40 ms·

Vernor Vinge has died

• demaga 3y ago
  Haven't read his fiction works yet, but his singularity piece is very interesting: https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
  • nabla9 3y ago
    "Rainbows End" is his singularity book.
    • tialaramex 3y ago
      I would argue that all of Vinge's longer works are about Singularitarian disasters. In Tatja we eventually figure out that Tatja herself is arguably the disaster. In Fire it was asleep in the library, and I think in Rainbows there's both Rabbit obviously and the weapon the story focuses on. You can think of the apparent survival of Rabbit as a hint of doom right at the end, like the fact R's diary is in the slush pile at the end of the Watchmen comic book.
      • nabla9 3y ago
        Vinge's technological singularity is explosion of things changing, not "rapture of nerds".
      • Vetch 3y ago
        I disagree with your characterization of Vinge's works as primarily about disasters but I agree they were all about an accelerating technological pace and its relation with intelligence. I'm fairly certain the mysterious event in Marooned in Realtime was Ascension. For Fire Upon Deep, it was sealed and there was a powerful countermeasure. The rabbit of Rainbows End felt like a trickster to me. Child-like playfulness, fey-like chaotic neutral at worst. I do not interpret Rabbit's survival as hints of doom. The weapon was plain old human abuse of power for control.
        • tialaramex 3y ago
          I think I've said "catastrophes" before rather than "disasters" and I think that's a better word, but I stand by it. It doesn't matter that Rabbit doesn't intend harm. Neither does Tatja, at least to those who aren't trying to harm her. But well, look at what she does, at first she almost gets a few dozen people killed, reckless teenager but hardly extraordinary, next time we see her she's about to tear apart a kingdom to fraudulently seize power, and as collateral she's (without telling them) ensured everybody she knew previously will die if she fails. By the end Tatja has started a war in order to seize control of a means to signal off world. Only two other people on her world even realises what "signalling off world" would even mean, but she's potentially going to kill huge numbers of people to achieve it anyway. She's a catastrophe even though that wasn't her intent. She does apologise, for whatever it's worth, right at the very end, to people who were close to her and from whom she belatedly realises she is now so distant. Rabbit is indeed just playing. When the library nearly falls over and kills a lot of university staff and students, that's just a small taste of what happens when playful Rabbit forgets for a moment that this isn't really just a game. Consider just how powerful Rabbit is remembering that's a distraction. The whole fight, which causes massive disruption to the city and easily could have led to enormous loss of life, isn't what Rabbit was really doing, it was just to distract Bob's team so that they don't focus on the labs for a few hours. And remember that Rabbit's goal here is clearly to secure the weapon for itself, not to deny it to the antagonist.
          • underlipton 3y ago
            This is a compelling argument, but I think it's overly pessimistic. Back on the human side, the ending sees Robert adapting to his situation; he loses his left arm (his "sinister"), and it looks like he's lost his wife for good, but he's managed to find some amount of synergy with the new world and technology he's surrounded by. Combined with Rabbit's temporary "defeat" (an experience that, if he's truly a super-intelligence capable of true learning and growth, should lead him to different means and even ends in the future, if nothing else), the implicit conclusion seems to be a future with an imperfect but livable melding of humanity and technology. Not too different from what's come before. Putting all of human history onto a single drive likewise might seem like a diminishing of its significance, but the fact is that it's still there to dive into, should one desire. That's arguably a step up from the past.
      • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        The Rabbit had a sense of morality. I do not think it intended to enslave or destroy humanity, or any other monstrous end. It kept bargains that it could have cheated, when cheating those bargains cost it nothing. This is at least a hint of a sense of justice. The Rabbit was likely the adversary of some other entity, perhaps something very Blight-like.
