So: the second book I borrowed was "A Deepness in the Sky," also by Vinge. After a detour through some non-science-fiction fare, I plunged into it.
The book ended up being quite different from Marooned in Realtime. I should have expected this: after all, his short stories were quite distinct from one another, so why should his novels be the same? Not only were the technology and the stories unique, but the overall feel is quite different as well. Marooned in Realtime is relatively narrowly focused, with a single protagonist and a central mystery to solve. A Deepness in the Sky is a grand epic, with a huge cast of characters. Although most of the action takes place in and around a single planet, it's set against a rich tapestry of starfaring, and you get a strong feel for the entire universe while reading it. It's also a darker book, with outright villainy dominating most of its timeline; the efforts of the good guys always seem doomed to failure. (In contrast, MiR is dominated by mainly good people, with a hidden and secretive bad guy lurking somewhere.)
ADitS is set in a different timeline, and it's one of the rare Vinge stories that doesn't deal with the Singularity at all. Or, you could say that it deals with it by omission, with a focus on social sciences. In this universe, mankind is thwarted from ever achieving the Singularity due to the unstable nature of civilization. Humanity has gained interstellar travel and spread to a wide range of planets, each of which have their own independent governments, but a cycle of rise and decline is endlessly repeated. Populations grow and technology expands, a grand civilization is established, but then some disaster inevitably strikes - perhaps overpopulation triggers a plague, or a tyrannical government takes over and drives the planet back to the Dark Ages, or religious wars divide the populace and leads them to annihilate one another. It's a fairly pessimistic view, though not universally dour: fallen civilizations can recover as long as enough people are left alive and the planet remains habitable. It may take ten thousand years or more, but eventually high civilization will return.
In this scenario, any planet is ultimately doomed. You can avoid that fate, however, by not being tied to a particular planet. This is how the whole enterprise got started, when the first men escaped the trap of Old Earth and established the first colonies before it failed. We learn that Old Earth itself has gone through three cycles of fall and rebirth; this book is set a LONG way in our future. Anyways, one particular loose grouping of people has abandoned the dream of establishing a permanent civilization, and become a tribe of constantly traveling and constantly trading merchants, the Qeng Ho. They have some of the accouterments of a nation, such as a language and dynasties, but have no desire to gain territory or subjugate other people. Instead, they travel between systems in search of advanced civilizations, and when they find them they trade. Over time, they are collecting all of the best technology and designs in the universe, and in the process helping to spread civilization itself.
Again, all that is backdrop. The actual story itself is more claustrophobic.
BEGIN MINI SPOILERS
Not to mention arachnophobic. The Qeng Ho find a rare prize, an intelligent non-human race. A fleet of ships mount an expedition, hoping to find a lucrative trading opportunity. They arrive at the same time as a rising power, the Emergents, whose murky goals alarm the Qeng Ho. The two work together in an uneasy truce for a while, before the Emergents betray them, killing many of the traders and enslaving the rest.
It takes a while to discover just what form their slavery takes. I had guessed fairly early on that what they called "Focus" was roughly equivalent to a ghost dub in the "Ghost in the Shell" world, where a human psyche is implanted in an automaton. This isn't quite right: Focus is more like a direct enslavement of the mind. Your brain stays in your body, but your master's volition is substituted for your own. You retain your previous memories and capabilities, but lose all emotional attachments except those related to your mission. Each person is Focused on a particular task, which might be piloting a ship, managing weapons systems, solving mathematical problems, translating alien speech, serving hors d'oeuvre, pretty much anything. The Qeng Ho have focused on automation, programming software to take care of routine tasks; the Emergents have some automation, but their edge is that they can run human intelligence like a software program, giving vague instructions in natural language and having their wishes carried out.
Focus is a really creepy thing. You get to see a lot of the Focused people and get to know them well over the long length of the novel. You also see Focus change people who are infected; they retain some of their personality, which makes their alienation even more painful to watch.
