American SF author. Invented Cyber Space in True Names, then came up with the idea of The Singularity. Having done so, he's had to spend the subsequent n years trying to work out how he could write medium-to-far-future SF in an intellectually honest fashion. The hack he came up with is a rather good one, and explained over in Vinges Deep; the galaxy of this hack is showcased in the Hugo-winning novels A Fire Upon The Deep? and A Deepness In The Sky?.
A Deepness In The Sky? is full of spiders locked into an unfortunate stellar cycle which occasions a rather jerky and erratic advance for their civilisation. It gets cold out there.
The rest of this page should probably be moved elsewhere.
Vinge goes back to Pham Nuwen and the interstellar Qeng Ho in A Deepness In The Sky? - so obviously there has to be a previous volume. That one establishes the existence of a Slow Zone at the galactic core, and things get progressively faster as one moves out towards Earth - and beyond, obviously. Tinkering up in the Transcend causes a ghastly effect on the Earthlings who think they've found a really neat artifact, so they download a god to try to sort things. Unfortunately, super-high-tech shininess and gods are not much use where these guys are headed. Yup, you guessed it: Slow Zonarama.
But there's a cute mathematical 8-dog pack down there with radio, Amdiranifani. And "godshatter" has its uses.
Aiee! Verging-on-the-edge-of-comprehensible Tanaqui infodump alert! Niall and/or Lyndsey (or anyone else) - any chance of introducing some hard-headed reason here? Hmm. We should probably sidelift the Deep comments to a page specifically for Vinges Deep. -- TA
Books rated on a Five Point Scale:
| Sat, 12 Mar 2005 15:55:38 GMT | Front Page | Recent Changes | Message Of The Day |