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      I'm half-convinced that the Rabbit was an ancient trickster god, and not an AI. Is AI even the correct term? If the Rabbit was a technological non-human intelligence, then surely it was never created (even by accident), and emerged/grew from the computosphere. No governments seemed to be aware of any other government having created it, and two of the nearly-main characters were special operatives tasked with knowing about shit like that and shutting it down before it could result in doomsday scenarios. I suspect very strongly that had we gotten a followup or two, it would have turned out that the Rabbit had been around for a very long time before even the first transistor.
    • hinkley 3y ago
      Marooned in Space Time is about people who missed the singularity.
• progbits 3y ago
  I knew "Fire upon the deep" would be a good book just few pages in, where in acknowledgements Vinge thanks "the organizers of the Arctic ’88 distributed systems course at the University of Tromsø".
• growt 3y ago
  Doesn’t he deserve the black bar on top of HN?
  • ilaksh 3y ago
    Yes. I assume the admin is sleeping. @dang
    • layer8 3y ago
      I don't think "@dang" is doing anything. You need to email hn@ycombinator.com.
  • dbuxton 3y ago
    +1
  • sdeer 3y ago
    +1
  • _0ffh 3y ago
    agreed!
  • ompogUe 3y ago
    +1
• arethuza 3y ago
  "So High, So Low, So Many Things to Know."
• re 3y ago
  If you haven't read A Fire Upon The Deep (or even if you already have), you can read the prologue and first few chapters here: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep.htm https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/A_Fire_Upon_the_De...
• jl6 3y ago
  Oh man, this makes me sad. I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wrote. A Deepness in the Sky is a worthy sequel. He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy exposition, but by expert omission. A true name in sci-fi.
  • emmelaich 3y ago
    'true name'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names THE cyberpunk book. Also, his later books are great but the "Across Realtime" trilogy has a special place in my heart. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/167844 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/167844
    • homefree 3y ago
      I’m pretty sure Yudkowsky read true names and it’s what caused him to focus his life on the alignment problem. That novella is basically an illustrated warning of misaligned super intelligence (it’s also really good!)
    • hinkley 3y ago
      I still want augmented Chess to be a sport. You get a computer not weighing more than X pounds.
  • TimSchumann 3y ago
    I'm stuck halfway through Deepness in the Sky, I should pick it up again. Also stuck on book 8 of the Wheel of Time series, I was like 5 chapters in and didn't pick up a single thread I cared about from the previous book. Agree about the expert omission part.
    • komaromy 3y ago
      Deepness was well worth it. Wheel of Time, on the other hand, I was very glad to give up on right around the same point as you.
• jonathanleane 3y ago
  This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.
  • Voultapher 3y ago
    Thomas Nau is such a fantastic villain. Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices.
    • atemerev 3y ago
      Reasoned decisions (if you think that empire building is reasonable) without morality and empathy _are_ evil. This is how Putin operates. Also, raping and torturing are very "evil for the sake of evil", if you ask me.
      • smogcutter 3y ago
        Yeah, discovering Nau’s chamber of horrors is meant to strip any illusions about his motivations.
        • Voultapher 3y ago
          Book spoilers. IIRC wasn't it the chamber/ship of someone he worked with, that he tolerated? Read it like six or seven years ago, so the details are fuzzy. The impression I kept was that he did a lot of evil stuff not because he relished the suffering he created in others, but because he didn't mind it.
          • vvillena 3y ago
            Yes, it was not his chamber, but Nau never wanted one because he kept a pet in the open.
          • int_19h 3y ago
            It's both. On one hand, he is aware that one of his valued subordinates "needs" to regularly murder people, and doesn't consider it an issue so long as that subordinate remains productive and is kept in check to avoid "wasting resources". But there's also a record of him personally torturing and raping one of the captives for the sake of it - which he keeps around, presumably to rewatch every now and then.
• rkachowski 3y ago
  > We spanned a pretty wide spectrum – politically! Yet, we KBs [Killer B’s] (Vernor was a full member ... ) Does this mean something other than a wu tang fan?