One of the most impressive aspects of this book is the way it keeps the Emergents' evil front and center throughout the novel. I'm used to books where the heroes are the focus; while the heroes and the villains inevitably clash, and may do so frequently, the heroes are still largely in control of their actions, able to make plans and carry them out. However, this is a book set in a police state, one that makes Stalin's USSR or Kim Jong Il's North Korea look like the Wild West in comparison. On top of the oppressive pyramid sits Thomas Nau, a fully realized bad guy who manages to be charming while also being manipulative and thoroughly cold-blooded. The Emergent power structure demands absolute obedience, and has the tools to enforce it. Nau controls an army of slaves who will unquestioningly carry out his bidding. He also has video and audio surveillance that lets him (and his lieutenants) watch everyone, everywhere, all the time. Later in the novel, he gains access to a new level of surveillance that allows him to even read body temperatures and minute facial expressions, letting him recognize when people are lying or unusually agitated. All of this data, in turn, is fed to the ranks of Focused analysts, who sift through the constant stream of input, discerning any sign that someone might be questioning his authority or preparing to move against him.
How do you organize a resistance to that? You can't. An early attempt at rebellion is squashed. From then on, everyone is Winston Smith. People can silently rage within their own minds, but not take any action against the government, cannot speak, cannot find anyone else who does. In fact, it's worse than Big Brother, because this one can actually read your mind, and doesn't need to find any journals or secret recordings.
All of this, however, is just the Human tip of the iceberg. A parallel story is taking place down on the surface among the Spiders. They're undergoing a rapid burst of technological development, essentially equivalent to going from the 1920's to the 1990's in the span of about 30 years. The book opens on a rough equivalent of our World Wars, with trench warfare and government research for more advanced weaponry. It closes with a Cold War showdown complete with a functioning Star Wars missile defense system. In between, a single Spider, Sherkaner Underhill, combines Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison, only more prolific; he's a brilliant engineer who single-handedly (er, single-leggedly) changes the world, then founds a university full of students each doing the same.
The length of the novel is put to good use. We get to really know Underhill, and his wife, and their friends, and their children. We see Underhill as a young lad bubbling over with enthusiasm and ideas, and watch him as he grows older and gradually more frail; he never loses that spark which makes him so endearing. We also get a feel for the geo-political shifts on Arachna, as old allies gradually become new enemies. And, of course, we know more than the Spiders, so even as we get to learn and like them more, our unease grows: we know that there is an avaricious race hidden just out of their sight, waiting to pounce and enslave them once they reach a sufficiently advanced technology.
I think that ADitS is one of the rare sci-fi books that can make a compelling case for being literature as well. We start getting chapters told from the Spiders' POV fairly early on. Much later, we realize that what we've been reading is taken from the Focused translators' own observation of the Spiders. This, in turn, leads to some other interesting insights. The Spiders are a fully alien race, so of course they have their own names, own language, own idioms. The translators have been working to make it comprehensible to humans, and are divided between a literalist faction, who want to present the words in as close to their original form as possible, and an impressionist faction, who are willing to bend the actual words in order to better convey the underlying meaning. In a sense, the Focused are creating the spiders as much as they are describing them. The Focused are authors. This kind of textual play is subtle, but a lot of fun, and helps make the book much more than "just" a rousing sci-fi story.
Towards the very end of the book, there's an extended discussion about the effects of Focus, and whether it is ever acceptable. During this section, I came to feel like Vinge was projecting some of himself into the debate. Focus is a horrifying thing, but at the same time, it allows one to accomplish so much. All you need to do is sublimate yourself into your work: the ego drops away, and all your effort pours into the task at hand, free from distractions or competing priorities. What he's describing is a state like what I feel when I'm programming or writing. There's something terrifying about the level of Focus in this book, but also something alluring, and I think Vinge feels the same kind of temptation that I do.
END SPOILERS
I think A Deepness in the Sky may be the best Vinge novel that I've read yet. It has all the intelligence and creativity of his other books, but adds a truly epic scope and tragic core that elevates it above the rest. It's not for everyone, but is a phenomenal novel that will reward on all fronts.
