I had bought the hardcover when it first came out, but always wanted the CDROM version when I had heard of it. It is a shame it hasn't made it online somewhere convenient.
I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today.
At the time of publishing, Vinge was one of the very few people who had a good grasp of the limits of computation and molecular nanotechnology were. Up until that point in mainstream SF writing, highly advanced technology was more akin to magic, even in "hard" SF. Aside from FTL tech (necessary for a novel with galactic scope), and the Zones of Thought (an artifice to help tell stories centering on people), Vinge sticks close to what is physically possible.
The prologue alone is packed with realistic details that was exceptional for its time.
Definitely near the top of my list. The sequel wasn't in the same class but his "True Names" novella is seminal cyberpunk although it doesn't have all of Gibson's trappings. (Varley's "Press Enter" is in a similar vein and has been more anthologized; they're both really good.)
I find it odd that people tend to think that way about A Fire Upon the Deep. I rank it as some of the softest science fiction I have ever read. It’s a decent story, but falls heavily into the science as magic trap.
Contrast it with say The Cold Equations which as I recall has FTL and everything else is bog standard physics and yet it was still criticized as unrealistic from an engendering standpoint. You can’t make that kind of criticism of A Fire Upon the Deep because everything is handwaved.
I never liked this very much, because the whole "we can only take exactly this mass, and an extra 60kg or whatever will doom us" thing is such an obvious design and/or process flaw. If you really are dependent on that (though I don't think the author made the case that they were, convincingly), you need to ensure it (by, for instance, weighing the craft); it's ridiculously optimistic to think that someone never accidentally leaves a piece of equipment lying around, say.
And even if you accept the absurd premise, it still doesn't work; the stowaway would presumably have used consumables (oxygen, if nothing else), and if you're that weight constrained you won't be carrying excess consumables anyway, so you're still doomed even if you lose the stowaway.
If anything, it's the same thing that bothers me about some 'softer' sci-fi; take a story you want to tell, and construct some completely implausible rules to make it work. To add insult to injury here, it's... not a very good story, IMO. Also, I believe Clarke hinted at a similar scenario in Islands in the Sky, published two years previously, though it didn't actually _happen_ there.
I generally agree, though mostly as a failure of storytelling. An actual plague pushing things to the absolute limits isn’t implausible. Adjust things so the main character is freaking out about landing a cargo 20% over standard safety limits etc.
That said, what allows us to make such criticisms is an understanding of the physics and economics involved. We can’t reason about what say Iain Banks’s Culture is going to do on economic grounds because things aren’t fleshed our enough to make such judgements. Bat at least we can reason about distances involved. Even softer in say the Star Wars universe economics and physics is such an afterthought that we can’t objectively judge if say the Death Star was a sound use of resources or a pointless vanity project. Worse, because hyperspace lanes are so hand-wavy we can’t even reason about movement speeds and and distance.
/The Cold Equations/ is lambasted for being a story that's set up to make a point in ways that completely contradict any sort of good engineering practice. Given the situation as described, the simplest ordinary precautions would prevent the problem from happening.
0th level obviousness: weight is at a premium on the ship, yet there is a closet with space for a small person and a solid closet door that makes it a hiding location. If there is a need for storage space, netting is a much more sensible protection mechanism than a door.
There are literally dozens of similar objections, including those made by Tom Goddard, the author, who explained that he was writing specifically at the direction of John W. Campbell, the editor.
"The Cold Equations" is pretty much the sole story on a list of SF shorts I'm finishing writing up that I don't actually like and am pretty much just including because it's on so many lists--possibly for the same reason :-)
And not only is it completely unrealistic in order to make the point of the title but everything about the characters is so 1950s feeling that it feels incredibly dated.
As far as I can tell, it rates a 4 on Mohs scale, i.e. "one big lie" - the idea that the speed of light varies with the distance from the center of the galaxy.
It's not that the speed of light varies, it's that the "amount of computation" you can do varies. As you approach the center of the galaxy even the relatively efficient human brain starts to break down. The speed of light connection is that FTL requires so much computation that it breaks at a certain point relatively far out from the center. Other technologies have similar issues.
