I followed a link from a recent thread on Robert Heinlein to a list of Hugo Award Winners, and was surprised to find that Vernor Vinge is one of only a few people to win the award more than twice. I’ve read a couple of his novels, “The Peace War” being my favorite, but even so I have trouble thinking of him as a giant of science fiction, rather than as my old CS professor from San Diego State. Has anyone else read his stuff, and what did you think?
A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, especially the latter, are both very good IMHO. I own, but haven’t yet read Rainbow’s End.
In general I like him, but then I like well done Space Opera ( I’m a Cherryh fan for example ), so the above two novels cater to my tastes.
He’s done some great stuff. I liked the equal to The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime even better. He also wrote a short story set between the two, The Ungoverned. True Names is an old favorite of mine, a very early example of cyberspace/virtual reality in sci-fi - before the name was coined. A Fire Upon the Deep was good, but the ending a bit depressing to me. The prequel I didn’t read, since the premise sounded too depressing for me to enjoy.
I like Vinge’s two space opera novels, but hire more “cyberpunk” stuff leaves me cold. Your milleage may, of course, vary.
equal = sequel? I actually liked “The Peace War” more than the sequel, but they were both interesting. The sequel does have his idea of a technological singularity, which he developed more after that.
hire more “cyberpunk”? hire = his, or what? I’m having trouble parsing that. Which are his cyberpunk novels? I assume you mean “A Fire Upon the Deep” is the space opera, right. I couldn’t really get into that one enough to be able to classify it. Maybe I’ll give it another try though.
Ugh, yes, sorry.
Ditto. Also, I liked A Fire Upon The Deep much more than A Deepness In The Sky, and I didn’t much care for Ranbow’s End.
I love True Names. It’s a brilliant mix of cyberpunk and fantasy.
I like almost everything he’s written, he’s one of the few writers who is capable of thinking about the future without falling into cliches. He’s an original, inventive thinker who knows how to write interesting stories. Rainbow’s End would be a cyberpunk story, I imagine, but still so imaginatively and originally realized that I enjoyed every word of it.
Yep, my mileage does vary. Loved AFUtD and ADitS, and then was completely blown away by Rainbow’s End - very imaginative. Reading this thread it looks like there’s a couple other of his books I should check out.
I’ve only read A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, but I absolutely love them both – I count them among my favorite sci-fi books. I seem to be in the minority in preferring Deepness to Fire, though.
I like him. Very good writer. I found you really can’t go wrong reading hugo winning stuff. It is voted on by readers and not publishers, after all.
I was so bored by Rainbow’s End that I couldn’t even finish it. I dislike cyberpunk in general, though.
I’ve enjoyed all his stuff except for “Rainbow’s end”.
I wish he’d go back to his “zones of thought” (or whatever it was called) universe.
He’s supposed to be releasing a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep sometime next year.
For an author with only seven novels out, he has a very high hit rate for winning the Hugo for best novel.
Three have won, and another two were on the ballot. Only his two early novels, Tatja Grimm’s World (1969) and The Witling (1976) didn’t make the nominations.
Hells yes I’m a fan. Philosophically stimulating wowee-zowee future-tech-y sci fi with engrossing plots to boot? I’m there.
I just finished re-reading A Fire on the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.
Funny thing is, I was going to start a thread about this, but since you already have, I’ll ask the question I was going to ask here instead.
The first time I read Deepness long long ago, I could swear (by the way, possible very minor spoiler ahead) there was some detail given as to how the Spiders’ vision worked. I remember it involving their visual system somehow flickering through various modes at several frames per second, and this made video very hard for them to develop. I remember this pretty clearly, remember thinking Vinge had oddly inserted this explanation into the story as though it were an important plot point when in fact it went nowhere.
But on rereading, I saw references to the difficulty of developing video, and hints that their visual system was very different than ours, but none of the details about it that I remember reading the last time.
Did I somehow skip a portion of the book this time? Or are there in fact no such given details, and I somehow just made up the memories in my head?
I’ve searched for info on this before but couldn’t find anything. Where did you read about it?
It seems like most fans don’t like Rainbows End as much. Yet I thought it was awesome. I wish I could remember enough about it to say why, but anyway, there’s the fact of it.
I dig plausible near-future tech speculations in general though so that may have been part of it.
Also the themes concerning the ways people can be fooled into thinking their autonomous when in fact they are agents for others–a theme that unifies all of his work, I think, esp. this and Deepness and Fire–is one that really hits me viscerally for some reason so that may have been part of it too.
Just found part of this mini-review I wrote for it once:
A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the all-time great space operas.