Showing posts with label vernor vinge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vernor vinge. Show all posts
Monday, April 19, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Lavender
I've previously bemoaned the dearth of Vernor Vinge titles in my library. I was recently complaining about this to a co-worker, who was kind enough to give me a little reality check, pointing out that I could buy a perfectly good used copy in, say, Borderlands for $10 or less, then sell it back when I was done reading, for a whopping total of a couple of bucks. It's true: my thrifty instincts often blind me to the reality that we live in a world where one can purchase goods with money.
He took pity on me, and lent me two Vinge titles from his own library. I first tackled the shorter of the two, Marooned in Realtime. After I got several chapters into it, I realized that it was a sequel to the short story "The Ungoverned," which I had just recently finished when reading through Vinge's collected works. I also learned that a Vinge sequel is very different from the sort of sequels one might usually expect.
MINI SPOILERS
Namely, how many sequels start fifty million years after the previous story?
Marooned in Realtime is a really fascinating work. The key technological gimmick is something called a "Bobble." A Bobble is essentially a stasis field. When a bobble is activated, everything within its radius freezes in time, while outside, time progresses as usual. So, to someone inside the bobble, it will feel as though an instant has passed, while on the outside, anywhere from several minutes to a megayear may have passed.
This allows for one-way time travel: you can bobble into the future, but not return to the past. That leads to some really cool and exciting story options. Traveling is always a risk, since you always leap forward into the unknown, and can never travel back into the past. There's a huge social element, since you're leaving behind those you didn't bobble with.
I like bobbling for a lot of reasons, but high on my list is that it feels like hard sci-fi. He never goes into the details of exactly how bobbling is supposed to work, but it does seem at least theoretically possible, based on what we know today about space and time. Einstein has shown that time is relative, not a constant, and so it is possible for two people to age at different rates; you could get an effect similar to bobbling by sending someone on a very fast space ship (which also happens within this book). And, by restricting himself to one-way time-travel, Vinge neatly avoids the entire temporal paradox problem; you can't keep your parents from meeting one another. It's very much an example of building a story around the world, instead of twisting the world to fit your story.
While bobbling is the main feature, it isn't the only technological advance. Actually, the timeline is kind of funny - Vinge wrote this book in the 80's, and anticipated a rapid approach towards the Singularity within our lifetime, so to break up the flow a little he invented a massive biological warfare catastrophe to take place in 1997 which wiped out the majority of mankind. Still, the survivors recovered enough in the next 100 years to create the Longevity Breakthrough, which allows humans (with the proper medical equipment) to remain practically immortal, and even reverse aging and redesign their bodies. Again, while we certainly can't do this now, it does seem to be theoretically possible once our science has advanced far enough. He also foresees something like today's always-connected, always-on Internet: the "low techs" have trouble using it, but more advanced travelers can tap in to the collective knowledge of all mankind and personal records at any time and from any place that they want. The only difference is that they use visors instead of mobile phones to do it.
What else... there are Autons, personal floating robots who observe and protect particular charges. And "clean" nuclear bombs, which are used as propulsion devices instead of weapons. And lots of other, smaller things.
The technology is the most interesting part of the story, but the characters are good as well. The main character, W W Brierson, returns from The Ungoverned in a somewhat familiar role. There he was a protector, using his wits to affect the outcome of a pending war; here he is a detective, tracking down the perpetrator of a crime. It's a different kind of intelligence, and makes for a great device on which to build the story.
There's a surprisingly large, varied, and rich cast of supporting characters, most of whom are also suspects in Brierson's investigation. They are roughly divided into low-techs, who bobbled out in the 21st century, and high-techs, who bobbled out in the 22nd century. Shortly after the last high-techs left, SOMETHING happened that eliminated the entire human race from Planet Earth and her colonies. Each of the high-techs have their own theory about what happened. Some think it was an alien invasion; others believe it was the Second Coming of Christ; others think it was a violent self-destruction; others think that the Singularity occurred, and all mankind transcended the planet. The characters aren't just those theories, though. With such a large cast Vinge can't devote too much time to any one person, but he does manage to provide an appropriate stamp of personality on every person, making them shy, or imperious, or cold, or fanatical, or conflicted.
