SF-LOVERS Digest Wednesday, 10 Feb 1993 Volume 18 : Issue 93 Today's Topics: Books - Vinge (14 msgs) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 21 Jan 93 17:47:18 GMT From: dcs@neutron.chem.yale.edu (Dave Schweisguth) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book... Lenore Levine (levine@symcom.math.uiuc.edu) wrote: >[A Fire Upon the Deep] ... just came out in paperback; and I really >enjoyed reading it. I liked the original scientific concepts and species >design (which seem to be very rare in 90's SF). I would like to know what >people think of this book. Just finished it. I particularly liked the Tines/Packfolk version of group minds, and was sorry that none of them made it to the Beyond. The several distinct side effects of the radio cloaks were well worked out. On the other hand, Vinge is no Wolfe, and the aliens were altogether too human. I was reminded of Hal Clement on a larger scale. Mind you, I do like Hal Clement. >Notice how well he's captured the flavor of the Net? I'm sure that "Death >to Vermin" guy's posted here before :-) . The "is-Vinge-on-Usenet?" business was discussed to death when the hardback came out, and I can't see why. It's such an obvious steal, right down to the cheesy headers. If 50,000 years and the computational advantages of the Beyond don't improve network communications, I'll stick with the Slow Zone. I only caught one glimmer of technological innovation, when a burning smell on the Olvira turned out to be a _diagnostic_. Dave Schweisguth Yale MB&B & Chemistry dcs@neutron.chem.yale.edu ------------------------------ Date: 21 Jan 93 16:47:00 GMT From: jvte@cs.few.eur.nl (Jan van 't Ent) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book... levine@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Lenore Levine) writes: [ About _A Fire Upon the Deep_] >...just came out in paperback; and I really enjoyed reading it. Yes, me too. The setting is very promising for more stories, which need not tie in very closely (so to speculate a little: for possible new books it shouldn't be necessary to read all the previous stuff). I also liked the various mixing and non-mixing aliens, and the general mix of technical SF versus good characters Vernor achieved. >Notice how well he's captured the flavor of the Net? I'm sure that "Death >to Vermin" guy's posted here before :-) . Yeah, well, on the one hand I liked it ... it was easily recognizable (although I wouldn't know how non-net-users think about those postings), but on the other hand I found it all too simple-sounding for such a highly developed civilisation ... so it was both nice to read, and irritating at the same time :-) Jan Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Netherlands vantent@CVX.eur.nl ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jan 93 00:44:33 GMT From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book... dcs@neutron.chem.yale.edu (Dave Schweisguth): >>Notice how well he's captured the flavor of the Net? I'm sure that "Death >>to Vermin" guy's posted here before :-) . > >If 50,000 years and the computational advantages of the Beyond don't >improve network communications... It was a direct steal from the net, and it worked rather well. I thought the similarities well motivated, though. They didn't just stem from a lack of imagination. The main thing to remember is that, despite the overwhelming number of messages, the main constraints on Vinge's net are a narrow bandwidth - exceedingly narrow as you move to the lower Beyond - and a very high cost. Each of the participants is not an individual, as is the case here, but a planetary system or equivalent, that is choosing to spend a noticeable portion of its budget on these communications. Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jan 93 04:00:29 GMT From: CMH114@psuvm.psu.edu Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book... Speaking of _A Fire Upon the Deep... (SPOILERS) What did yinz think of the the psychological theme? Kind of reminded me of Dick's _Dr. Bloodmoney_. Vinge seems to be playing with characters with severely compromised personalities. The Skroderiders discovering that they are genetically/technologically programmed saboteurs, Phrom tortured by his artificial, puppet nature, the Sjandra Kei refugees dealing with the destruction of their culture, the unstable nature of the Tines pack-minds, they all share a certain lack of mental integrity. Interesting that a 600pg space opera plotted on the galactic scale is at its heart a psychological novel. Mitch Hagmaier ------------------------------ Date: 23 Jan 93 17:16:12 GMT From: David.Dyer-bennet@f30498.n1125.z0.tdkt.kksys.com (David Dyer-bennet) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Vernor Vinge's New Book... Lenore Levine wrote: > I would like to know what people think of this book. I enjoyed it immensely. For some reason the scenes with the doggies didn't properly engage my attention, but I can't see why; I can't analytically find anything "wrong" with them. >Notice how well he's captured the flavor of the Net? I'm sure that "Death >to Vermin" guy's posted here before :-) . I both greatly enjoyed, and was very bothered by, this aspect. Given the time-span involved, I think it's *wrong* for the net to be so completely recognizable. (I have this same problem with Card's net in the Ender books.) ------------------------------ Date: 24 Jan 93 16:45:12 GMT From: levine@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Lenore Levine) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's New Book... David.Dyer-bennet@f30498.n1125.z0.tdkt.kksys.com (David Dyer-bennet) writes: [About A Fire Upon the Deep] >I both greatly enjoyed, and was very bothered by, this aspect. Given the >time-span involved, I think it's *wrong* for the net to be so completely >recognizable. (I have this same problem with Card's net in the Ender >books.) But sometimes the far future has to be interpreted to make it familiar. For example, Vinge's Beyond humans come from so far in the future that they are not members of any current race (and there are hints that their genes have been extensively edited). Is it reasonable that the language they speak would so resemble Norwegian, or indeed, any Indo-European language? And yet, having them use words from a real language, one related to English, but one not many of us are familiar with, does give this world a feeling of reality that names and words from an invented language would not. ------------------------------ Date: 25 Jan 93 20:12:31 GMT From: matt@physics2.