  • B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
    I think that was later ... In the 1980s there was a surfeit of B-initial SF writers (as in the article's picture). Also there was some media noise about killer bees, and they became part of the standard dungeon zoo, I think. Plus, possibly just "the Bees" would prompt "What, the Bee Gees?", a terrible risk.
  • zem 3y ago
    the "killer B's" originally referred to Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin
• Voultapher 3y ago
  :( Currently reading The children of the sky. And wow I had somewhat forgotten how good sci-fi can be. So much depth, such coherent and well thought out worlds.
• Klaster_1 3y ago
  Oh man, that's sad to hear. I really loved his books, especially the ones that looked into the future from a modern day engineer point of view. "Rainbows End" comes to my mind quite often when as I read the tech news, it paints a picture of a future that seems to get closer day by day - a sci-fi that you can one realistically believe to live in one day.
• reducesuffering 3y ago
  It is astonishing how many of the great sci-fi writers are/were around California: Vernor, PK Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Huxley, Frank Herbert, Bradbury, Heinlein, Niven, etc. Per-capita has to be several orders of magnitude higher.
  • 082349872349872 3y ago
    Le Guin and Niven being the only ones of your list who were born there; all the rest explicitly chose to be there.
  • zabzonk 3y ago
    you could probably say the same about the east coast, and NY in particular - pohl, bester et al.
  • sph 3y ago
    They always had the best LSD. Not necessary, but won't hurt to explore and experience the depth of your creativity.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • nabla9 3y ago
    Scotland's per capita big name sci-fi writer contribution must be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude higher still.
• aaron695 3y ago
  Interview from ReasonTV - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alxyAeCPits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alxyAeCPits (2011) I love the cyberpunk vibe of "Prisoners of Gravity" (1992) but it only discusses "Marooned in Realtime"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERRA8qXvuyU&t=87s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERRA8qXvuyU&t=87s
• steve1977 3y ago
  He wrote some of my favorite sci-fi books. I was aware he wasn't in good health for a while already, it's still sad to hear about his passing of course. Thank you for the worlds you showed me.
• Simon321 3y ago
  He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all. >The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",[8] and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity,[4][7] in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030. Looks like he was spot on.
  • trenchgun 3y ago
    He popularized and advanced the concept, but originally it was by von Neumann.
    • nabla9 3y ago
      The concept predates von Neuman. First known person to present the idea was mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet in the late 1700s. Not surprising, because he also laid out most ideals and values of modern liberal democracy as they are now. Amazing philosopher. He basically invented the idea of ensemble learning (known as boosting in machine learning). Nicolas de Condorcet and the First Intelligence Explosion Hypothesis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1609/aimag.v40i1.2855 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1609/aimag.v40i1.2855
      • n4r9 3y ago
        That kind of niche knowledge is what I come to HN for!
        • protomolecule 3y ago
          Also "Darwin among the Machines"[0] written by Samuel Butler in 1863, that's 4 years after Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". Butlerian jihad[1] is the war against machines in the Dune universe. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines [1] https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
• pontifier 3y ago
  Oh man, I sincerely hope he was signed up for cryonics. If there was someone who deserved to see what the future holds, it was him.
  • unnamed76ri 3y ago
    From what I’ve read, cryonics seems like a massive scam pulled on rich people. The tissue damage in these frozen corpses is extensive and irreparable.
    • gamblerrr 3y ago
      > irreparable That’s the gamble. I think you’re right though, it’s far lower odds than the snake oil salesmen present.
      • adastra22 3y ago
        The alternative of cremation is still lower odds.
      • easter726 3y ago
        So you’re saying there is some chance then. Can we let go of the pseudoscience and quackery quote from the early 90s then?
      • mr_toad 3y ago
        Even if some future technology could repair the damage, it’s a big gamble that someone in the future will want to repair the damage.
    • niplav 3y ago
      What evidence do you base those beliefs on?
    • adastra22 3y ago
      Then you obviously haven't read much about cryonics, which involves vitrification rather than freezing to avoid such tissue damage.
