tech worked OR b) Know specific choices are right ones OR c) Have a computer (or at least a book)with detailed instructions. Now: is it possible to rebuild tech? If so, which paths and what’s quickest way? Often one needs to build a chain of techs first. For example, as a thought experiment, a time machine can send back a VLSI design textbook (which makes clear that planar CMOS wins). If that’s to 1947, diverts from building big vacuum tube computers into pushing to VLSI as fast as possible. But if sent to 1900? Likewise, complete design for iPhone sent to 1990 doesn’t help much.
  - JohnMashey 5y ago
    As a CS professor, Vernor was always familiar with then-current computing researcher(s) and practice, then extrapolated into stories. Hence: 1981 Arpanet => True Names' cyberspace, and lookahead to issues of identity and privacy 1992: USENET => FIre's galactic communication network, with mix of well-informed commenters, flamers and out-of-touch people 1999: smart dust => Deepness' localizers (note presentation by Pister 1997) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust 2006: Wikipedia revert wars => battles to enforce augment3ed reality perceptions As for issues of sensor nets and surveillance, at 2004 Foo Camp, Pam Samuelson and I did a session where I talked about the sensor net technology and she talked about issues of surveillance, privacy, law that were already surfacing ... even years before iPhones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Samuelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Samuelson
philipswood 5y ago
I loved his "Tatja Grimm's World" for its depiction of a human of "superhuman" intelligence. There's a bit of dialog where the one character tells the other about information theory in a sentence - and the other groks it like Shannon did. In the same genre is "Understand" by Ted Chiang. For me good science fiction (if it's not for the physics or math) is often about the believable alien or superhuman intelligence.
dmd 5y ago
Here: https://3e.org/vvannot/ https://3e.org/vvannot/ is Vinge's *ANNOTATED* copy of A Fire Upon The Deep; all the editing notes he, his editors, and test readers sent to each other during the writing of the book. This should be mirrored more widely before it gets lost...
- cybernautique 5y ago
  Appreciate it! Downloading and seeding on a few different trackers :)
twodayrice 5y ago
Vernon Vinge True Names. It’s prophetic.
- dogman144 5y ago
  Cloud computing, splitting identities across platforms, general fracturing of perceptions between two humans looking at the same set of information (you can only "see" the part of cyberspace if you imagine it correctly step by step), etc. Amazing read considering when it was written.
scott-smith_us 5y ago
I was reading through a list of Hugo and Nebula award winning books (fairly late in life) when I discovered Vernor Vinge. "A Fire Upon the Deep" and also "A Deepness in the Sky" were both astonishingly great books. After that, I started going through his catalog. Can't recommend enough for lovers of hard sci-fi and expertly-crafted storytelling.
brongondwana 5y ago
My daughter is named after one of Vinge's characters! Big fan of his work.
- themadturk 5y ago
  I named a character in an unpublished novel after Ravna. It was hard coming up with justification for her name, though; last I looked (a long time ago) there was just Vinge and part of the hyphenated name of a European hotel. I decided her parents called her that because she was conceived there, a la Ron Howard and his kids.
  - brongondwana 5y ago
    Like Fenchurch with Douglass Adams!
  - int_19h 5y ago
    The name is Norwegian, like pretty much everything else about the human civilization in the Beyond.
damontal 5y ago
Started off as a great story about a super AI then … alien dogs with some kind of mind reading distributed pack intelligence? Really disappointing. Didn’t bother finishing it.
- garmaine 5y ago
  I think you very much missed the point. The tine packs don't mind read, they have high bandwidth sonic communication and their mind is brought into being through that communication. Much like the same can be said of you, whose brain consists of specialized regions with high-bandwidth communication between them. Individually they're rather dumb dogs, but together they can form a higher intelligence. It's an extremely interesting way to explore the nature of the mind, and what it means to be a conscious, thinking entity. The super-AI thing is just a thriller plot point to move the story forward, by comparison.
sporkland 5y ago
Not that it super matters, but I was turned onto Vernor Vinge novels by John Carmack. Can't find the original ref. I think it was one of his plan files, but here is a recent Twitter response to lex Friedman as well as an old slashdot q&a: https://mobile.twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1306109831401492486?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/130610983140... https://m.slashdot.org/story/7828 https://m.slashdot.org/story/7828
russnewcomer 5y ago
If you are interested in listening to an hour long podcast discussion of the novel, I was recently on the fun HugosThere podcast discussing this, one of my favorite novels. https://hugospodcast.com/podcast/hugos-there-podcast-57-a-fire-upon-the-deep-by-vernor-vinge-feat-russ-newcomer/ https://hugospodcast.com/podcast/hugos-there-podcast-57-a-fi... As someone who read the book when I was younger and the internet was younger, I’ve always wished for the ‘Net to have translation pathway headers.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
It's so good, even the omniscient viewpoint quails. The second chapter is the best of the best - as a pure adventure episode, the characters, and the way the Tines' strangeness is indirectly explained.
sincarne 5y ago
Vernor Vinge should be much better known. True Names, while a bit dated and silly-seeming now, was still quite prophetic.
ca98am79 5y ago
Vernor Vinge is awesome and I love the character Pham Nuwen. His books are some of the smartest books I have read. I remember hearing an interview with Vinge and he talks about how he loved writing because you could actually write in a way so that readers who are smarter than himself could get more out of it. I thought that was interesting. He was a computer science professor at San Diego State University. I read Dune after reading Vernor Vinge and I realized how influenced Vinge was by Dune. Dune is also a very smart book. Vinge is also the first to coin the term "The Singularity" in regards to technical innovation growing so quickly, and on top of itself, that we can't predict what is beyond.