However, if you read carefully, and consider some of the consequences, it becomes clear that this is not a natural rule of the universe, but something technological, created by presumably one of the first civilizations to become highly technological as a defense against what would otherwise be a fairly vicious universe with constant high-tech civilizations fighting each other with frightfully powerful weapons, and perhaps a hint of compassion towards the not-yet-high-tech civilizations. That's why it can be manipulated with certain keys, in ways that would not be possible (lots of FTL signalling) if the Zones were truly a fundamental rule of the universe. (Notice also how the super-high-tech civilizations don't understand how the Zones work or why they exist, which if there were purely natural seems unlikely.) The Powers tend to last 10 years probably because that's how long it takes to either be accepted by the highly advanced civilization(s) that live in the galactic cores, or how long it takes to work out how to move there despite the Zones being in the way, or both. This creates an entrance gate against things like the main threat of the novel getting into your high-tech civ.
I don't deny I'm extrapolating a bit, but there's a lot of hints, especially if you add A Deepness in the Sky to the mix. Pham was probably sent from this central civ to fight A Fire Upon the Deep's main threat, if you read where he came from. The entire planet of A Deepness in the Sky is clearly from a super-high tech civ far beyond what Earth's depth could support, but it's from closer to the galaxy's core, not farther, which is why Pham went in to the galaxy's core after that story rather than out looking for more intelligent life. He in fact found it, or it found him, if you prefer.
Once you see there's a probably-even-beyond-Transcend civilization living under the Zones of Thought it mostly comes together.
I agree with a lot of this -- although I hadn't put the story about the galactic core together in the same way. A lot of this isn't made clear though. Can you point to some of the evidence you used to arrive at the conclusion that the high-tech civ is centered in the core, or that they're gating civilizations entering it? I think you might have picked up on some things I missed.
One correction: the Zones impact BOTH the speed of computation AND the laws of physics (whether FTL travel and communication are physically possible). They also make pretty explicit in Fire Upon the Deep that mechanical failure rates of certain complex systems (especially automation) increase rapidly as you approach the Slow Zone. And then within the Slow Zone they increase again as you approach the Unthinking Depths.
It is made explicit -- as you note -- that the Zones of thought are controlled somehow by the Countermeasure (or some Control System it speaks to). It is also clear that this system do not like the Blight and actively opposes it.
One other interpretation that struck me is that the Control System may have put in place the Zones of Thought simply because stars become so dense as one approaches the Galactic Core. Forcing the Transcend to the Galactic edges limits the rate at which any change can spread and allows for civilizations (and the System itself) to respond to threats such as the Blight.
"Can you point to some of the evidence you used to arrive at the conclusion that the high-tech civ is centered in the core, or that they're gating civilizations entering it?"
A high-tech civilization in the core is IIRC spelled out in A Deepness in the Sky because the planet there comes from the core. On its own that means nothing, but combined with A Fire upon the Deep it means there's more down there than the Upper Beyond realizes.
Gating civilizations entering it is a bit of my own interpolation. One alternative is that powers simply die out after 10 years because there is some reason they need to advance to the next level, but they're locked out by the Zones.
"BOTH the speed of computation AND the laws of physics (whether FTL travel and communication are physically possible)"
My read is that that is cause and effect, though, not two effects. The amount of computation you are allowed is limited; super high tech becomes impossible, then FTL, then our tech, then even any system that performs simple and meaningful mechanical computations. Even a car engine can be viewed as performing computations to stay running.
This is a particularly sci-fi element. I don't think it's immediately obvious how to separate the universe into "meaningful" computation and the sort of computation a stationary rock is "performing" as its atoms jiggle around, such that one can distinguish at the level of the laws of physics themselves between a rock and a car engine or other simple mechanical device. Then again, I'm not a superintelligent civilization with nearly unbounded resources and deeper access to the laws of physics than I have. (Arguably, under the circumstances, it could simply be an enormous computation of its own, in which they aren't doing it via clever rewrites of the universe, but basically by executive fiat, or, to put it another way, the standard may literally be "I know it when I see it" for some sufficiently intelligent "judge", rather than any sort of physical law.)