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book... The Net messages were a bit too lifelike to seem realistic: it's hard to imagine that level of immaturity when the participants are entire civilizations, and when posting costs a noticeable fraction of one's planetary wealth. Still, even that isn't completely implausible; what we're reading isn't the postings themselves, but the translations of the translations of the translations of the postings. We can imagine that the postings seem more sensible to the alien civilizations that posted them than they do to us, and that the sophomoric flavor of many of the postings is just the way that the translation programs attempt to deal with what are really incomprehensibly alien viewpoints. Matthew Austern (510) 644-2618 austern@lbl.bitnet matt@physics.berkeley.edu ------------------------------ Date: 29 Jan 93 17:56:50 GMT From: fzimmerm@csd630a.erim.org (Fred Zimmerman) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book... I am a heavy net user, and didn't find Vinge's use of the net analogue distracting at all. I took it for granted that there was a much larger and much more incomprehensible volume of traffic on the "real" net in Vinge's world, and that he was presenting us with representative excerpts to give us an idea of plot developments in his galaxy. ------------------------------ Date: 29 Jan 93 20:08:13 GMT From: brand@csgrad.cs.vt.edu (Jeff Brandenburg) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book... matt@physics2 (Matt Austern) writes: >We can imagine that the postings seem more sensible to the alien >civilizations that posted them than they do to us, and that the sophomoric >flavor of many of the postings is just the way that the translation >programs attempt to deal with what are really incomprehensibly alien >viewpoints. This is, after all, the whole point - the book has a target audience. Perhaps the satire on Usenet could have been a little more subtle, the Tines a little less humanoid. But I don't think I was alone in recognizing certain individuals or sites on Vinge's Known Net, or people I've known in Scriber Jaqueramaphan. There is *plenty* of subtlety in the book. The games with Tines' names, the ocean/shore theme, the bits of history, the depths of mystery - what are the Zones? What is the Blight, exactly? Heck, what's a flamed trellis? Some things in the book are easy to recognize, and enjoyable. Some things seem utterly obscure, and are still enjoyable. I think the book as a whole is a lot more substantial than most of the SF I've read recently, and it's certainly a lot of fun... Jeff Brandenburg Va. Tech CS ------------------------------ Date: 2 Feb 93 22:43:37 GMT From: dwl@watson.ibm.com (David W. Levine) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Vernor Vinge (Fire upon the deep setting) For those who are looking over the background to Fire Upon the Deep, you should hunt up a copy of Vernor Vinge's story "The Blabber" I knew that the setting was familiar and it took me a while to hunt down the reference. It's in his collection "Threats ...and Other Promises", Baen, 1988. It is post Fire Upon the Deep, and interlocks with a bunch of stuff in that setting. I'm going to do the cross-matching and post some more, but I'd file this as a must read if you're intrigued by the setting. No spoilers in this post, but when I get the time... On the same subject, the notes between the stories in "Threats ..." are pretty intriguing. Does anyone know if Vinge has written any non-fiction on the subject of his writing? David W. Levine IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center dwl@watson.ibm.com ------------------------------ Date: 2 Feb 93 04:55:30 GMT From: doom@elaine36.stanford.edu (Joseph Brenner) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Vernor Vinge's "The Peace War" Just re-read "The Peace War", the first novel in a volume issued by Baen books as _Across Realtime_. Vernor Vinge is okay, sometimes... doesn't have the flash of a Gibson, but he does manage to provide enough novelistic weight to carry his premises (character's are okay, plot is interesting, imagery is decent, even striking in places)... but what about those premises, huh? You got this lone genius working at Livermore who comes up with this boffo idea for generating these weird little semi-permanent, impenetrable force fields they call "bobbles". Some idealistic/power hungry forces in the bureaucracy at Livermore decide to try and save the world (bobbling nuclear weapons, and so on) and end up (a) taking over the world (b) crushing all heavy industry for fear it could be used to make weapons. The "Tinkers" (read "Hackers") in the outback continue making technical advances in secret, until they outstrip the capabilities of the stultified bureacracy of "The Peace Authority". Ultimately, the same lone genius (now in hiding) with the help of an apprentice genius make some advances in