131 points by cybernautique 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jrootabega 5y ago

TIL archive.org has a lending library. This is a great book.

jodrellblank 5y ago

I had to google what "ENCRYPTED DAISY download. For print-disabled users" means. ""Print disabled" books are those that have been specially formatted in the DAISY format for users who can not read regular print books. These titles are only accessible on a specialized device to patrons having a key issued by the Library of Congress." "The Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) format is a means of creating digital talking books for people who wish to hear--and to navigate--written material presented in an audible format. DAISY helps those with "print disabilities," including blindness, impaired vision, and dyslexia, to read electronic texts that have been converted into its format. The DAISY consortium was formed in 1996 by talking book libraries around the world to lead the transition from analog talking books into digital format." Imagine; machine readable, content separated from presentation, no mandatory awful UI, no DRM; dreadful. Good thing it's restricted to special Library issued keyholders only. /s

cybernautique 5y ago
Good catch! I wonder how access to DAISY format can be made more accessible. Perhaps a service that automatically fills out the necessary paperwork?
- User23 5y ago
  Every state has a library for the blind that will gladly assist eligible persons. The list is here[1]. [1] https://www.loc.gov/nls/braille-audio-reading-materials/find-a-local-library/ https://www.loc.gov/nls/braille-audio-reading-materials/find...
User23 5y ago
To the casual reader there may be some missing context here so let me fill it in. The overwhelming majority of “print disabled” persons in the USA are blind. The Library of Congress is funded to provide gratis talking books[1] for that community and provides an app that understands the DAISY format. There are also dedicated devices, but I don’t know anyone that uses them anymore. While I agree with you that better accessibility is good for all users, your framing of this is a bit offensive[2]. I know you don’t mean to be, but you’re framing a big accessibility win for a community that faces serious everyday challenges as somehow being bad. Maybe don’t do that? Edit: There is the potential for a big mutual win here. If sighted persons could pay fair value for DTBs, it would incentivize publishers to make more titles available. We would get the format's benefits and the blind community would get access to more titles. [1] https://nlsbard.loc.gov/ https://nlsbard.loc.gov/ [2] I'm not speaking for others, I'm relaying what I was told.

flint 5y ago

The first intelligent life from earth to meet extraterestial intelligent life will be a dog, and it will speak mandrin.

