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.
