I’ve loved just about everything I’ve read by him, except for those two novels. Yes, even Rainbows End.
I liked *Deepness *better, too. Those are the only two of his novels I’ve read, but I intend to read more.
I’ve been trying to catch up with the last decade of Hugo nominees. I’ve just started my first Charles Stross book. So far I like Michael Flynn, Michael Chabon, Neal Stephenson, Naomi Novik and Peter Watts, but I don’t like John Scalzi or Robert J. Sawyer. I’ve always liked Connie Willis and Lois McMaster Bujold. I liked Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, and I’m meaning to read more from him.
Whatever you do, avoid his Darwinia, which has an awesome initial premise and then goes very very very badly off the tracks about halfway through.
I saw it on his Wikipedia page, citing an interview he gave at a Con. Here’s the interview, where he clearly talks about the sequel to Fire that he is finishing. I don’t know where Wikipedia got the release date from, as it isn’t cited.
Based on what you’re all saying, I’ll try some others of his.
With regard to Robert Charles Wilson–Try Julian Comstock. Good stuff. I liked Darwinia as well, but Tom Scud is right that it goes of the rails.
Thanks for replies! It’s good to know that Dr. Vinge has such a fan-base. He was a pretty good teacher as well. I remember he won his first Hugo in the first year of my master’s program, after being nominated twice and falling short. Until this thread though, I still thought of writing as his side job. Now I’m curious to read some more of his work.
I read “Long Shot,” a fantastic short story by Vernor Vinge, in a collection when I was 12 years old or so. (I actually figured out who the author was years later here on the SDMB.)
As a freshman in college, I read the serial version of “Marooned in Realtime” in Analog. I should track down the prequel one of these days…but hey, it’s only been 24 years since then, after all. 
I dunno. I didn’t feel that Darwinia went off the rails so much as it went off in a completely unexpected direction.
To anyone looking for a good introduction to Wilson, I’d recommend The Harvest. It’s an unusual end-of-the-world story.
For me, The Peace War was pretty good in spots, but overall weak; great ideas, but uneven storytelling. Then I read A Fire Upon The Deep and was totally hooked. Then I was pleasantly surprised at how much A Deepness in the Sky surpassed it – awesome book. In the interim, I read Marooned in Realtime and loved the angle of a murder mystery spanning thousands of years, great stuff!
OTOH, I hated Rainbow End. Not an original idea in it, and it was written long past when being characters being “connected” 24/7 was innovative. I struggled to finish that book, and I’m not happy I persevered.
The nomination are good to look at as a guide for discoving books.
I’ve discovered several that way, most notably to me The Inverted World and The Ragged Astronauts.
The only 4 time best novel winner other than Heinlin is Bujold, who i don’t care for but many obviously do
I loved that book, quite epic in it’s scope. I did though find the ending a bit uplifting somehow at the same time as being slightly sad.
I read A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, and enjoyed them.
I really liked in A Fire Upon the Deep the idea of an individual mind emerging from a pack, but was disappointed about how utterly human the mind is. Perhaps he was trying to make a point that minds are similar even when generated in different ways, but I didn’t buy it.
Really? A main plot point was Flenser’s villainous personality eventually being supplanted by the Teacher personality, because Flenser was forced the take on the Teacher members when his other members were lost (and eventually declared dead). This doesn’t scream “non-human mind” issues to you?
BTW Fire is objectively better than Deepness.
Better plotting, better writing, more interesting speculations about what aliens can be like, and more emotional punch to boot.
What I mean is that the thought processes and motivations were identical to the human mind. The dialog and thoughts of these characters were indistinguishable from dialog and thoughts from human characters.
[spoiler]I dunno, there was a lot of superficial sameness - which is what you’d expect: aliens may be alien but we are all animals together - social animals would be superficially similar, wherever they happened to be from. OTOH, while pursuing human-like goals - power over others, creativity, etc. - they often employ non-human means - like attempting to extend their “self” with incest. I liked the handling of the Tines.
Also, the same book depicted aliens who were well and truly alien in motive and act - those strange creatures they come across in their habitats.
What I thought less successful was the handling of those plant-creatures, which I thought unnecesarily unrealistic.[/spoiler]
Unrealistic in what sense? The skroderiders were explicitly an artificially created species (or, at least, one whose evolution was artificially manipulated), which seems to neatly explain away any implausibilities.
I know, but the species seemed to have too many bizzare drawbacks to make a lot of sense as a wide-ranging sparefaring species - or at least, it seemed a trifle jarring to have a space pilot who occasionally just forgets what s/he/it’s doing. The Tines, in contrast, worked well to my mind - they had drawbacks it is true, but also advantages.
Eh - that didn’t seem all that unreasonable to me. Skroderiders have perfectly functional long-term memory - it’s just that their short-term memory is crud, which is why they use their skrodes as memory prostheses. I expect skroderider pilots train extensively on a very simple concept: When in doubt, consult your skrode immediately. Not so different, in principle, from the use of checklists in-flight by human aviators.
[spoiler]Fair enough, it just struck me as jarring that a major species would have such an odd and inherent drawback. Yes, I know that they were engineered that way, but otherwise - how could a species lacking in short-term memory evolve? And if this was a product of their prosthesis - why design it that way?
I know this is explained by a revelation later. But in reading the book for the first time, they just didn’t seem that likely.[/spoiler]