Causality1 5y ago

A fantastic book. It will really make you ache for more information, though. Why do ascended beings only hang around for a few years and where do they go? What fraction of living beings survived the Blight and the Countermeasure? What is the present-day status of Earth?

jrootabega 5y ago
I think looking at things like Stargate SG-1 seasons 9/10 show why it's better to be left with such questions than answers. And I think that no author would be able to satisfyingly describe concepts like that anyway, just the way that their "mortal" characters perceive such concepts.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Liu Cixin managed to provide some very interesting answers regarding the nature of the cosmic dark forest and higher dimensional space in Death's End, the third book in the Three Body Problem trilogy. The Expanse book nine, Leviathan Falls, will probably explain the advanced alien conflict and unknown aggressors that proceeded human discovery in the distant past. Given how the authors have handled mysterious alien stuff so far in the first eight books, looks like they can pull it off.
  - jrootabega 5y ago
    I'll have to check it out! I've been delinquent on reading those.
    - garmaine 5y ago
      See the sibling comments... those books are SF thriller junk. Don't let me stop you from reading them if you enjoy that, but their reputation for "deep ideas" is not deserved.
  - stormking 5y ago
    Oh come on, it's a nice book and I enjoyed reading it but his physics are pure bullshit and his game theory is based on pop psychology.

DoneWithAllThat 5y ago

Easily one of my favorite books of all time. It’s also always thoroughly enjoyable to reread, there’s lots of little details and foreshadowings you catch each time.

perihelions 5y ago

If anyone's purchasing this as an ebook, note that there is (unusually) a DRM-free version available [0]. I'm not sure if this is the publisher (Tor Books) or the author's decision -- the publisher's DRM philosophy been discussed on HN [1][2] but I don't know what the current information is. [0] for example (.epub), https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/a-fire-upon-the-deep-1 https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/a-fire-upon-the-deep-1 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630104 ("One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free") [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885513 ("More on DRM and ebooks")

AlotOfReading 5y ago
Tor books is well known for publishing their entire library DRM-free. It's pretty awesome that such a reputable publisher has made their works accessible.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  It's also something that they (and a couple other publishers) forced Amazon to note in their catalog books published DRM-free and it has long amused me how passively-aggressively that note seems to be written from Amazon's side: > At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. It feels to me this is phrased as if this is a bad thing. Amuses me every time I see it, and it's at the bottom of a lot of book descriptions these days (certainly all of Tor's books, including A Fire Upon the Deep).
NelsonMinar 5y ago
Tor Books has had a policy of not having DRM on their eBooks for years now. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/tor-books-says-cutting-drm-out-of-its-e-books-hasnt-hurt-business/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/tor-b...

chrisweekly 5y ago

Great book. I put Vinge in the same small group of criminally-underappreciated scifi authors who can really think and really write as Adrian Tchaikovsky and Nick Harkaway. Highly recommended.

mawise 5y ago

This is in my list of top 10 (ish) books I've read. If you've enjoyed it, He's got two more books in the Zones of Thought universe: A Deepness In The Sky, which follows Pham in his Queng Ho days before A Fire Upon The Deep (recommended!) as well as Children Of The Sky, which follows Ravna and the children on the Tines world as a direct sequel to Fire Upon The Deep.

cybernautique 5y ago
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll put them on the top of my reading list. I generally consider A Fire Upon the Deep to be one of the great achievements of human imagination. Reading this book and discovering Vinge's unique vision of a variable physics universe was akin to reading Tolkien and discovering his vision of a divine universe.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Vinge already cemented himself with the peace war books, but his ability to present otherness in the Zones of Thought books is probably his most impressive accomplishment. Spiders you both can and can’t understand, and then hive mind mammals… The facile approach would be to cut out the middleman and make hive insects, and he did not. The speed of sound aspect of his hive mind was a brilliant stroke, the intergenerational element was the cherry on top.
jrootabega 5y ago
I acknowledge that I'm digressing into general Vinge talk here instead of Zones of Thought, but Rainbow's End was good, too, as more of a near-future vision that, these days, would barely be considered sci-fi. It's also got some elements that are scarily analogous to current trends in government/social media/political dialogue.
- ghaff 5y ago
  On the more general Vinge theme, his "True Names" novella is probably overlooked compared to his novels. But, along with Varley's "Press Enter" (written about the same time) is a really good early take on the "Net" and its intersection with the real world.

sillyquiet 5y ago

Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on right-to-repair issues in a way.