• Patrick_Devine 3y ago
  I just finished reading Children of the Sky and re-reading A Deepness in the Sky. I've been finding with Vinge's work, along with Iain Bank's works, a lot of it is better the second time around. There's just so much to take in.
  • kristianp 3y ago
    Unfortunately Banks passed away more than 10 years ago now. It doesn't seem like that long ago that his last book came out.
• boffinAudio 3y ago
  I once worked with a guy who was a close personal friend of Vernor, and I remember with much joy the enormous collection of science fiction he (the friend) had at his place .. literally every wall was covered in paperback shelves, and to my eyes it was a wonderland. I casually browsed every shelf, enamoured with the collection of scifi .. until I got to what I can only describe as a Golden Book Shrine Ensconced in Halo of Respect - a carefully maintained, diligently laid out bookshelf containing every single thing Vernor Vinge had written. Everything, the friend said, including stuff that Vernor had shared with him that would never see the light of day until after he passed away. I wonder about that guy now. It wasn't my first intro to Mr. Vinge, but it was my first intro to the fanaticism and devotion of his fan base - that in itself, was a unique phenomenon to observe. Almost religious. Which, given Mr. Vinge's works, is awe-inspiring, ironic and tragic at the same time. For me, it was a singular experience, realizing that science fiction literature as a genre was far more vital and important to our culture than it was granted in the mainstream. (This was the mid-90's) Science Fiction authors are capable of inculcating much inspiration and wonder in their fans yet "scifi" is often used in a derogatory way among the literature cognescenti. Alas, this myopia occludes a great value to society, and I thank Mr. Vinge - and his fanboix - for bringing me to a place where I understood it was okay to value science fiction as a motivational form. That Golden Book Shrine Ensconced in Halo was itself a gateway to much wonder and awe.
  • bsenftner 3y ago
    Science Fiction - the literature - is so different from all other media forms of SciFi there needs to be a formal separate of Science Fiction Literature from SciFi films, live action and animated series, games, and comic books. These other forms, SciFi, are the cartoon abbreviated to something else that is fun, adventure but is not Science Fiction (Literature) and the existential examination of how Science Changes Reality.
    • boffinAudio 3y ago
      Absolutely, in the same way that there are tabloid forms of journalism, citizen, and authoritative forms, also. For me the distinction is in the nature of speculation. If you speculate about some facet, and it seems feasible but fantastic, this is the event horizon at which the subject becomes useful as well as entertaining. It was no doubt of great utility to the original developers of satellites to have had Arthur C. Clarkes' models in their minds. However, its hardly viable to speculate about regular use of teleportation or faster than light travel .. unless, of course, we end up getting these things because some kid read a story and decided it could be done, in spite of the rest of the worlds feeling about it ..
• gitfan86 3y ago
  Having read rainbows end just a few years before COVID was interesting.
  • reticulan 3y ago
    it even name mentions the wuhan labs early on in the book
• turing_complete 3y ago
  Just a couple years before the singularity. Sad.
• turing_complete 3y ago
  If you never read Vernor Vinge (except for his essay on the Technological Singularity), what would be the best book to start?
  • geden 3y ago
    A Fire Upon The Deep, shortly followed by A Deepness In The Sky (which is even more page turny but kinda requires AFUTD. Across Real Time is also great and shorter.
    • db48x 3y ago
      I disagree with the notion that A Deepness in the Sky requires having read A Fire Upon the Deep. In fact, I would go so far as to say that each ends with an open question that is answered by the other, so that no matter which one you read first you will discover the answer in the second.
  • cwillu 3y ago
    A Fire Upon the Deep, without question.
  • angiosperm 3y ago
    The Peace War is closer to home than Fire. Read both.
    • stormking 3y ago
      The Peace War is a mediocre adventure story followed by a brilliant sequel, Marooned in Realtime.
      • angiosperm 3y ago
        Peace War is about personal tragedy on a big stage. If you read it for the adventure, you missed the whole thing.