bobble technology. They learn to project bobbles using radically less energy, though their techniques are slower, and the size of the bobbles limited, and so on. So what do you make of all this stuff? I mean, first of all, bobbles are bullshit. There's no physics behind this stuff, no speculative physics even, just a magical effect the author has come up with, and back-filled with a small amount of technical gobbldygook. So this is science fiction, as opposed to fantasy? Well maybe. Fantasy tends to focus on things like "What if you had three wishes." Even bad Science Fiction tends to focus on questions like "What if *everyone* had three wishes? What if you could buy three wishes?" So, SF gets closer to reality than F, even if there isn't much S in it. And I give Vinge some points for picking a fairly creative piece of fantastic technology to write about, rather than sticking to the usual cliched things like faster-than-light travel. Okay then, how about this business of a conspiracy within a government lab to take over the world? A bit much? Well, maybe not... If you start taking the nanotech scenarios seriously, this sort of thing starts looking really tempting. If you hit on a really big technical advance, what should you do with it? Would you tell your bosses how to make the next atom bomb, and hope they did the right thing with it? Maybe the way to preserving world stability is to get to the next break through first, and use it before the "bad guys" do, whoever you think the bad guys might be. (This probably isn't a *good* way to go, but it might be the *only* way...). So the villains are believable to me. And the heroes? Is it really possible to beat the big, slow, government labs, with clever, cheap experiments performed by small groups of individuals on their own? I dunno. Maybe it's worth thinking about though... before you decide to try and get rich quick by writing yet another piece of video game software. So Vernor Vinge gets a "thumbs-up" without reluctance from me, even if his stuff isn't perfect... (like, check out the stories in Poul Anderson's MAURI & KITH. Isn't Vinge covering a lot of the same ground?). ------------------------------ Date: 3 Feb 93 19:09:01 GMT From: marshall@seas.gwu.edu (Christopher Marshall) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Vernor Vinge's imitation internet There has been some discussion about Vernor Vinge and his imitation of the Internet newsgroups in A Fire Upon the Deep. I would like to add my two cents. I liked it. I don't think he was being unsophisticated in portraying a galaxy wide internet as having the familiar text interface that we all know and love. It does not matter how advanced your technology is, if you have limited bandwidth channel (say limited to roughly what we are used to on the internet) then you can't have a mind blowing full sensory spectrum kick ass interface. Text messages might be as good as you can do. Who's to say what factors would limit your bandwidth on a super-luminal communications link stretching from one section of the galaxy to the other? The resources of an entire solar system might barely be able to sustain a 1Mb/s link across a thousand light years with a round trip delay of two hours. In fact, there was an incident in which a full sensory spectrum broadcast over galatic distances took place which was referred to as 'The most incredible waste of bandwidth ever seen,' or words to that effect. Chris Marshall marshall@seas.gwu.edu ------------------------------ Date: 3 Feb 93 23:50:46 GMT From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge (Fire upon the deep setting) dwl@watson.ibm.com : >For those who are looking over the background to Fire Upon the Deep, you >should hunt up a copy of Vernor Vinge's story "The Blabber"... "The Blabber" takes place about one thousand years after AFutD. To be more precise, AFutD, which was written later, was placed about a thousand years before Blabber. The author realized that there were some inconsistencies between the two, but wasn't willing to ruthlessly mold the novel to be completely consistent with the story. The story, btw, is (among things) a relatively unabashed homage to "The Star Beast". Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com ------------------------------ Date: 3 Feb 93 21:41:33 GMT From: matt@physics2.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern) Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge (Fire upon the deep setting) dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) writes: > "The Blabber" takes place about one thousand years after AFutD. To be > more precise, AFutD, which was written later, was placed about a thousand > years before Blabber. The author realized that there were some > inconsistencies between the two, but wasn't willing to ruthlessly mold > the novel to be completely consistent with the story. The story, btw, is > (among things) a relatively unabashed homage to "The Star Beast". A thousand, eh? It's clear from "The Blabber" that it has to take place at least 500 years after A Fire Upon the Deep, but I didn't see any obvious way to date it more precisely than that. (Actually, I was a trifle puzzled whether a character in "The Blabber" was supposed to be the same person as the character in A Fire Upon the Deep who had the same name: a lot of time has passed between the two stories, after all! It's also noteworthy that this character doesn't refer, in "The Blabber," to any of the events in A Fire Upon the Deep, but does refer to a completely different struggle. How many galaxy-shaking fights can one person reasonably expect to engage in?) Matthew Austern matt@physics.berkeley.edu ------------------------------ End of SF-LOVERS Digest ***********************