roca 5y ago
The Peace War is okay but oddly enough in this case the sequel Marooned in Realtime is much better IMHO. Much more thought-provoking and genuinely moving.
- sillyquiet 5y ago
  yes, agreed, I really listed it because it's a necessary (imo) prologue to the events in `Marooned in Realtime`
rout39574 5y ago
It was my impression that he was the first articulator of the singularity concept. Other than fashion, why do you think it's outdated? I consider Rainbow's End to be a pretty good picture of what it might be like to live through the singularity. Especially evocative: the kid at the end chipping a skill his (grandfather?) worked for a career to accumulate, using it for a weekend, and then discarding it.
- _jal 5y ago
  > why do you think it's outdated? I don't know if 'outdated' is the right word. Maybe just not that useful, except as mind-candy? It is mostly a computationally-focused reformulation of the Rapture.
  - sillyquiet 5y ago
    Yeah, this covers it for me. Maybe outdated isn't wrong so much as nothing more than a fun intellectual exercise and what if - there's no road map, there's no solid technological basis for reaching a singularity, imo there's not much theory to it outside speculation and some fairly specious projections.

si1entstill 5y ago

One of my favorites to be sure - I kept pushing this on my book club for weeks until they finally caved. Its one of those works where, when people ask "what is it about?" I can never land on a succinct answer, and I love it.

jordanpg 5y ago

These are the only sci-fi books I'm aware of that include a believable, fleshed-out secular explanation for the existence of supernatural, god-like beings in the Transcend. As an atheist who usually can't say out loud what I really think about facile, Earth-bound supernatural beliefs, I was enchanted to find this feature included in this already-mesmerizing world.

stormking 5y ago
When I read that Ravna had a degree in "Applied Theology", I loughed out loud.
cybernautique 5y ago
You might like the Nooniverse series by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, also known for their terrific work "Roadside Picnic."

btown 5y ago

Highly, highly recommend Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky [0], which won the Hugo in 2000. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony over centuries of time (in many ways thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation is in helping people to understand foreign ways of thinking. At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of philosophical antipositivism [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and description that's familiar to yourselves... even if in so doing this becomes more art than science? Is creative translation ethical if it establishes power dynamics that would not be there otherwise? There's a mind-blowing meta-narrative to this as well when you think about how the reader should interpret the book with that question in mind, though to say anything more would delve into spoilers. And lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope. While technically it's a prequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Content warnings for mind control and assault (though they're handled thoughtfully IMO). With Asimov's Foundation being adapted for TV (also recommend, if for the visuals alone), if you want even more sci-fi that speaks to societal rise and decline, and the lengths to which people will manipulate others in the name of control and survival, this is a must-read. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355 https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism

cdogl 5y ago
+1. A Deepness in the Sky is one of the most underrated works of speculative fiction that I've read. It is a masterwork of plotting and character work. A Fire Upon the Deep has some great ideas and some characters that have stuck with me, but I think Deepness is a far superior work. Its brilliance is that it has the structure of a great work of fiction but you can basically just read it as straight pulp science fiction and have a fun time.

CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago

This is the book that reignited my love for sci-fi after college. It’s the only book I’ve ever read twice.

db48x 5y ago
You should read A Deepness in the Sky then :)

marstall 5y ago

For those that aren't familiar, a short teaser: Future archaeologists have traveled to a remote asteroid to investigate an alien artifact found within it, a computing device of some kind. They bring it to life and begin extracting its data and programs for their research. A debate breaks out about the substantial virus risk known to be associated with these "found" computing devices. They decide to cut and run, but not before the artifact has regained its ancient sentient awareness, unbeknownst to the crew. They wipe and rebuild their onboard computers as quickly and thoroughly as they can. But as they are rocketing away, the artifact scans their ship and finds a neglected peripheral on its surface. A software vulnerability is found! It makes its move.

dsm9000 5y ago
This scene in the book is maybe one of the earliest examples of fuzzing being used n fiction :-) ?
- marstall 5y ago
  what's fuzzing?
  - detaro 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing
- kabdib 5y ago
  Fuzzing was used in Thomas J Ryan's The Adolescence of P-1, circa 1977 (in an attack against some IBM mainframe's supervisor). (TAoP1 is a much-overlooked example of . . . well, I wouldn't call it cyberpunk, but definitely counter-culture computing. In the IBM world, I think that means you refuse to wear a tie. It's technically dated -- think modems-and-megabytes -- but still kind of fun).
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Vernor Vinge did write True Names, which is often considered a foundational cyberpunk text (even predating Gibson).