Vinge keeps the theme from The Ungoverned going here. The old Planet Earth had largely evolved beyond governments, settling into a system of private contracts and self-selected affinity groups. However, in the post-Singularity future, about one-third of the surviving people follow the Republic of New Mexico, while another third represents the Peace Authority. A subplot of the book deals with the struggle for power between these groups, while the remaining unaligned people watch with a fair amount of bemusement.
Even though Brierson gets the most space by far, I actually thought he was the weakest character. He's interesting, but not really very consistent. Vinge writes about how he's popular and everyone likes him, but we never see that; other than two Indian brothers, we never really see anyone who seems to like him or treat him with respect. Similarly, he goes through nearly the whole novel as the cool, self-controlled detective, but he loses control and goes a bit nuts at two points in the story. Vinge tries to work this in to his description of Brierson, but I found it hard to buy. Rather than make him into a more complex and interesting character, it just feels really jarring and inauthentic.
That said, it IS a great story. The mystery format works wonderfully, giving Vinge tons of time to lay out his ideas while still allowing us to feel like the whodunit is progressing. It ends on a very satisfying, almost comically cliche note, with all the suspects gathered in one room for the denouncement by the detective.
Now, for the "What This Reminded Me Of" run-down:
The book I found myself most often thinking of was "The Door Into Summer" by Robert Heinlein. This is mainly because both books feature one-way time-travel, which people undertake for similar reasons. TDiS time-travel is done by cryogenics, and only affects a single person rather than a field, but it's really the same ideas. That said, TDiS is incredibly optimistic, with a very rosy view of the future. Vinge is big-picture optimistic - he sees the march towards the Singularity as inevitable and exciting - but in the short run, the people who bobbled out of his world encountered a future far worse than that in Heinlein.
There are also a few similarities with Hyperion, mainly in the way they acknowledge both relative and absolute time. In Marooned in Realtime, a character's life might span seventy million years, but he might only be aware for 200 of those. A bobble of a thousand years might be trivial, while 100 years in realtime could be fatal. In Hyperion, the same kind of schism is at play, although there it is tied more directly to relativity. One person might live their entire life on one planet in seventy years. Another person might be born at the same time, leave when they were 20, travel around the universe visiting other planets for 10 years, and then return to that planet; they will be aged 30, but someone with the same birth date might have turned 60. That leads to awkward social skew. That said, MiR's longevity breakthrough keeps that from being such an issue, as age differences can be smoothed out, and people live effectively endless lives.
END SPOILERS
Vinge stays sharp in this book, and I'm glad to see that Rainbow's End isn't the only good novel that he wrote. It will be most attractive to people who want to play with Vinge's ideas, but it's also quite satisfying purely on the basis of its plot. One of these days, I'll need to read about the Peacewar and find out how this saga began.
He took pity on me, and lent me two Vinge titles from his own library. I first tackled the shorter of the two, Marooned in Realtime. After I got several chapters into it, I realized that it was a sequel to the short story "The Ungoverned," which I had just recently finished when reading through Vinge's collected works. I also learned that a Vinge sequel is very different from the sort of sequels one might usually expect.
MINI SPOILERS
Namely, how many sequels start fifty million years after the previous story?
Marooned in Realtime is a really fascinating work. The key technological gimmick is something called a "Bobble." A Bobble is essentially a stasis field. When a bobble is activated, everything within its radius freezes in time, while outside, time progresses as usual. So, to someone inside the bobble, it will feel as though an instant has passed, while on the outside, anywhere from several minutes to a megayear may have passed.
This allows for one-way time travel: you can bobble into the future, but not return to the past. That leads to some really cool and exciting story options. Traveling is always a risk, since you always leap forward into the unknown, and can never travel back into the past. There's a huge social element, since you're leaving behind those you didn't bobble with.
I like bobbling for a lot of reasons, but high on my list is that it feels like hard sci-fi. He never goes into the details of exactly how bobbling is supposed to work, but it does seem at least theoretically possible, based on what we know today about space and time. Einstein has shown that time is relative, not a constant, and so it is possible for two people to age at different rates; you could get an effect similar to bobbling by sending someone on a very fast space ship (which also happens within this book). And, by restricting himself to one-way time-travel, Vinge neatly avoids the entire temporal paradox problem; you can't keep your parents from meeting one another. It's very much an example of building a story around the world, instead of twisting the world to fit your story.
