32
votes
Sci-fi author Vernor Vinge dead at 79
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- Title
- Vernor Vinge, father of the tech singularity, has died at age 79
- Authors
- Benj Edwards
- Published
- Mar 21 2024
- Word count
- 666 words
Vinge was a Hugo-winning author best known for his works A Deepness in the Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep, and Fast Times at Fairmont High. He taught as a professor of mathematics and computer science - a trait which gave his works an unusual degree of foresight and verisimilitude.
I can personally attest that A Deepness in the Sky is a masterpiece, and the best work of fiction I’ve read in my lifetime. I think most of his books will appeal to the vast majority of the tech crowd on this site.
RIP to a true visionary and poet.
This news hits hard as I just finished reading Deepness in the Sky for the first time last week. Definitely worthy of the awards it won!
Oh no. A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites, very sad to hear that he's gone. So many formative and foundational ideas made their way from his works into the minds of other authors over the years. Almost criminal that he's not wider-read and recognized.
Yeah, it's a great book, and on such an epic scale.
Aw, what the hell. He was supposed to write another book for the Tines world. What happens after Children of the Sky now?
Brandon Sanderson will write it, of course.
(This is snarky, and obviously he's not the right person for hard SF, but I do think he did justice to the end of WoT, a staggering task in its own right, and I don't begrudge him the success he's carved out for himself after. I know he has his detractors, but to me, he's doing the work, and seemingly doing it well.)
Sanderson has work ethic comparable to Stephen King.
His prose is not my jam but he can tell a story.
Oh man, this sucks. VV was one of my favorite authors.
Everyone talks about Fire on the Deep and Deepness in the Sky, and for good reason: they’re both excellent. But he also wrote a bunch of other great books, e.g., the real time series (the peace war and marooned in real time), rainbows end, and true names are all worth your time. I have a collection or two of his short fiction as well, some of which are real fun.
He was truly a master.
Marooned in Realtime is my favorite followed by the Peace War and then Fire on the Deep. I think Deepness in the Sky is about as poorly paced as Dune. (… if there was no Dune maybe people would read Under Pressure, the BuSab stories and such…)
Since Skylark of Space there have just been so many novels about people who fly around the galaxy, so the zones of thought books (Fire and Deepness) are pretty ordinary in my book, whereas the one-way trip 50M+ years in Marooned plus the stacked mysteries in it make it something unique.
Apparently there is an author-annotated version of A Fire Upon the Deep from a CD-ROM. Someone on Hacker News linked to an online version.
It's pretty rough, though; I think it might be better to the re-read the novel in the normal way.
I went to an open discussion forum on the singularity at a conference. He was so very nice, open minded and happy to what anyone had to add.
I'm aware of him but never read his books (I'm a SciFi book fan though). I do have a copy of Fire Upon the Deep but did he have any recent book releases?
Yes, but Children of the sky is probably my least favorite book of his. I’d recommend Rainbow’s End for a “newish” (this century) work of his
This is so weird, I’m pretty sure I read one of his books ages ago and I seem to remember really liking it. I’d been meaning to pick up more but never did. Now I can’t for the life of me remember what I read in the first place! I skimmed his bibliography on Wikipedia and none of the titles ring any bells. I have a vague notion that what I read was online, like an e-book or a novella published for free on his website or something. Couldn’t tell you what it was about. It’s gonna bug me.
Regardless, RIP and I guess it’s time for me to discover his oeuvre for real.
Any time I think about public key encryption schemes, I remember how the characters in the book just laughed about when this was brought up in Fire. What a gifted author.
What an amazing storyteller. Rainbow's End is one of the most interesting visions of the near-future I've read, I often recommend it to other people who work in XR.