Kaibeezy 5y ago

Rainbows End No apostrophe. The last chapter is “The Missing Apostrophe”. See also: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/RainbowsEnd https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/RainbowsEn... Memorable book. The method of digitizing the library is unforgettable.

cletus 5y ago

This is one of several books I read in the 90s that I still think about and love so much. Startide Rising and Downbelow Station are the other ones that immediately springs to mind. This book (and Startide Rising) are very much in the space opera camp. There's really no basis in physics for the zones in this book but I really love the ideas. I love the Tines. I also love the idea of the arms race that was unwittingly started on this world. If you like the theme of sudden technological advance, I highly recommend CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series. They're sets of trilogies and I think it's up to ~15 books now? This series is set in the same world as Downbelow Station (tangentially). The central premise is that FTL jumping is possible but difficult. In this series, a group of would-be colonists awake from jump sleep to find they have no idea where they've jumped to. They can't get any star bearings and they end up ultimately settling on a world that has an alien species on it that technologically is around the 19th century. It's not a fast-paced series but I love the thoughtfulness and introspection of it.

db48x 5y ago
> There's really no basis in physics for the zones That’s because the Zones are artificial.

travisgriggs 5y ago

Have read all of Vinges works. They’re all great reads at different levels except Rainbows End (that one is a bust IMO). The nice thing about them, is that while some are loosely related, there is no order they need to be read in.

lproven 5y ago
Agreed. It was striking to see so many people in this thread praising _Rainbows End_, which I personally found unreadable. Context: personal SF collection of a few thousand volumes, can devour a good book in a day even it's 1000-pager. But RE defeated me.

atombender 5y ago

I enjoyed the sci-fi parts of this book. The whole thing about the ship trying to evade the Blight was some of the best hard sci-fi I've come across. What I liked less was the subplot about the children marooned in a medieval-style society of dog-like aliens, which got a bit Game of Thrones-y for my taste, and felt like a completely different book. I considered reading A Deepness in the Sky, but then learned it involves a civilization of spider-like aliens. How is it?

int_19h 5y ago
The spiders in Deepness are already a technological society with cars, airplanes, radio etc. Furthermore, the interaction between them and humans in space above their planet is one of the main storylines in the book. To a certain extent, it's one of those "what if we were the aliens?" kinds of stories, but very thoroughly fleshed out.
- atombender 5y ago
  I started reading it last night. Then I remembered that I had started reading it about a year ago, but that I had given up around chapter 4. This is where the novel switches gears completely. It introduces a new narrator who describes the spider world, except in human terms with cars, royal families, blacksmiths and references places with Earth-like names like Princeton, so clearly a kind of allegorical form of storytelling. It completely put me off what was up to then pretty decent hard sci-fi. It reminded me of the fable-like way the aliens are described in The Three-Body Problem, which I did not like. I will try a few more chapters, I guess.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    If you read on, you'll eventually find out just why it's narrated the way it is. You're correct in that it's clearly metaphorical - but that actually has a compelling in-story explanation, and it is a major factor later in the plot. A (hopefully) non-spoiler TL;DR is that this has to do with how our perception of others affects our ability to humanize or dehumanize them. In fact, there's one scene near the end where this metaphorical narration is intentionally and explicitly contrasted with the actual appearance of the Spiders and their world.

dekhn 5y ago

vinge's books set me on my life path decades ago. I still feel like the first book remains unresolved.

zimmertr 5y ago

Richard Stallman told me this was his favorite book.