  • loudmax 3y ago
• adrianhon 3y ago
  A lot of love here for A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies") and A Deepness in the Sky (great depiction of cognitive enhancement, slower-than-light interstellar trade), but less so for Rainbows End, which is perhaps a less successful story but remains, after almost two decades, the best description of what augmented reality games and ARGs might do to the world.
  • liotier 3y ago
    > A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies") Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns - although not at FaceTwitTok scale. But still, I love Vinge's take on information entropy across time, space and social networks. A Deepness in the Sky features the profession of programmer–archaeologist and I'm here for that !
    • KineticLensman 3y ago
      > Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns I still remember the moment when I realised that the galactic network in 'Fire...' was in fact based on Usenet (which I used heavily at the time), especially how it was low bandwidth text (given the interstellar distances) and how it had a fair number of nutters posting nonsense across the galaxy ('the key insight is hexapodia'). Great author, who'll be sadly missed.
      • db48x 3y ago
        Skrodes have six wheels, so…
  • floren 3y ago
    I recently re-read Rainbows End, and I think "do to the world" is an appropriate phrasing. It's a strikingly unpleasant vision of a world in which every space is 24/7 running dozens of microtransaction AR games... I found the part where Juan walks through the "amusement park" particularly effective, where little robots would prance around trying to entice him into interacting with them (which would incur a fee).
• denton-scratch 3y ago
  I found a text/plain copy of A Fire Upon The Deep, and read it in a single sitting. I later found a paperback edition in a second-hand bookshop, and bought it. I've since re-read it at least twice. I'm sorry he's died.
• lycopodiopsida 3y ago
  What a great mind - the concept of computer archeology from "A Deepness in the Sky" is something I often think about looking at legacy code and maybe something our children will think about even more often.
• ois_ultra 3y ago
  Considering his novel Rainbows End is about a very sick author in his 70s getting brought back to the world by modern technological breakthroughs in the mid 2020s, I feel like we’ve let him down in some way. Maybe he knew he was already sick, even back then, maybe not. Your meticulous and inspiring level of detail will be missed.
• ptero 3y ago
  His larger works are getting a lot of praise (justifiably, I read "A fire upon the deep" on a friend recommendation, then everything else Vinge wrote), some of his short stories strongly resonated with me, too. The cookie monster is, IMO, a thought-provoking marvel.
  • dgacmu 3y ago
    Thank you for recommending this! I hadn't read it, and it was delightful. It's online: https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-%20The%20Cookie%20Monster.htm https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-...
    • Baeocystin 3y ago
      Oh, that was a great read! I'd never come across it before. Thank you for posting it.
• ompogUe 3y ago
  Oh No! So Saddened! Found The Peace War at an airport book rack in the late '80's. Then, found True Names at a library sale in the early '90's and fell in love. "Zones of Thought" was a really smart idea once you got it. I put him as 2nd generation genius like "Hendrix -> Van Halen": "Asimov -> Vinge". Also (only real nitpick ever), like Asimov, was a little weak in dialogue and the poetry of words (comparing to Tolkein and Heinlein), but they were literally both STEM "Dr.s/PhD's". Rainbow's End seemed to be the FAANG playbook for many years: drones, AR (google glass on), haptics, autonomous automobiles, and on and on. Was thinking literally yesterday about how the biotech and architecture/earthquake ideas hadn't made it to today (which is around when the story takes place), but the latency issues seem to have been licked well before now. Requiescat in Pace
• nl 3y ago
  One of the true greats. True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote. Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer). RIP
  • adamgordonbell 3y ago
    The Bobbler was a strange idea. It made for a fun concept. I think there was more than one story in that world, if I'm remembering correctly. Rainbow's End was very good!
    • phrotoma 3y ago
      The shift of the use of bobbles from Peace War to Marooned in Realtime is _wild_. Fantastic stories, wildly creative, delightfully different.