While bobbling is the main feature, it isn't the only technological advance. Actually, the timeline is kind of funny - Vinge wrote this book in the 80's, and anticipated a rapid approach towards the Singularity within our lifetime, so to break up the flow a little he invented a massive biological warfare catastrophe to take place in 1997 which wiped out the majority of mankind. Still, the survivors recovered enough in the next 100 years to create the Longevity Breakthrough, which allows humans (with the proper medical equipment) to remain practically immortal, and even reverse aging and redesign their bodies. Again, while we certainly can't do this now, it does seem to be theoretically possible once our science has advanced far enough. He also foresees something like today's always-connected, always-on Internet: the "low techs" have trouble using it, but more advanced travelers can tap in to the collective knowledge of all mankind and personal records at any time and from any place that they want. The only difference is that they use visors instead of mobile phones to do it.
What else... there are Autons, personal floating robots who observe and protect particular charges. And "clean" nuclear bombs, which are used as propulsion devices instead of weapons. And lots of other, smaller things.
The technology is the most interesting part of the story, but the characters are good as well. The main character, W W Brierson, returns from The Ungoverned in a somewhat familiar role. There he was a protector, using his wits to affect the outcome of a pending war; here he is a detective, tracking down the perpetrator of a crime. It's a different kind of intelligence, and makes for a great device on which to build the story.
There's a surprisingly large, varied, and rich cast of supporting characters, most of whom are also suspects in Brierson's investigation. They are roughly divided into low-techs, who bobbled out in the 21st century, and high-techs, who bobbled out in the 22nd century. Shortly after the last high-techs left, SOMETHING happened that eliminated the entire human race from Planet Earth and her colonies. Each of the high-techs have their own theory about what happened. Some think it was an alien invasion; others believe it was the Second Coming of Christ; others think it was a violent self-destruction; others think that the Singularity occurred, and all mankind transcended the planet. The characters aren't just those theories, though. With such a large cast Vinge can't devote too much time to any one person, but he does manage to provide an appropriate stamp of personality on every person, making them shy, or imperious, or cold, or fanatical, or conflicted.
Vinge keeps the theme from The Ungoverned going here. The old Planet Earth had largely evolved beyond governments, settling into a system of private contracts and self-selected affinity groups. However, in the post-Singularity future, about one-third of the surviving people follow the Republic of New Mexico, while another third represents the Peace Authority. A subplot of the book deals with the struggle for power between these groups, while the remaining unaligned people watch with a fair amount of bemusement.
Even though Brierson gets the most space by far, I actually thought he was the weakest character. He's interesting, but not really very consistent. Vinge writes about how he's popular and everyone likes him, but we never see that; other than two Indian brothers, we never really see anyone who seems to like him or treat him with respect. Similarly, he goes through nearly the whole novel as the cool, self-controlled detective, but he loses control and goes a bit nuts at two points in the story. Vinge tries to work this in to his description of Brierson, but I found it hard to buy. Rather than make him into a more complex and interesting character, it just feels really jarring and inauthentic.
That said, it IS a great story. The mystery format works wonderfully, giving Vinge tons of time to lay out his ideas while still allowing us to feel like the whodunit is progressing. It ends on a very satisfying, almost comically cliche note, with all the suspects gathered in one room for the denouncement by the detective.
Now, for the "What This Reminded Me Of" run-down:
The book I found myself most often thinking of was "The Door Into Summer" by Robert Heinlein. This is mainly because both books feature one-way time-travel, which people undertake for similar reasons. TDiS time-travel is done by cryogenics, and only affects a single person rather than a field, but it's really the same ideas. That said, TDiS is incredibly optimistic, with a very rosy view of the future. Vinge is big-picture optimistic - he sees the march towards the Singularity as inevitable and exciting - but in the short run, the people who bobbled out of his world encountered a future far worse than that in Heinlein.