> This is a particularly sci-fi element. I don't think it's immediately obvious how to separate the universe into "meaningful" computation and the sort of computation a stationary rock is "performing" as its atoms jiggle around, such that one can distinguish at the level of the laws of physics themselves between a rock and a car engine or other simple mechanical device.
It sounds like what you’re asking boils down to “is entropy a real thing, or is it subjective / relative to our purposes and measurements.” And that the Zones essentially work by enforcing an “entropy quota” on things according to where they are in the galaxy- things in the Slow Zones must be very high-entropy (and somehow are forced to become so if they weren’t before) and things in the Transcend can be low-entropy in ways we couldn’t currently imagine.
IIRC the planet comes from the direction of the core, which the protagonists assume implies from the core... but it could have just been travelling through it, no?
As for the FTL limit, I always thought the causality is the reverse - that compute power that the Beyond has is because their computers run on the same physics that allows FTL travel.
If FTL was driven solely by compute, then you'd never have a clear boundary in the first place - just shorter and shorter hyperspace jumps, perhaps until the point where they become infeasible (because the amount of time it takes to make one, including compute, is more than just travelling there). But the way the book describes it, the boundary is qualitative, and FTL drives plainly don't activate once in the Slow Zone. Ditto for FTL comms.
Yes, that was my take too. "OnOff’s eccentric orbit had at least passed through those unseen depths." -- but the irony of the end of the book is that they're going to be going entirely the wrong way. The ellipse that describes its orbit is eccentric -- that means it can touch both points near the center of the galaxy and points outside the Slow Zone.
FTL alone is already at “one big lie” stage, it’s got plenty of other issues with established physics and arguably worse with consistency. Personally I would argue for rank 1, but I am somewhat of a curmudgeon about this stuff.
It doesn't appear to be available anywhere any more, though. I just requested it via the EFF donation, though (I would guess quite a few people did today after seeing this!), and maybe Brad would be amenable to it going on archive.org?
That's one of the main reasons why I love this book so much, that it sounds realistic. I'll be honest, I always struggled with suspension of disbelief with lots of SF. Does anyone know other SF books that are similar (aka believable?)
What people find "believable" or "realistic" will vary.
Within the genre of Science Fiction there is a sub-genre of Hard Science Fiction in which it's considered more important that it could actually work. Fire Upon The Deep probably wouldn't generally be considered at all Hard because it has Faster-than-Light travel, which is one of the things you generally would rule out of Hard SF because of how conservation rules in Physics work, if you can do FtL then you can do time travel (because space and time being the same kind of thing), and then what's your story?
"The Martian" a novel subsequently made into a movie is pretty realistic, turns out the setup (a storm on Mars separates Mark from the rest of the crew) is the least realistic part of that entire story.
If that's a bit too realistic, some of Liu Cixin's shorts are pretty wild while remaining down to earth about what's practical. "The Wandering Earth" for example.
Greg Egan is very Hard, but you may find you think Greg's technically possible stuff seems harder to believe than faster-than-light travel which isn't possible at all. The Clockwork Rocket couldn't happen here, but it's set in a universe with a different dimensional symmetry, the Amalgam stuff is set in this universe, but with a society far more advanced than ours.
But then if it turns out "realistic"/ "believable" counts like Star Wars style laser blasters and stuff then I dunno, lots of things, maybe you'd like Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch stuff, (or indeed Iain M Banks' Culture novels) which aren't Hard at all.
This one follows a common pattern where it has a single piece of magic (in this case FTL travel via magical portals) and everything else is reasonably hard. Another example would be pretty much anything by Peter Hamilton (also an aficionado of magical portals, sometimes with trains).
Banks also has a magical FTL portal novel, actually (The Algebraist); they're quite popular.
Cixin's name makes me curious about your scale for soft/hard. Would you consider "Three-Body Problem" to be hard sci-fi, or at least "down to Earth about what's practical"?
