"A Fire Upon the Deep" is a great book for several reasons. I can't think of any better expression of what Usenet felt like in its prime, than portrayed there.
That hexapodia business seemed like a hint in a murder mystery; some of the connections to the rest of the story were reasonably clear, but I always felt like I was missing some insight there.
And all this time I thought Twirlisp was just caricature of off-base, know-nothing commentors. I guess the lesson is: do read all the comments, and carefully.
I've only read A Fire Upon The Deep, which I found super interesting in terms of setting, but the storytelling felt a bit clunky to me at the time. I was still intrigued by the author though and I read A Deepness In The Sky and was blown away.
Storytelling, setting, everything just clicked. I know there is a third book in the trilogy but it seems a bit back to the roots in terms of setting and I haven't touched just out of the fear that I wouldn't love it as much as ADITS... Should I?
Probably just me, but it first book was such a schizophrenic experience. Loved every single bit of space part but couldn't care less about medieval cluster dog minds part, eventually grew bored of it and it felt disturbing. Especially when author thinks some minor medieval squabbles are equally important as the galactic space part, giving it same page count.
Suffered till the end, and lost any motivation to continue since following books proudly advertised that the form is there to stay.
There are vastly more diverse stories that still link well together, ie Hyperion cantos was an amazing experience for me. Literally 7 different stories coming together, from cyberpunk to high religious politics, but always connected to same technological universe.
I disagree, they have some stuff to think through, even if they're not as shiny as the first one. Perhaps he did himself a disservice by showing all he's got at the very begining of the series, though.
That stuff has the Star Wars vibe where Ep 1-3 have much more grandiosity than the original series - luckily the weren't chronologically first.
The problem isn't the highlights of it - it's the low-lights, which make up most of those books. The main POV character is incredibly annoying to follow around - he's a dense, not-too-intelligent, but incredibly-long-winded everyman, who is never told to shut up by anyone around him.
I don't need an everyman perspective[1] on an epic science-fiction story! I am an everyman! I can form my own opinion of it!
They are also rather heavy on author-dictated philosophy (which is not particularly interesting, or insightful, and manages to fall flat in a pretty major self-contradictory way) - whereas the first two Hyperion books have much less of an author's voice in them, and are much more of a presentation of an interaction of different, competing value systems. That is interesting! Listening to the chosen one go on and on about choosing again (when none of their disciples actually do) is not!
The overall plot of them is fine. It's, unfortunately, all in the execution.
[1] Or at least, not one that's hammered into me for ~60% of the book.
I disagree. Yes #1 was best. I thought #2 was the weakest link, but with the redeeming feature of getting you to #3 and #4. Are they perfect, no, but they do have good moments aplenty and I thought the ending worth the journey.
Edit: thinking back, the ending of #2 was bloody spectacular as well. I think the sheer volume of character/world building must help as preparation for impactful endings.
Strongly agree. There are some enjoyable bits in 3&r4 ( I just enjoy episodic travel adventures), but for the most part they are pretty bad, especially compared to the masterpiece of the first one (the second was an adequate ending to the story).
> Especially when author thinks some minor medieval squabbles are equally important as the galactic space part, giving it same page count.
That was a major plot design point to me.
That pre-spacefaring civilizations have things that are incredibly important to them, but questionably important relative to order-of-magnitudes different power galactic civilizations.
One of the reasons I like Banks fiction as well -- in all likelihood, given evolution and technological maturity timescales, advanced civilizations will be wildly displaced in time as well as space.
Yes, but Banks version of the "extremely minor event in the grand scheme of things but terribly important to those participating in it" (i.e. Consider Phlebas) is much better.
Deepness has the same "split brain". Half the story is set in the future, but the other chapters are told as a picaresque fantasy in what appears to be a kind of fictional alternative reality circa World War I, that is eventually revealed to be a "humanized" version of the alien civilization's history (similar to how the aliens are described in The Three-Body Problem).
