# Anyone a fan of Vernor Vinge? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 18, 2010, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156 "2010-11-18T22:21:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Greg\_Charles](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Charles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Greg_Charles)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2010, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/1 "2010-11-18T22:21:12Z")
I followed a link from a recent thread on Robert Heinlein to a list of [Hugo Award Winners](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel), 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? ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2010, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/2 "2010-11-18T22:25:17Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2010, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/3 "2010-11-18T22:30:48Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Excellent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f19dbf/32.png) [@Mr.Excellent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Excellent)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2010, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/4 "2010-11-18T22:36:08Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > 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. I like Vinge’s two space opera novels, but hire more “cyberpunk” stuff leaves me cold. Your milleage may, of course, vary. ---
**Author:** ![Greg\_Charles](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Charles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Greg_Charles)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2010, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/5 "2010-11-18T22:53:17Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2010, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/6 "2010-11-18T23:16:36Z")
> [@Greg\_Charles](#): > > equal = sequel? Ugh, yes, sorry. ---
**Author:** ![Morbo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/morbo/32/389_2.png) [@Morbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morbo)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2010, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/7 "2010-11-18T23:20:45Z")
> [@Mr.Excellent](#): > > I like Vinge’s two space opera novels, but hire more “cyberpunk” stuff leaves me cold. Your milleage may, of course, vary. 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. ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2010, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/8 "2010-11-18T23:37:15Z")
I love True Names. It’s a brilliant mix of cyberpunk and fantasy. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2010, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/9 "2010-11-18T23:39:20Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![hdc\_bst](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/9f8e36/32.png) [@hdc\_bst](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hdc_bst)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/10 "2010-11-19T00:00:07Z")
> [@Mr.Excellent](#): > > I like Vinge’s two space opera novels, but hire more “cyberpunk” stuff leaves me cold. Your milleage may, of course, vary. 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. ---
**Author:** ![MilTan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/71e660/32.png) [@MilTan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MilTan)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/11 "2010-11-19T00:02:27Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/12 "2010-11-19T00:50:26Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Green\_Bean](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/green_bean/32/1760_2.png) [@Green\_Bean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Green_Bean)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/13 "2010-11-19T01:00:32Z")
I was so bored by Rainbow’s End that I couldn’t even finish it. I dislike cyberpunk in general, though. ---
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/14 "2010-11-19T01:22:51Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![MilTan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/71e660/32.png) [@MilTan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MilTan)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/15 "2010-11-19T03:19:08Z")
He’s supposed to be releasing a sequel to _A Fire Upon the Deep_ sometime next year. ---
**Author:** ![Meurglys](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/258eb7/32.png) [@Meurglys](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meurglys)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/16 "2010-11-19T12:19:49Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/17 "2010-11-19T13:14:51Z")
> [@Greg\_Charles](#): > > I followed a link from a recent thread on Robert Heinlein to a list of [Hugo Award Winners](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel), 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? 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? ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/18 "2010-11-19T13:17:37Z")
> [@MilTan](#): > > He’s supposed to be releasing a sequel to _A Fire Upon the Deep_ sometime next year. I’ve searched for info on this before but couldn’t find anything. Where did you read about it? ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/19 "2010-11-19T13:21:57Z")
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: > [@](#): > > As the book progresses, Robert and granddaughter, with some friends, end up embarking on a kind of updated Hardy Boys style mystery caper–though the stakes this time turn out to involve the fate of the human race itself. > > The way into the caper involves the concept of “hijacking.” To hijack someone is to hack into their computer and manipulate the information it is feeding them. By this means, a hijacker can make someone act in the hijacker’s own interest. It’s like mind control, but different. > > Who is being hijacked, and by whom? This question is asked all over the place in the book. And so it turns out the book is largely about people trying to discover the significance of their own actions. Another way to put this is, they’re trying to discover the meaning of their own life. > > Any book that successfully shines a new light at a new angle on that old quest must be pretty good. And it is ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2010, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156/20 "2010-11-19T14:52:51Z")
_A Fire Upon the Deep_ is one of the all-time great space operas. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-a-fan-of-vernor-vinge/561156.md?page=2)