Mmm. It has been some time since I read Three-Body Problem and I bounced off The Dark Forest. This also means it's possible my impressions are either erroneous because I forgot something important or it's explained/ ret-conned in the subsequent books.
In Three-Body Problem as I recall there's some pretty hand-waving stuff about sophons in particular. They're basically a MacGuffin which is used to explain whatever is necessary to the plot so as to have the Trisolarans able to interfere in Earth's affairs essentially at whim yet not obviate the invasion itself. So that's not very Hard SF.
My issue with TBP is not so much the hand-waving, it's the attempts to explain things that quickly become ridiculous, because the author is clearly out of their domain of expertise. Sophons are one example - they would be more believable unexplained, but when they're explained as a circuit on the surface of an unrolled elementary particle, well...
Or sometimes it's the way something is set up in a particular way, only to be abandoned when it becomes inconvenient. For example, when they come up with a plan to set up a trap using monomolecular filament, it is specifically stated that it can only be made in that shape. But literally one page later, when the question of how to tie it to something without cutting through that something comes up, it's immediately dismissed by the same character saying that they can also make sheets of that material, so it can be used as a backstop. Either take is believable per se, but they're clearly mutually exclusive.
On the whole, the science in Three-Body Problem kinda felt like gratuitous insertion of random (and ften misunderstood) pieces of popular science into the story as a deus ex machina.
I liked the first part (technically first 2 parts) of Seveneves. But then [POTENTIAL SOMEWHAT SPOILER] it felt like vastly unlikely events come to pass and Stephenson spends the back part of the book telling the completely different story he wanted to tell.
yeah, hence the "mostly" in my comment. FWIW I really liked the whole thing, but 100% agree it's almost like 2 loosely-related works that ship together. It's the 1st (longer) part that I thought "felt" realistic given the premise.
Red Mars is exceptionally slow though. I made it through the first novel, but I had to stop somewhere a quarter into the second because there was just nothing interesting happening (or maybe too much of it?).
Dragon's Egg is a hard sci-fi that documents an encounter with an alien race that lives on the surface of a neutron star!
In all-to-typical hard sci-fi fashion, you don't really care about any of the characters, but the concepts are truly mind-bending (what looks like a circle to creatures on the surface is an oval to an outside observer due to the extreme magnetic environment; extreme gravity leads to ultra-fast metabolism; etc).
Interstellar travel, yes, but slower than light! In the Revelation Space books, it's either fusion powered starships of the "big cylinder full of people hibernating" variety, or admittedly somewhat magic relativistic starships (Bussard ramscoops in the earliest stories, but this was retconned out, and indeed a Bussard ramscoop shows up in a later story as a prototype that never really worked properly).
He has some sort of jump gate in at least some of his stories. I actually discovered him fairly recently based in part on the Love, Death, and Robots series on Netflix.
"I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today."
I enjoyed tremendously _A Deepness in the Sky_ and continue to find the ideas interesting and thought-provoking - especially the localizer networks, etc.
Based on that I read _Fire Upon the Deep_ and found it very enjoyable and interesting throughout, but then deeply disappointing at the end. I was expecting explanations and resolutions of the deep background events and actors that were shaping the story and none were given.
"then deeply disappointing at the end. I was expecting explanations and resolutions of the deep background events and actors that were shaping the story and none were given."
If you read carefully, and make a couple of reasonable deductions, I think you can come to mostly satisfactory conclusions. There's room for a couple of different interpretations of what's in the center of the galaxy, but not all that many, really.
Could you explain your own deductions, please? What are the possible interpretations?
I have read both novels, but on that reading do not feel I could be sure of understanding what's at the galactic center at all. In fact, I recall feeling puzzled and wishing it was explained, much like the parent poster. I'd love to hear some deductions and to find out what hints in the book I missed.
Whine here - this version used to be available on Kindle - I know, because I purchased it. However, it is no longer available and my copy got ‘updated’ to just the regular text, sometime between my original purchase in 08 and ~2015.