I didn't love A Fire Upon the Deep because, while the sci-fi parts were amazing, the medieval fantasy telepathic dog society was much less interesting, basically a political fable with some children thrown in; it seemed like a different novel altogether, and in fact the plots don't really ever intersect except when the adults finally land. It felt like two very different books cobbled together from two different authors. The dog half reminded me of Terry Pratchett for some reason, another author whose schtick involves making the story go faster and increasingly more breathless towards the end, like some Hollywood action movie, often involving a bunch of running or flying.
I liked Deepness even less, because once again you have fantasy politics, and while I understood the conceit, the storytelling just didn't work for me. Like before, the science-fiction stuff was fantastic and full of great ideas, but the other half was the exact opposite.
Just a note that the dogs/Tines aren’t telepathic but communicated via high frequency sound. The idea was exploring an entity that existed as a society of minds and how that would look from a practical perspective. There’s a story in the compilation discussed here that feature the Tines in another setting one may find interesting.
Ah, it's been a while. It doesn't change anything, though. They might as well have been telepathic, since it appeared they formed a sort of hive mind when close to each other.
I had to read the book a couple of times before I completely understood this, but I'm pretty sure there's an implicit metaphor that ties the two plots together, and it's about the feedback between technological progress and intelligence, and how physical constraints (or accidents of evolution) limit progress. The society of the Tines is constrained by their peculiar path to sentience - they can't split up pack members and they can't co-mingle packs without losing coherence. From their perspective, early 20th century electronics are the equivalent of neural prosthetics, and might as well be gifts from the Transcend.
Are you perchance channelling that space-Usenet poster who was utterly dismissive of the main plot until the very end? ;-)
Parent comment should be marked SPOILERS, this one also.
Srsly tho, I appreciate your perspective. I found the dog part a little slow at times but still super interesting due to their collective identity which was explored quite a lot. As such it wasn't just a medieval squabble, it was entirely in keeping with the nature-of-consciousness theme that permeated the space part of the story.
I do get it, no idea why everybody now starts explaining the story to me like I misunderstood it :) Its fine that person A likes object X, but person B doesn't, there is no rationalization needed since it won't change the opinion.
I went for that sci-fi book for the space and sci-fi parts, and found the other side not interesting. That's it. I think I generally like sci-fi happening in space or generally futuristic. For medieval I prefer reading fantasy (which I think would help story tremendously if included for folks like me, since there is already another 'magic' in that universe).
I think you misunderstand my reply. I'm not trying to change your mind, I'm trying to express disagreement without reaching for the downvote button, is all :-)
I've seen others who felt similarly about the enjoyability of the space part vs the dog part. But for some reason I felt the opposite, the space part was alright but I didn't really connect with any of the characters or plot there much. But I loved the part on the dog planet, for me that world felt like he started with a question of "What might it look like if a pack animal achieved human-like level of intelligence?" and explored from there, and what he came up with made a lot of sense to me and was really interesting to think about.
I think the dog part really suffered from a quite common syndrome, that the sci-fi author gets some really cool idea/concept, and has to explore it in some context / story, but doesn't really deliver on it. For me the idea/concept was great, the story just boring filler needed to explore the idea.
I'm completely with you. I found the space parts a chore to read through to get back to the most interesting stuff. The whole "zones of thought" concept just seems an obvious device to allow Vinge's ideas to work.
By contrast, the thrill I got when I first realized that the dog hive mind was evolution's stab at an acoustic modem was fantastic, and I read through all of this aspect of the book with great wonder.
Deepness and Marooned in Realtime are his favorites of mine. Both sequels to less impressive novels imo. I like his writing in general but those two were really brilliant.
If you haven't already read "The Ungoverned" I recommend it as well - although much shorter it's effectively the second part in a trilogy, bridging the two novels and featuring the same main character as "Marooned in Realtime".
I just read it a couple of years ago, missed the memo that there was a third book. It feels like book 3/4 but he has not finished the story and I worry if he ever will.
> It feels like book 3/4 but he has not finished the story
Worse: Children felt like the author stalling for time on the greater plot. Chekov's gun isn't just left unfired; the author takes it down, polishes it a bit, and puts it back on the mantle without firing a shot.