37ef_ced3 5y ago

Read Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster" to see one of the major inspirations for Black Mirror, and a character similar to Elon Musk. Full text here: https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-%20The%20Cookie%20Monster.htm https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-... Also everyone should read Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" to understand a plausible outcome of the technological change we are witnessing today. It's a bittersweet book, about being a small human in a world where the value of individual creative efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer might of automation and vast collaboration and technological accumulation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End You will recognize Pokemon Go, and many other things that happened after the book was published (2006). Great foresight. Wikipedia: Vernor Vinge is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and perhaps the first to present a fictional "cyberspace" (in his novella True Names). He also wrote "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky", but those are more escapist.

bsanr 5y ago
>It's a bittersweet book, about being a small human in a world where the value of individual creative efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer might of automation and vast collaboration and technological accumulation. I also hold, strongly and somewhat idiosyncratically, that it would work quite well as a Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki film. (Chew on that for a minute, hahah.) (EDIT: So much so that I did, at one point, badly mock-up a poster for it: https://imgur.com/a/S96hTSV https://imgur.com/a/S96hTSV) RE is phenomenally underrated, not just because of its prescience, but also because of the way that it's simultaneously accessible and layered. It's apropos that Pokemon-like entities show up in the story since, like the original Pokemon games, it's a relatively simple and straightforward story, with some complex thoughts and troubling implications drifting below the surface. I like the tagline, "A novel with one foot in the future," because it perfectly alludes to the nature of adolescence, which describes the setting and also the age (and up) of people who should be reading it if they want to get a glimpse of the times that are fast barreling towards us. Excusing further Japanese pop culture analogies, I get the feeling that Vinge fans treat it as FFTA to ZOTs' FFT. Which is a bit of a shame, kind of like eschewing 1984 for The Forever War.

undoware 5y ago

One of the best books I've ever read. Not only that, the prequel, _A Deepness in the Sky_, has the most plausible managerial villains I've ever read. Vinge, man. Vinge.

JohnMashey 5y ago

1) In a 2004 article for ACM Queue magazine, I couldn't resist excerpting the software archaeology bit as a an introductory section:https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039532 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039532 and of course, as an ancient Unix person, recognized the date.' 2) In 2007, I was Program Co-Chair for the Hot Chips conference, and got Vernor to give a keynote first day. We used keynotes for fun topics. (I had a connection via UC Berkeley Prof Kris Pister (smart dust), whose Dust Networks company I advised.) Second day, I took Vernor around the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for the morning to tour. He said he was doing a sequel to Deepness in the Sky, about Pham & Anne's battle with the Emergents (obviously winning, given Fire Upon the Deep). Years later, I asked him what happened, as the sequel never appeared. He said it was too depressing(i.e., for those who thought Deepness dark, imagine the portrayal of the Emergents worlds.)

JohnMashey 5y ago
An interesting theme unmentioned so far here appears in Fire.., Children… & (somewhat) in Deepness…: technology progress and it’s possible acceleration depending on the information you have. Level of civilization tech has fallen (or never existed). People a) recall that some tech worked OR b) Know specific choices are right ones OR c) Have a computer (or at least a book)with detailed instructions. Now: is it possible to rebuild tech? If so, which paths and what’s quickest way? Often one needs to build a chain of techs first. For example, as a thought experiment, a time machine can send back a VLSI design textbook (which makes clear that planar CMOS wins). If that’s to 1947, diverts from building big vacuum tube computers into pushing to VLSI as fast as possible. But if sent to 1900? Likewise, complete design for iPhone sent to 1990 doesn’t help much.
- JohnMashey 5y ago
  As a CS professor, Vernor was always familiar with then-current computing researcher(s) and practice, then extrapolated into stories. Hence: 1981 Arpanet => True Names' cyberspace, and lookahead to issues of identity and privacy 1992: USENET => FIre's galactic communication network, with mix of well-informed commenters, flamers and out-of-touch people 1999: smart dust => Deepness' localizers (note presentation by Pister 1997) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust 2006: Wikipedia revert wars => battles to enforce augment3ed reality perceptions As for issues of sensor nets and surveillance, at 2004 Foo Camp, Pam Samuelson and I did a session where I talked about the sensor net technology and she talked about issues of surveillance, privacy, law that were already surfacing ... even years before iPhones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Samuelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Samuelson

philipswood 5y ago

I loved his "Tatja Grimm's World" for its depiction of a human of "superhuman" intelligence. There's a bit of dialog where the one character tells the other about information theory in a sentence - and the other groks it like Shannon did. In the same genre is "Understand" by Ted Chiang. For me good science fiction (if it's not for the physics or math) is often about the believable alien or superhuman intelligence.