I now no longer solely purchase Kindle versions of books that have some characteristic I value, and I think Vinge would solidly approve of that stance. Not sure about the reaction of the Blight, though.
In the pre-Kindle days, Amazon sold it as an Adobe DRMed PDF, which is how I bought it in 2006. When they introduced the Kindle they retired the Adobe DRM servers, and since they did not alert me as to this happening (despite the ebook being registered to an email address), my copy turned into a pumpkin.
It took me a few back-and-forths with Amazon's customer support to get them to even acknowledge that this had happened. Most of the reps I communicated with weren't even aware that Amazon had sold ebooks before the Kindle. They wanted to just give me the Kindle version of the regular eBook, but grudgingly gave me a refund instead, because I insisted on either the full annotated version in any form or a refund (I already own two copies of the regular book in paper form).
Another possibility is not to keep the books just in the Kindle/Kindle app and to regularly download them to your computer and back them up. The DRM can be stripped too.
My interest in reading this was to see how he went about writing. I did read some of it (I 'owned' it in Adobe PDF form) before getting sidetracked, then my copy turned into a pumpkin when Amazon retired the Adobe DRM servers shortly after they introduced the Kindle.
Anyone interested in Vinge's annotation scheme can get a sense of it from this interview with Norwescon [1], which includes a screenshot of his working draft for The Children of the Sky. Short answer: he writes in Emacs, and uses a convention to incorporate reviewer comments, annotations, and his own tags intermingled with the actual text, and has a set of text processing tools for navigating it.
Edit: I just remembered a bit of trivia some readers might find interesting: there was a whole minor character he cut fairly late in writing, who survives in fragments 'commented out' in the annotated version. I think it might have been one of Ravna's fellow librarians at Relay, and he cut the character to streamline the storytelling. I think there might have been notes from his early readers supporting the decision too.
Brad has a page about his SF publishing on his personal site [1]. He says that it is still possible to get the CD-format anthology that includes the hypertext version of A Fire Upon the Deep by joining the EFF. More details on the page.
Brad Templeton wrote about it: "I believe this CD is now a piece of history, as the world's first major eBook project using current fiction. At the time it was the largest anthology of current fiction ever published in one volume, and it may retain that title even today. Prior ventures were small or featured either unpublished writers or public domain works. This anthology featured novels that in most cases had not yet come out in paperback."
“These directories contain the "raw" form of the anthology, which is to say RTF, GIF and JPEG files, along with a few ASCII files. They are found in the online version, and in a special directory on the CD for people without MS-Windows or a Macintosh.” [read.me]
The format description for the .txt annotations is at: "hugo-nebula anthology 1993/hugo/novel/vinge/exnotes.txt"
To take a first quick look at the notes:
unzip hugo.zip
cd 'hugo-nebula anthology 1993/hugo/novel/vinge/'
rg '^\^ ' # or grep -rn '^\^ ' .
Hmm. Perhaps someone needs to transform those RTFs to HTML, with appropriate management for the footnotes. Then we can finally have the HTML version of the annotated novel that was promised 27 years ago. :)
It's pretty hacky, but you end up with a single HTML file with Vinge's notes in a side margin, with numbers and everything. There's probably ways that the title bits could be improved, but I'm too lazy to fix it now that I have the actual HTML file.
Good luck! Let me know if you have questions, I may be able to help.
Baader-Meinhof at work for me in this thread, I just finished reading Deepness for the first time two days ago. It took me quite a while for me to get into it, but I'm glad I did - for the last 150 pages or so I couldn't put the book down, as all the various characters and plot threads finally converged. I'm glad I stuck with it enough to make it to that point.
I've read A Deepness In The Sky and enjoyed it, I was wondering whether it A Fire Upon The Deep is similar?
Also, it was lucky I had A Deepness In The Sky on my e-reader as I had no idea how long it was and it would have been far more intimidating in its physical form!
There are similarities but Fire is more of a space opera and Deepness is more of a character drama. The tech details in Fire are more fantastical since they involve superluminal communications/travel and the book centers around the mechanism that makes that possible. I like Fire more because I like the pacing and the xenos better (space operas are fun) but the tech and its implications are far better in Deepness. I like the depiction of computing/programming in both and both have the history of technology as a major theme, which is one of my favorite topics.