Assuming that it's still canon, The Blabber tells us how it ends, but there's some very interesting stuff in between we're still waiting for.
DARPA wanted to work on it as well (look up "Total Domain Awareness"), but I think the power vs jam resistance (even against non-intentional emissions, such as a broken computer/microwave or a malfunctioning localizer) tradeoff is just not tractable at this point.
Is this a successful attempt to game the hackernews algos? The referenced WP page is obviously written by gtp-3, and the comments sound like a troupe of sock puppets in chorus. Yet here we are on the front page. Good job!
I don't see any evidence of that. The votes look perfectly normal to me, the submitter is a good HN submitter, and while I agree with you that we don't want GPT generated posts on HN, the OP doesn't read that way to me.
Have to say Rainbows End is one of my favorites. It's got everything AR, VR, AI, Social media/belief circles, mass behavior manipulation, reverse aglng etc etc. I felt like I was looking into the near future.
In the same vein that 'True Names' covered the last 10-20 years with AI, Anonymity, cyber crime, hacking, and virtual reality, I think 'Rainbows End' is our next 10-20 years.
His other stuff. A lot of it is pretty good. There's that trilogy with the layers of space. I guess I need to look at it again. But the group mind dogs. Interesting but not amazing. And then we have your usual good-bad conflict, which is boring. So anyway.
But ya. Cookie Monster. That shivers my things good.
The fact that the malevolent AI could escape by buffer-overflowing a sensor, but didn’t realize that only ram-drive ships were being targeted was insulting plot-wise.
Personally I liked spiders more than dogs. There's more dogs though, and the dogs are enjoyable enough. I need to finish that series. And re-read spiders. All in all both spiders and dogs sit near the top of my personal scifi lists. They're uncomfortable because they're twisting your brain. Just like a good yoga session also can feel awkward or a stretch:)
I also liked the spiders way more than the dogs. During the dogs scenes I just wanted to skip ahead and find out what was happening in the rest of the galaxy.
Can someone explain this? One three occasions in the essay, including the title. he adds a cryptic "2001 Tor". What does that mean? It does not exist in the many other mentions of the same book title. Also, Amazon believes the publication year is 2002. What is "2001 Tor"?
You never know. I thought this about my favorite short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I didn't think it was possible to turn it into a movie at all and yet Denis Villeneuve did an amazing job with Arrival which is based on the story.
By Vinge's prophecy we will have AGI between this year and 2030, which means you can have perfect stable diffusion for movies before you retire, and you can tweak your movie for the book to your hearts content.
Vinge was one who very early recognized that the invention of artificial intelligence didn't just imply androids (as Asimov or Roddenberry imagined them) on roughly the level of humans, but rather the existence of a vastly superhuman species that would change the future completely.
In 1983 he wrote in the SF magazine Omni:
"We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between... so that the world remains intelligible."
Ten years later, in is his famous essay "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" he went into more detail and predicted the singularity to occur between 2005 and 2030:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180410074243/http://mindstalk....
72 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] thread"Hexapodia is the key insight"
Among other things, he taught me how to write pre-emptive task switching in 68k assembly language.
Fun times!
Storytelling, setting, everything just clicked. I know there is a third book in the trilogy but it seems a bit back to the roots in terms of setting and I haven't touched just out of the fear that I wouldn't love it as much as ADITS... Should I?
Suffered till the end, and lost any motivation to continue since following books proudly advertised that the form is there to stay.
There are vastly more diverse stories that still link well together, ie Hyperion cantos was an amazing experience for me. Literally 7 different stories coming together, from cyberpunk to high religious politics, but always connected to same technological universe.
That stuff has the Star Wars vibe where Ep 1-3 have much more grandiosity than the original series - luckily the weren't chronologically first.
I don't need an everyman perspective[1] on an epic science-fiction story! I am an everyman! I can form my own opinion of it!