There are also a few similarities with Hyperion, mainly in the way they acknowledge both relative and absolute time. In Marooned in Realtime, a character's life might span seventy million years, but he might only be aware for 200 of those. A bobble of a thousand years might be trivial, while 100 years in realtime could be fatal. In Hyperion, the same kind of schism is at play, although there it is tied more directly to relativity. One person might live their entire life on one planet in seventy years. Another person might be born at the same time, leave when they were 20, travel around the universe visiting other planets for 10 years, and then return to that planet; they will be aged 30, but someone with the same birth date might have turned 60. That leads to awkward social skew. That said, MiR's longevity breakthrough keeps that from being such an issue, as age differences can be smoothed out, and people live effectively endless lives.
END SPOILERS
Vinge stays sharp in this book, and I'm glad to see that Rainbow's End isn't the only good novel that he wrote. It will be most attractive to people who want to play with Vinge's ideas, but it's also quite satisfying purely on the basis of its plot. One of these days, I'll need to read about the Peacewar and find out how this saga began.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Vernal
Vernor Vinge seems to be a very highly regarded sci-fi author, but for some bizarre reason, the San Jose library doesn't carry any of his novels, and so I haven't been able to follow up on my excellent experience with his novel "Rainbow's End." That book was the first hard sci-fi that I'd read in ages, and it was a really thrilling experience that reminded me what I used to love about sci-fi: the way it can turn on parts of your brain, activating modes of thought and prompting you to consider how the world could change, how you could change, what really lies beneath our everyday reality.
While the library doesn't have his novels (I'm particularly curious about "A Fire Upon the Deep"), it does carry a collection of his short stories, which I finally got around to checking out. It's great stuff, and shows an impressive range. Everything in here counts as science fiction of some sort, but no two stories are really alike; they range from adventure tales, to fairly sentimental character studies, to cleverly plotted puzzle stories, to thrillers.
I hadn't realized just how long Vernor has been active for. He wrote his first stories while he was still a teenager in the 1960's. He's currently a professor, so he isn't a full-time author, which I'm sure limits his output somewhat. That arrangement is probably a really good thing, though... it keeps him active in the real world (well, as real as an academic in San Diego can experience), away from the solipsistic temptations of professional writers.
MINI SPOILERS
Things got off to a great start with "Bookworm, Run!" After all, it's about an ape! How could I possibly withhold my approval from Monkey-related shenanigans? The concepts are interesting, but were probably more revolutionary in the 1960's: networks of computers, vast stores of electronic government data that could be instantly and remotely accessed, augmenting a biological brain with digital data. All that plus comical Russian spies... neat!
A couple of the stories feel a bit more like fantasy, but sooner or later betray their sci-fi leanings. One features a high-tech "peddler" who arrives on a low-tech world. There's the obligatory Asimovian rumination about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. However, the peddler takes a young (and violent) man in under his wing, and gradually the youngster begins to understand the nature of technology. Another pseudo-fantasy was one of my favorite stories here, "The Barbarian Princess." This story was about a sci-fi/fantasy magazine (!) on an alien world (!!) which sails a ship among a large number of archipelagos, collecting new stories and selling issues with tales from other writers (!!!). This is also a relatively low-tech world; the telescope has only recently been invented, and there's no form of communication faster than the ship. There's a really good reason for the tech, though: metal is extraordinarily rare. A tribe offers to pay "a few coppers" for issues of the latest magazine; this would be a pittance in a fantasy world, but it's extremely lucrative here. The lack of metal (and petroleum) has hampered progress, and some of my favorite parts are when the characters daydream about what it must be like to live on a planet with abundant supplies of metal.
Some of the most science-fiction-y stories prominently feature aliens, and Vinge gets some good mileage out of playing around with stereotypes about these creatures. In one case, he inverts our common Foundation-esque view of aliens (wise, advanced, experienced) and comes up with a race of incredibly impatient, short, and violent creatures. (This story also features a Noir style, which is pulled off masterfully well.)
Vinge switches up his writing style as much as he varies his subjects. The aforementioned alien story is told in the first person; most of his stories are told in third person, with varying levels of omniscience; and a particularly entertaining one is an advertisement in Scientific American, aimed at recruiting one particular reader to join a shady biotech firm. He doesn't do anything earthshatteringly literary with perspective, but he uses it well to tell his stories... he isn't a Kilgore Trout sort of sci-fi author who has great ideas but no skill.