    • KineticLensman 3y ago
      > I think there was more than one story in that world Two separate novels: 'The Peace War' and 'Marooned in Realtime', sold collectively as 'Across Realtime'. Enjoyed them both a lot, but for me 'Marooned...' had a more emotional punch, especially as it becomes clearer what had happened to the victim. There is also a short story 'The Ungoverned' whose main character is Wil W. Brierson, the protagonist in 'Marooned...'. Overviews without plot spoilers: 'The Peace War' describes a near-future in which bobbles (apparently indestructible stasis fields where time stands still) are used by 'hacker' types to launch an insurrection against the state. 'Marooned...' is set in the far future of the same world, where bobbles are used to support one-way time travel further into the future, where the few remaining humans try to reconnect following the mysterious disappearance of 99.9% of humanity. Both are high-concept SF, but 'Marooned...' also has elements of police procedural where a low-tech detective (Brierson) shanghaied into his future has to solve the slow murder of a high-tech individual (someone from the far future, relative to him).
    • at_a_remove 3y ago
• acdha 3y ago
  I’ll echo everyone else saying you should read his books (and not just Fire/Deepness) but wanted to note that while I never met him in person, I know a few people who have and literally everyone has started by describing him as one of the nicest people they met. That seems like an accomplishment of its own.
• hyperific 3y ago
  My introduction to Vinge was Rainbow's End. As a fellow San Diegan raised in East County I found it hilarious that he represented El Cajon as a wasteland.
• salojoo 3y ago
  Vinge introduced me to space opera with zones of thought. Such amazing books I've read multiple times.
• masto 3y ago
  Vernor Vinge has an outstanding catalog of invention and accomplishments. One of that's threaded through many of his stories and has become even more relevant lately is ubiquitous computing and networking, and in particular augmented reality. To truly understand the transformative potential of something like a VR headset if technology allowed it to be unobtrusive and omnipresent, one must read Vinge. The idea of consensual reality as portrayed in, e.g., Fast Times at Fairmont High, is kind of mind-blowing.
• RecycledEle 3y ago
  Rest In Peace, old man. I loved A Fire Upon the Deep. It gave me many hours of pleasure and many things to think about.
• nanolith 3y ago
  His Zones of Thought series, especially, A Deepness in the Sky, remain some of my favorite science fiction. This one hits hard.
• griffey 3y ago
  I had the privilege to interview Vernor back in 2011, and continued to have interactions with him on and off in the intervening years. He was, as others have said, just immeasurably kind and thoughtful. I'm sad that I'll not have the opportunity to speak with him again.
  • ca98am79 3y ago
    I emailed him out of the blue and asked him to write more stories about Pham Nuwen. He replied and was really nice and we corresponded over a couple of emails.
  • fl7305 3y ago
    I had him as a CS teacher at SDSU for a class. I had no idea he was a sci-fi author when I started the class. Bought his books and was hooked. He taught me how to implement OS thread context switching in 68000 assembly language. We also had a lab where we had to come up with a simple assembly function that executed slow or fast depending on whether it used the cache efficiently or not. Great teacher and author, and a very nice guy in general.
  • burrish 3y ago
    Did you ever ask him what he thought of today AI advancement ?
• _yb2s 3y ago
  A true visionary, he will be missed. His fiction was entertaining, but also filled with important lessons that will help us prepare for the future in a better and more humane way. Thank you Vernor Vinge.
• vhodges 3y ago
  Ah, sad news indeed. I just finished re-reading The Peace War RIP
• remram 3y ago
  @dang Can't this thread be titled "Vernor Vinge has died"? I feel like this is the usual title for those. With this title it's not obvious that the news is he died yesterday.
• abraxas 3y ago
  This merits the black ribbon atop the HN banner, I think.