dmd 5y ago

Here: https://3e.org/vvannot/ https://3e.org/vvannot/ is Vinge's *ANNOTATED* copy of A Fire Upon The Deep; all the editing notes he, his editors, and test readers sent to each other during the writing of the book. This should be mirrored more widely before it gets lost...

cybernautique 5y ago
Appreciate it! Downloading and seeding on a few different trackers :)

twodayrice 5y ago

Vernon Vinge True Names. It’s prophetic.

dogman144 5y ago
Cloud computing, splitting identities across platforms, general fracturing of perceptions between two humans looking at the same set of information (you can only "see" the part of cyberspace if you imagine it correctly step by step), etc. Amazing read considering when it was written.

scott-smith_us 5y ago

I was reading through a list of Hugo and Nebula award winning books (fairly late in life) when I discovered Vernor Vinge. "A Fire Upon the Deep" and also "A Deepness in the Sky" were both astonishingly great books. After that, I started going through his catalog. Can't recommend enough for lovers of hard sci-fi and expertly-crafted storytelling.

brongondwana 5y ago

My daughter is named after one of Vinge's characters! Big fan of his work.

themadturk 5y ago
I named a character in an unpublished novel after Ravna. It was hard coming up with justification for her name, though; last I looked (a long time ago) there was just Vinge and part of the hyphenated name of a European hotel. I decided her parents called her that because she was conceived there, a la Ron Howard and his kids.
- brongondwana 5y ago
  Like Fenchurch with Douglass Adams!
- int_19h 5y ago
  The name is Norwegian, like pretty much everything else about the human civilization in the Beyond.

damontal 5y ago

Started off as a great story about a super AI then … alien dogs with some kind of mind reading distributed pack intelligence? Really disappointing. Didn’t bother finishing it.

garmaine 5y ago
I think you very much missed the point. The tine packs don't mind read, they have high bandwidth sonic communication and their mind is brought into being through that communication. Much like the same can be said of you, whose brain consists of specialized regions with high-bandwidth communication between them. Individually they're rather dumb dogs, but together they can form a higher intelligence. It's an extremely interesting way to explore the nature of the mind, and what it means to be a conscious, thinking entity. The super-AI thing is just a thriller plot point to move the story forward, by comparison.

sporkland 5y ago

Not that it super matters, but I was turned onto Vernor Vinge novels by John Carmack. Can't find the original ref. I think it was one of his plan files, but here is a recent Twitter response to lex Friedman as well as an old slashdot q&a: https://mobile.twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1306109831401492486?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/130610983140... https://m.slashdot.org/story/7828 https://m.slashdot.org/story/7828

russnewcomer 5y ago

If you are interested in listening to an hour long podcast discussion of the novel, I was recently on the fun HugosThere podcast discussing this, one of my favorite novels. https://hugospodcast.com/podcast/hugos-there-podcast-57-a-fire-upon-the-deep-by-vernor-vinge-feat-russ-newcomer/ https://hugospodcast.com/podcast/hugos-there-podcast-57-a-fi... As someone who read the book when I was younger and the internet was younger, I’ve always wished for the ‘Net to have translation pathway headers.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

It's so good, even the omniscient viewpoint quails. The second chapter is the best of the best - as a pure adventure episode, the characters, and the way the Tines' strangeness is indirectly explained.

sincarne 5y ago

Vernor Vinge should be much better known. True Names, while a bit dated and silly-seeming now, was still quite prophetic.

ca98am79 5y ago

Vernor Vinge is awesome and I love the character Pham Nuwen. His books are some of the smartest books I have read. I remember hearing an interview with Vinge and he talks about how he loved writing because you could actually write in a way so that readers who are smarter than himself could get more out of it. I thought that was interesting. He was a computer science professor at San Diego State University. I read Dune after reading Vernor Vinge and I realized how influenced Vinge was by Dune. Dune is also a very smart book. Vinge is also the first to coin the term "The Singularity" in regards to technical innovation growing so quickly, and on top of itself, that we can't predict what is beyond.