END SPOILERS
As far as I can tell, this collection includes every short story Vinge has published, which is cool. It's a shorter collection than I would have expected for someone who has been writing as long as he has; but, again, he's been doing other things with his life, including writing novels that my library inexplicably omits. What he has here is great; even his earliest stuff is fun to read, and he stays strong throughout. The very last story here, "Fast Times at Fairmont High," was the kernel for "Rainbow's End," which lends a nicely circular feel to my experiences with this author. Anyways. This is a great collection for any sci-fi fan, or anyone who wants to be a fan, or was one once and wants to remember why they enjoyed it so much.
While the library doesn't have his novels (I'm particularly curious about "A Fire Upon the Deep"), it does carry a collection of his short stories, which I finally got around to checking out. It's great stuff, and shows an impressive range. Everything in here counts as science fiction of some sort, but no two stories are really alike; they range from adventure tales, to fairly sentimental character studies, to cleverly plotted puzzle stories, to thrillers.
I hadn't realized just how long Vernor has been active for. He wrote his first stories while he was still a teenager in the 1960's. He's currently a professor, so he isn't a full-time author, which I'm sure limits his output somewhat. That arrangement is probably a really good thing, though... it keeps him active in the real world (well, as real as an academic in San Diego can experience), away from the solipsistic temptations of professional writers.
MINI SPOILERS
Things got off to a great start with "Bookworm, Run!" After all, it's about an ape! How could I possibly withhold my approval from Monkey-related shenanigans? The concepts are interesting, but were probably more revolutionary in the 1960's: networks of computers, vast stores of electronic government data that could be instantly and remotely accessed, augmenting a biological brain with digital data. All that plus comical Russian spies... neat!
A couple of the stories feel a bit more like fantasy, but sooner or later betray their sci-fi leanings. One features a high-tech "peddler" who arrives on a low-tech world. There's the obligatory Asimovian rumination about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. However, the peddler takes a young (and violent) man in under his wing, and gradually the youngster begins to understand the nature of technology. Another pseudo-fantasy was one of my favorite stories here, "The Barbarian Princess." This story was about a sci-fi/fantasy magazine (!) on an alien world (!!) which sails a ship among a large number of archipelagos, collecting new stories and selling issues with tales from other writers (!!!). This is also a relatively low-tech world; the telescope has only recently been invented, and there's no form of communication faster than the ship. There's a really good reason for the tech, though: metal is extraordinarily rare. A tribe offers to pay "a few coppers" for issues of the latest magazine; this would be a pittance in a fantasy world, but it's extremely lucrative here. The lack of metal (and petroleum) has hampered progress, and some of my favorite parts are when the characters daydream about what it must be like to live on a planet with abundant supplies of metal.
Some of the most science-fiction-y stories prominently feature aliens, and Vinge gets some good mileage out of playing around with stereotypes about these creatures. In one case, he inverts our common Foundation-esque view of aliens (wise, advanced, experienced) and comes up with a race of incredibly impatient, short, and violent creatures. (This story also features a Noir style, which is pulled off masterfully well.)
Vinge switches up his writing style as much as he varies his subjects. The aforementioned alien story is told in the first person; most of his stories are told in third person, with varying levels of omniscience; and a particularly entertaining one is an advertisement in Scientific American, aimed at recruiting one particular reader to join a shady biotech firm. He doesn't do anything earthshatteringly literary with perspective, but he uses it well to tell his stories... he isn't a Kilgore Trout sort of sci-fi author who has great ideas but no skill.
END SPOILERS
As far as I can tell, this collection includes every short story Vinge has published, which is cool. It's a shorter collection than I would have expected for someone who has been writing as long as he has; but, again, he's been doing other things with his life, including writing novels that my library inexplicably omits. What he has here is great; even his earliest stuff is fun to read, and he stays strong throughout. The very last story here, "Fast Times at Fairmont High," was the kernel for "Rainbow's End," which lends a nicely circular feel to my experiences with this author. Anyways. This is a great collection for any sci-fi fan, or anyone who wants to be a fan, or was one once and wants to remember why they enjoyed it so much.
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