• ViktorRay 3y ago
  After reading this and all the comments on this thread I think I will pick up some of his books. Too much science fiction nowadays is dystopian, cynical and pessimistic. I don’t have a problem with any individuals writing stuff like that if they really want to. People should have the freedom to write whatever they want. I just personally feel like there is too much of the cynical pessimistic stuff being written nowadays. So seeing that Vernor Vinge wrote stores that portray science and humanity in positive hopeful and optimistic ways makes me very interested in reading his work.
  • djaychela 3y ago
    Yes, do! I've only read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon The Deep but they were absolute joys, despite their intimidating page count. Just mind-bendingly inventive and continually interesting. I won't ruin anything for you, but as a reader you make assumptions which then turn out not to be true via progressive revelation as the books go on. Brilliant stuff.
• dmd 3y ago
  Please mirror, because more people should have a copy of this: https://3e.org/vvannot https://3e.org/vvannot This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    The key insight always was hexapodia.
    • jerf 3y ago
      IIRC from the annotations (it's been a while), Vinge did not intend that Twirlip was right about everything; Twirlip was merely meant to a representation of the weird things you used to get on Usenet. But it worked out fairly well. (On the one hand, this might technically be a spoiler, but on the other, I think in practice even knowing this tidbit won't actually give anything away.) (I'm glad someone linked to this. I actually bought the annotated edition a while back and was reading it back in the Palm Pilot era, I think, but I've lost it and never quite finished it. So I'm happy to see it and have no qualms for myself about grabbing it.)
      • smallmancontrov 3y ago
        I'd be pretty comfortable advocating for (metaphorical) Death of the Author on this one if this weren't, you know, a thread about the literal death of the author.
  • thrtythreeforty 3y ago
    Thanks for mirroring this! This was only published on an old CD for the '93 Hugo winners, and I had a devil of a time trying to find a copy (inter-library-loan, etc) before realizing someone had archived it on archive.org. It is indeed well worth the time spent if you're a fan of Fire.
• mercutio2 3y ago
  My favorite author of all time. 80 years is a good run, but I wish he’d seen another 20. I would’ve loved to read his reaction to the 2020s. Rainbow’s End is by far the best prediction of what this decade has been like, from 30 years ahead. I wish we’d gotten to read a few more books from Vinge.
• Eliezer 3y ago
  Ow.
• sl-1 3y ago
  RIP. His work is excellent and deep
• toomuchtodo 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge
• r00fus 3y ago
  The first chapter of Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites of all time. I really some of the concepts introduced (ie, universal constants aren't universal) to resolve Fermi paradox.
• r00fus 3y ago
  The first chapter of Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites of all time. I really love some of the concepts introduced (ie, universal constants aren't universal) to resolve Fermi paradox.
• joshstrange 3y ago
  I've read a lot of SciFi but there was something special about Vernor Vinge IMHO. Something about the way he wrote and what he wrote about that "unlocked" various concepts for me. I'd have to sit down and think about them to list it all out but I can trace my interests in a number of concepts back to his books.
• 725686 3y ago
  Don't know who Vernor Vinge was, but his name rocks!
  • fl7305 3y ago
    He got his last name from his Norwegian ancestors.
  • r2_pilot 3y ago
    Do yourself a favor and check out any of the books in this thread, if that's your jam. I woke up to sad news, but if someone can be introduced to his work by his passing, then it wouldn't be all bad news.
• schoen 3y ago
  On Vernor Vinge's connection to free software: https://lwn.net/Articles/310463/ https://lwn.net/Articles/310463/
  • fl7305 3y ago
    He was no slouch when it came to programming. He taught classes that going through the actual 68000 assembly to perform the context switch between threads in an interrupt service routine (copy the saved registers from the running thread on the stack to a separate area, and overwrite them on the stack with the registers from the thread you want to switch to).
