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Vernor Steffen Vinge (IPA: ) (born February 10, 1944 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA) is a mathematician (retired Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University), computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo award-winning novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, as well as for his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.
Life and work Vinge published his first short story, "Bookworm, Run!", in 1965 in Analog Science Fiction, then edited by John W. Campbell. He became a moderately prolific contributor to SF magazines in the 1960s and early 1970s, adapting two of his stories into a short novel, Grimm's World (1969), and publishing a second novel, The Witling (1975). Vinge came to prominence in 1981 with his novella True Names, which is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others (and particularly to the cyberpunk genre). His next two novels, The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986), concern the impact of a technology which can create impenetrable force fields called "Bobbles". These books built Vinge's reputation as an author who would explore ideas to their logical conclusions in particularly inventive ways. Both books were nominated for the Hugo Award, but lost to novels by William Gibson and Orson Scott Card. These two novels and True Names also emphasized Vinge's interest in the technological singularity. True Names takes place in a world on the cusp of the singularity. The Peace War shows a world in which the singularity has been postponed by the Bobbles, while Marooned in Realtime follows a small group of people who have managed to miss the singularity which otherwise encompassed Earth. Vinge won the Hugo Award with his 1992 novel, A Fire Upon the Deep. In it, he envisions a galaxy that is divided up into "zones of thought", in which the further one moves from the center of the galaxy, the higher the level of technology one can achieve. Earth is in "The Slow Zone", in which faster-than-light (FTL) travel cannot be achieved. Most of the book, however, takes place in a zone called "The Beyond", where the computations necessary for FTL travel are possible, but transcendence beyond the Singularity to superhuman intelligence is not. Thus Vinge could write a classic space opera despite his belief that the technology required for such stories would push us past the singularity. Fire includes a large number of additional ideas making for an unusually complex and rich universe and story. A Deepness in the Sky (1999) was a prequel to Fire, following competing groups of humans in The Slow Zone as they struggle over who has the rights to exploit a technologically emerging alien culture. Deepness also won a Hugo Award in 2000. Vinge's novellas "Fast Times at Fairmont High" and "The Cookie Monster" also won Hugo Awards in 2002 and 2004, respectively. His latest novel, Rainbows End, which is set in the same universe as "Fast Times at Fairmont High", was published in May 2006. Vinge retired in 2002 from teaching at San Diego State University in order to write full-time. Most years, since its inception in 1999, Vinge has been on the Free Software Foundation's selection committee for their Award for the Advancement of Free Software. His ex-wife Joan D. Vinge is also an accomplished science fiction author. He intends his next novel to be a direct sequel to A Deepness in the Sky. Vernor Vinge was Writer Guest of Honor at ConJosé, the 60th World Science Fiction Convention in 2002. Themes The concepts of artificial intelligence and technological singularity inform much of Vinge's writing, whether his stories embrace them (Bookworm, Run; True Names and Other Dangers; Rainbows End) or construct worlds to specifically explain the non-existence of these phenomena (A Fire Upon the Deep; A Deepness in the Sky). A pro-market/anarchocapitalist theme can be seen in other works, either explicitly (The Ungoverned) or more quietly (the confrontation between the Emergents and the Qeng Ho in A Deepness in the Sky). Novels Collections Uncollected Short Fiction Listen to | ||||||||
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