Vernor Vinge

Vernor VingeVernor Vinge (born February 10, 1944 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA) is a mathematician (retired Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University), computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo award-winning novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, as well as for his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.

Vernor Vinge published his first short story, "Bookworm, Run!", in 1965 in Analog Science Fiction, then edited by John W. Campbell. He became a moderately prolific contributor to SF magazines in the 1960s and early 1970s, adapting two of his stories into a short novel, Grimm's World (1969), and publishing a second novel, The Witling (1975).

Vernor Vinge came to prominence in 1981 with his novella True Names, which is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others (and particularly to the cyberpunk genre).

His next two novels, The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986), concern the impact of a technology which can create impenetrable force fields called "Bobbles". These books built Vernor Vinge's reputation as an author who would explore ideas to their logical conclusions in particularly inventive ways. Both books were nominated for the Hugo Award, but lost to novels by William Gibson and Orson Scott Card.

These two novels and True Names also emphasized Vinge's interest in the technological singularity. True Names takes place in a world on the cusp of the singularity. The Peace War shows a world in which the singularity has been postponed by the Bobbles, while Marooned in Realtime follows a small group of people who have managed to miss the singularity which otherwise encompassed Earth.

Vernor Vinge won the Hugo Award with his 1992 novel, A Fire Upon the Deep. In it, he envisions a galaxy that is divided up into "zones of thought", in which the further one moves from the center of the galaxy, the higher the level of technology one can achieve. Earth is in "The Slow Zone", in which faster-than-light (FTL) travel cannot be achieved. Most of the book, however, takes place in a zone called "The Beyond", where the computations necessary for FTL travel are possible, but transcendence beyond the Singularity to superhuman intelligence is not. Thus Vinge could write a classic space opera despite his belief that the technology required for such stories would push us past the singularity. Fire includes a large number of additional ideas making for an unusually complex and rich universe and story.

A Deepness in the Sky (1999) was a prequel to Fire, following competing groups of humans in The Slow Zone as they struggle over who has the rights to exploit a technologically emerging alien culture. Deepness also won a Hugo Award in 2000. Vinge's novellas "Fast Times at Fairmont High" and "The Cookie Monster" also won Hugo Awards in 2002 and 2004, respectively.

His latest novel, Rainbows End, which is set in the same universe as "Fast Times at Fairmont High", was published in May 2006.

Vernor Vinge retired in 2002 from teaching at San Diego State University in order to write full-time. Most years, since its inception in 1999, Vinge has been on the Free Software Foundation's selection committee for their Award for the Advancement of Free Software. His ex-wife Joan D Vinge is also an accomplished science fiction author.

He intends his next novel to be a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, set approximately 30 years after the events of that book.

 

Selected Bibliography

Novels

  • Grimm's World (1969), revised as Tatja Grimm's World (1987)
  • The Witling (1976)
  • The Peace War (1984)
  • Marooned in Realtime (1986, winner 1987 Prometheus Award)
    • (The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime collected as Across Realtime.)
  • A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)
  • A Deepness in the Sky (1999, winner 2000 Prometheus Award)
  • Rainbows End ISBN  (2006)

Collections

  • True Names and Other Dangers
    • "Bookworm, Run!"
    • "True Names"
    • "The Peddler's Apprentice" (with Joan D Vinge)
    • "The Ungoverned" (occurs in the same milieu as Across Realtime)
    • "Long Shot"
  • Threats... and Other Promises  (These two volumes collect Vinge's short fiction through the early 1990s.)
    • "Apartness"
    • "Conquest by Default" (occurs in the same milieu as "Apartness")
    • "The Whirligig of Time"
    • "Gemstone"
    • "Just Peace" (with William Rupp)
    • "Original Sin"
    • "The Blabber" (occurs in the same milieu as A Fire Upon the Deep)
  • Across Realtime
    • The Peace War
    • "The Ungoverned"
    • Marooned in Realtime
  • True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier  (contains "True Names" plus essays by others)
  • The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge  (This volume collect Vinge's short fiction through 2001, including Vinge's comments from the earlier two volumes.)
    • "Bookworm, Run!"
    • "The Accomplice"
    • "The Peddler's Apprentice" (with Joan D Vinge)
    • "The Ungoverned"
    • "Long Shot"
    • "Apartness"
    • "Conquest by Default"
    • "The Whirligig of Time"
    • "Bomb Scare"
    • "The Science Fair"
    • "Gemstone"
    • "Just Peace" (with William Rupp)
    • "Original Sin"
    • "The Blabber"
    • "Win A Nobel Prize!" (originally published in Nature, Vol 407 No 6805 "Futures")
    • "The Barbarian Princess" (this is also the first section of "Tatja Grimm's World")
    • "Fast Times at Fairmont High" (occurs in the same milieu as Rainbows End)

Uncollected Short Fiction

  • "A Dry Martini" (The 60th World Science Fiction Convention ConJosé Restaurant Guide, page 60)
  • "The Cookie Monster" (Analog Science Fiction, October 2003)
  • "Synthetic Serendipity", IEEE Spectrum Online, 30 June 2004 (Excerpt from Rainbows End)

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