• epivosism 3y ago
  +1 on the recs for his main work. I also wanted to mention that I loved his book Tatja Grimm's world, too. It's great, alternate world fantasy, but with Vingean depth of thought about what it all might mean... Looking it up now, I see this is a rework of what must have been a very early novel for him, based on a work that came out in 1969! Thinking about this too, I'm sure he did a great job as a professor, supporting his family and teaching. But in addition, he had this greater creative gift to reach millions, too! I think this pattern probably applies to a lot of us. Working and doing useful things during the day out of necessity... and like him, I hope everyone on HN puts in the effort and time to do something creative, too, and finds their audience. It'd have been a shame of the creative side of Vinge had never gotten out!
• nodesocket 3y ago
  I went to San Diego State and majored in CompSCi in 2006. Vernor was a bit before my time but heard legendary stories. Rest in peace.
  • fl7305 3y ago
    I had a CS class with him in the 90s, the stories were true :)
    • nodesocket 3y ago
      Nice, let’s go Aztecs in the tournament!
      • fl7305 3y ago
        Saw Marshall Faulk attempt a critical two point conversion at Jack Murphy stadium :)
• TheMagicHorsey 3y ago
  This makes me so sad. He was my favorite sci-fi author. I was looking forward to more books in the Fire Upon The Deep and Deepness In The Sky universe.
• supportengineer 3y ago
  RIP to author of one of my favorite books. If Vernor Vinge doesn't deserve the black banner atop HN, then nobody does.
• TMWNN 3y ago
  No one else has mentioned what I think are his two greatest insights besides the Singularity: * A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit. The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255> * In said future human society pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/ https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/> (Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)
• underlipton 3y ago
  Aw, man. This is a bummer, considering how deep into "replicating Rainbows End" we are (despite everyone and their mother's insistence that we try for a "Ready Player One" future). I find it funny that it seems to be one of his least-liked novels, because the concepts and characters it plays with have always been more approachable and relatable - and less terrifying - than in much of his other work (insofar as I can tell, being wary of reading them). I still maintain that Miyazaki needs to adapt RE before he heads out himself: https://imgur.com/a/8PeXHlb https://imgur.com/a/8PeXHlb
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I like to think history is like the greatest book ever written. When we are born we get to open it somewhere in the middle, spend a while figuring out what’s going on, then have to close it and never know the end. But vinge clearly peaked ahead a few chapters.
  • _0ffh 3y ago
    Amazing, I came up with the same thing. There's probably more of us out there! > then have to close it and never know the end That bit has irked me to no end since I was young!
• nxobject 3y ago
  I wonder whether, as a sci-fi writer from the golden age, it would've been a blessing or a curse to have lived this far into the 21st century.
• pigeons 3y ago
  That's a black bar event.
• hyperthesis 3y ago
  An exceptional author, A Fire Upon the Deep was his very best IMHO, and chapter 4 its best: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/0812515285___4.htm https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/0812515285___4.htm A sensational adventure story, with the particular science-fiction skill of communicating strangeness, effortlessly.
• gildandstain 3y ago
  Such a loss! He fused good-hearted optimism and mindbending data-architecture (and mind-architecture) into ripping plots. And +1 for Marooned in Realtime. The awesome scale reminds me of Greg Egan, but it highlights Vinge's particular genius for imagining side-effects of the technological premise.
• adastra22 3y ago
  Can we get a black line for Vernor Vinge?
• auroralimon 3y ago
  damn. one of the best SF books - a fire upon the deep - ever. RIP Vernor
• chai2010 3y ago
  [dead]
• AlwaysRock 3y ago
  So sad. I love the deep books and have read most of what Vinge has published. I was just looking to see if he had anything new coming out earlier this week. RIP Vinge.
• blowsand 3y ago
  Dang. RIP. Rainbows End has a special place in my heart. As a teen a buddy and I used to explore the UCSD tunnels and labs at night and let our imaginations run wild about what we’d see.
• uslic001 3y ago
  I am bummed out. I first read The Witling by Vernor Vinge in the early 1980's while in high school. I have read every novel and most of his short stories/novellas since then. I have reread most of his books at least once if not more. I am currently rereading The Peace War, Time to break out my paperback of the The Witling that is falling apart and read it again in tribute to VV.