They are also rather heavy on author-dictated philosophy (which is not particularly interesting, or insightful, and manages to fall flat in a pretty major self-contradictory way) - whereas the first two Hyperion books have much less of an author's voice in them, and are much more of a presentation of an interaction of different, competing value systems. That is interesting! Listening to the chosen one go on and on about choosing again (when none of their disciples actually do) is not!
The overall plot of them is fine. It's, unfortunately, all in the execution.
[1] Or at least, not one that's hammered into me for ~60% of the book.
Edit: thinking back, the ending of #2 was bloody spectacular as well. I think the sheer volume of character/world building must help as preparation for impactful endings.
They're sequels set in the same setting, with a few cool ideas, but the literary flair -- the magic -- just isn't there.
The Canterbury Tales in Space framing took me way to long to pick up on.
That was a major plot design point to me.
That pre-spacefaring civilizations have things that are incredibly important to them, but questionably important relative to order-of-magnitudes different power galactic civilizations.
One of the reasons I like Banks fiction as well -- in all likelihood, given evolution and technological maturity timescales, advanced civilizations will be wildly displaced in time as well as space.
I didn't love A Fire Upon the Deep because, while the sci-fi parts were amazing, the medieval fantasy telepathic dog society was much less interesting, basically a political fable with some children thrown in; it seemed like a different novel altogether, and in fact the plots don't really ever intersect except when the adults finally land. It felt like two very different books cobbled together from two different authors. The dog half reminded me of Terry Pratchett for some reason, another author whose schtick involves making the story go faster and increasingly more breathless towards the end, like some Hollywood action movie, often involving a bunch of running or flying.
I liked Deepness even less, because once again you have fantasy politics, and while I understood the conceit, the storytelling just didn't work for me. Like before, the science-fiction stuff was fantastic and full of great ideas, but the other half was the exact opposite.
Quite the opposite. The rot13(ybat enatr enqvb pybnxf) are an important plot point.
That isn't what I was referring to. You may have missed something important in your reading.
Since the showdown with the blight is in the medieval dogs’ turf, the effects of that minor squabble could determine the fate of the galaxy!
"As above, so below".
I could have done with more space archaeology, and less human children. Apart from that I felt it was pretty great.
Are you perchance channelling that space-Usenet poster who was utterly dismissive of the main plot until the very end? ;-)
Parent comment should be marked SPOILERS, this one also.
Srsly tho, I appreciate your perspective. I found the dog part a little slow at times but still super interesting due to their collective identity which was explored quite a lot. As such it wasn't just a medieval squabble, it was entirely in keeping with the nature-of-consciousness theme that permeated the space part of the story.
I went for that sci-fi book for the space and sci-fi parts, and found the other side not interesting. That's it. I think I generally like sci-fi happening in space or generally futuristic. For medieval I prefer reading fantasy (which I think would help story tremendously if included for folks like me, since there is already another 'magic' in that universe).
By contrast, the thrill I got when I first realized that the dog hive mind was evolution's stab at an acoustic modem was fantastic, and I read through all of this aspect of the book with great wonder.
Don't. It's nowhere near as good as either of the previous books, and the ending leaves some important plot points unresolved.
Worse: Children felt like the author stalling for time on the greater plot. Chekov's gun isn't just left unfired; the author takes it down, polishes it a bit, and puts it back on the mantle without firing a shot.
Assuming that it's still canon, The Blabber tells us how it ends, but there's some very interesting stuff in between we're still waiting for.
It's got the right stuff.
His other stuff. A lot of it is pretty good. There's that trilogy with the layers of space. I guess I need to look at it again. But the group mind dogs. Interesting but not amazing. And then we have your usual good-bad conflict, which is boring. So anyway.
But ya. Cookie Monster. That shivers my things good.
The spider were just great though!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Verno...
Some stories probably can only be told properly in written words, and that’s ok.
In 1983 he wrote in the SF magazine Omni:
"We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between... so that the world remains intelligible."
Ten years later, in is his famous essay "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" he went into more detail and predicted the singularity to occur between 2005 and 2030: https://web.archive.org/web/20180410074243/http://mindstalk....