In contrast with most of the opinions here, I prefer Fire Upon the Deep. I think the alien species it explores is much more interestingly non-human than the one in Deepness in the Sky and that the bad guys in Deepness are kind of comically over-done. They suffer from a common problem where the bad guys have to not only be bad for main reason X but also are sadistic rapists, torturers, etc. on top. As if we didn't already get the "they're bad" memo already. Plus all the action happens in the finale and, to a large extent, outside of our view. Still, both are great books, but I'd recommend Fire to anyone first.
If I'd rate my current collection of best SF I've read:
- Deepness in the Sky: super mustache twirling, one of the worst.
- Fire upon the Deep: I consider the blight to be twirling. Why treat lower civ that way? AFAIK, for mustache twirling.
- Iain M Banks: lotsa mustache twirling. Surface details and Player of Games in particular. My view of the culture AI is that they are constantly sarcastically toying with humans, and are thus secretly twirling.
- Fifth Season (Jemisin): no twirling. One of the most balanced novel on that front, every faction has believable reason to act the way they do.
- Book of the New Sun: no twirling, but OMG, stop what you're doing a good read these books! The tone and story was just perfect for me. Sure, it looks like a weird cross of SF and fantasy, but there is no fantasy at all in the novel in reality. Book of New Urth is, in comparison, just merely very good.
- Ancillary Justice (Lecki): some small twirling, but justified since it's an empire: absolute power corrupt. The twirling is commensurate with having a empress as head of state. She even becomes mostly sympathetic later.
- Left hand of Darkness: not only no twirling, but the power struggle is extremely believable. Great illustration of an interesting alien civilisation. Great for both world-building and character building. Another of those stop everything and just read it now novel.
- Roadside Picnic: no twirling. The conflicts and abuse of power are all believable.
- Collapsing Empire (Scalzi): lot of mustache twirling. Not DotS level, but not that far off. Plus, there is a plot point in the first novel that made me quit reading for a week. Incomprehensible because it was all of unbelievable (given the multiple characters behaviour before), idiotic and had zero impact on the rest of the book... so why write it. (Page 260 in my paperback version, for the record)
I think he says early on that the archive trap doesn't have self-awareness, except for a few subroutines that need to be self-aware like the simulations of the researchers which facilitate the escape. Even the name blight evokes a fungus. I was thinking of it's cruelty to lower civs as analogous to the cruelty of a fungus secreting an antibiotic.
Hunting down the OOBII comes down to the escaped personae having data that could be used against it by another power.
> Iain M Banks: lotsa mustache twirling. Surface details and Player of Games in particular.
I think both the Hell faction in Surface Details and the empire in Player of Games have reasons to be as nasty as they are; they're somewhat internally consistent, in that the social stability of both the Hell faction societies and the empire are dependent on the nastiness. There are, unfortunately, real life examples of this. Veppers is a bit gratuitous, granted.
In the Fifth Season, the entire planet is a mustache-twirling villain, sort of.
(Sure, it's revenging past wrongs... on humans, some of whom are far, far descendants of the original perpetrators, and none of whom have any idea what they're even been punished for.)
It's a reference to caricature of evil villains twirling their mustache as they gratuitously enjoy the extreme suffering they inflict upon others with no rationale other than enjoying being evil.
Thanks, I get it now and basically agree on the ones I've read too. I did feel like I missed some of the motivations for some factions in the Fifth Season series. I've added Book of the New Sun to my wishlist.
They are similar in that there are two different stories that are related but don't really converge until the end, and that a primitive alien culture is explored in one of them and an advanced human[0] one in the other. They differ primarily in that Fire has a hand-wavy way of allowing for impossible technology like FTL.
Personally, I think Deepness is the better work, but Fire is pretty good too. If you read Deepness first then, because it was written second, at least one character may seem a little off for reasons that will become obvious.
[0] The characters we follow the most are human anyway.
You will also miss a lot hints about the odd things that happen around the On/Off star - almost as if there was something different about that volume of space...
Maybe I missed something about the location, but I thought the On/Off star was just inside the Beyond, where a lot of advanced technologies start working, and had the remnants of a Beyond civilization (including antigravity materials)?
The actual On/Off star was presumably powering a zone changing device of some kind - antigravity technology had remained working for millions of years which made me think it was in a bubble of High Beyond or Transcendent zone levels (like the ending of AFUTD).
They did also say in AFUtD that the Zone boundary isn't smooth and continuous, it's like a foam with ripples and bubbles near the boundary and moves around some normally -- which is why ships that ply the Low Beyond near the Zone boundary always carry coldsleep units and ramscoops as a backup.
Did we every get an in universe or author-commentary explanation confirming the theories about the On/Off? I always figured it was some high-tech artifact based on Beyond or Transcend tech that was going to remain mostly unexplained?
In-universe, there's a conversation between a couple of the focused near the end of chapter 15. One of them speculated that it was a fast square wave generator.
Discussed up-thread: OnOff has an eccentric orbit, and I think we're meant to infer that it was in the Beyond or Transcend at one point. (I think the characters draw the wrong conclusion about which part of its eccentric orbit was the interesting one and we're meant to read it as horribly ironic that they're planning on going entirely the wrong way. But someone else concluded from Fire that the galactic core also had interesting activity.)
Larry Niven, a similar kind of a scifi writer, said that when a writer is so successful they quit their day job, they lose that source of inspiration.
Vinge retired from lecturing compsci in 2000. Deepness was 1999. Children was 2011, was competent, but lacked almost all the clever insights of the previous novels. I wish he'd go back.
Oh well, he gave us several very good novels and 2 great ones. He deserves a break!
I'm not sure why that would be especially true for writers in general. If anything, I expect it would be more about reverting to the mean given that Fire Upon the Deep is one of the all-time great SF stories.
I think it can happen in some circumstances though. For example, Dilbert still feels largely locked in some 1990s PacBell cubicle land.
yah, he lived on a trust fund for the first year. I've wondered why he thought it didn't apply to him. Perhaps, being a student then writer, work was never his inspiration, he had others.
Which ones? His earliest adolescent stories were buddy stories, eg Becalmed in Hell, Wait It Out. I can only think of inherited wealth in A Relic of the Empire (Rich Mann).
Been years since I read his early stuff, but as far as I remember, a lot of the early stories about teleporters (proto-Known-Space) featured youngish middle-class men in California with no apparent means of support.
I hadn't thought of it in terms of "no apparent means of support", but didn't pick up on that. There was Gil the ARM; a belter; and later Elephant (whose great^n grandmother invented the displacement booth - that qualifies!)
I feel I know the stories well, so it's disconcerting that maybe I missed something. I'll keep an eye out if I read them again.
Yes, aFutD is similar, but different enough for the preference to be a matter of taste. They're both among my favorite SF novels.
It works best to read them both, in publication order (aFutD first), because you only see the second book's layer of dramatic irony with that background. More on this in Jo Walton's review: https://www.tor.com/2008/07/19/deepnessreview/
Also the first book is shorter, and if you're like "meh" about it then I doubt you'd be into the second either.
I'd say that the barrier to entry for both is the same, though: Vinge's writing, while rich, is also quite hard for reading, in a sense that you have to go slow to parse things correctly. FOTD has a bit more action in it that speeds things up sometimes, so it's an easier read. But if you could read and enjoy it, you shouldn't have troubles with DITS.
I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today.
At the time of publishing, Vinge was one of the very few people who had a good grasp of the limits of computation and molecular nanotechnology were. Up until that point in mainstream SF writing, highly advanced technology was more akin to magic, even in "hard" SF. Aside from FTL tech (necessary for a novel with galactic scope), and the Zones of Thought (an artifice to help tell stories centering on people), Vinge sticks close to what is physically possible.
The prologue alone is packed with realistic details that was exceptional for its time.