The Novels of Vernor Vinge
James Nicoll
He's interesting to do because his recents novels are much better than
the ones before, a relief from all the Novels of posts where the author
falls prey to the Brain Eater. On the other hand, this improvement can
have tragic consequences for young readers whose quirks compel them to
hunt down all the books by an author they have just discovered, who go
from _A Deepness in the Sky_, say, to _The Witling_.
STAND ALONE
The Witling
Vinge's first novel, this has a human expedition (Slower
than light) encountering a world whose inhabitants can teleport objects,
with restrictions. Much of the book depends on the implications of the
restrictions (which include conservation laws but not, as I recall, C.
This latter point does get discussed). Bit of a mixed bag, I am afraid,
as the unhappy intellectual female character finds Twue Wuv as result
of brain damage. Odd that the aliens are so attractive to us.
Tatja's Grimm's World
There are at least two versions of this book, the second of
which is much longer than the first. In this story set on a metal-poor
ocean world, a superior woman goes from being the object of protection
by Analog Maga^H a nomadic press organization to playing a central role
in the planet's history. The ending involves something that often comes
up in Vinge's fiction, the idea of intelligence amplification and the
singularity that makes meaningful communication across the technological
difficult if not impossible.
I thought this was mostly harmless. I also seem to have forgotten
what exactly the differences are between the two editions.
Bobble Novels
The Peace War
Possibly Vinge's worse novel, this eye-glazingly dull book pits
a handful of free thinking types (an astronaut, a sick boy etc) against
a tyranical organization of evil scientists armed with the bobble, something
like Niven stasis fields, said organization having saved civilization from
atomic war by reducing it to a pitiful shadow of itself. Darn those central
planners! Darn them to heck! Between a small plucky band of individualists
and heavily armed, entrenched collectivists Who! Will! Win??????
(Hint: it was published in Analog)
Marooned in Real Time
This is an odd example of a sequel that is better than the original.
This is a murder mystery set against a future in which virtually all of
humanity has disappeared due to causes unknown. A band of humans is jumping
through time using bobble technology, collecting all the known bobbled humans
as they go. One of their number is left behind on one of the jumps and our
hero has to figure out why.
Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology, mostly
lifted from a Dixon book, as I recall. I had actually written Vinge off
because of TPW and a novella sequel whose title I forget, but this was
readable.
The Zone Novels
A Fire Upon the Deep
Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
but no web because that hadn't caught on yet) portions of this verged on
the interesting despite the contrived background. In a galaxy strangely
like the one in Anderson's _Brain Wave_, where the type and speed of
computations one can perform depend on location, some stupid archaeologists
goes looking for treasure but finds an apocalyptic monster. Half the book
follows the young survivors of this expedition, marooned on telepathic-dog
world. The other follows a human female who gets entangled in the vast disaster
the discovery unleashed. Eventually the two plots converge and a solution
to the problem, although not an especially humane one, is handed to the
characters (Probably for the best, as they were hopelessly outclassed).
Some slow bits, some dull bits but I did like the doggies. Boy, do
the net-parts date this badly.
A Deepness in the Sky
Set a long time before AFUD, this supplies us with the back stories
to one of the characters in AFUD. An STL trade and exploration expedition to
an anomolous star runs into an STL expedition from a centrally planned
civilization who surprisingly turn out to be evil. Actually, not just
evil. Eeeeevil, with a capital Sadistic, with some tools to help them in
this that I could flog on Bay Street for millions. When the planet of the
weird star turns out to be inhabited, a many sided struggle to prevail
results. Who! Will!--
Well, you know how that goes.
Parts of this I really liked, a much higher percentage than any
other VV novel. As one expects the bad guys are very bad indeed and Focus,
a work-ethic enhancer, is misused horribly in their service. Some interesting
bits on running STL trade networks and the problems of running civilizations
without them falling over and spinning around on one wheel get a significant
amount of stage time.
--
"Repress the urge to sprout wings or self-ignite!...This man's an
Episcopalian!...They have definite views."
Pibgorn Oct 31/02
Dan Swartzendruber
> Vernor Vinge is easy to do because he has written so few novels.
> He's interesting to do because his recents novels are much better than
> the ones before, a relief from all the Novels of posts where the author
> falls prey to the Brain Eater. On the other hand, this improvement can
> have tragic consequences for young readers whose quirks compel them to
> hunt down all the books by an author they have just discovered, who go
> from _A Deepness in the Sky_, say, to _The Witling_.
>
> STAND ALONE
>
> The Witling
>
> Vinge's first novel, this has a human expedition (Slower
> than light) encountering a world whose inhabitants can teleport objects,
> with restrictions. Much of the book depends on the implications of the
> restrictions (which include conservation laws but not, as I recall, C.
> This latter point does get discussed). Bit of a mixed bag, I am afraid,
> as the unhappy intellectual female character finds Twue Wuv as result
> of brain damage. Odd that the aliens are so attractive to us.
I didn't think they were really aliens, but some offshoot of humanity?
Anyway, it was a mixed book, but I liked it because of the way the
limitations and capabilities of the teleports was worked out...
> Tatja's Grimm's World
>
> There are at least two versions of this book, the second of
> which is much longer than the first. In this story set on a metal-poor
> ocean world, a superior woman goes from being the object of protection
> by Analog Maga^H a nomadic press organization to playing a central role
> in the planet's history. The ending involves something that often comes
> up in Vinge's fiction, the idea of intelligence amplification and the
> singularity that makes meaningful communication across the technological
> difficult if not impossible.
>
> I thought this was mostly harmless. I also seem to have forgotten
> what exactly the differences are between the two editions.
Never read.
> Bobble Novels
>
> The Peace War
>
> Possibly Vinge's worse novel, this eye-glazingly dull book pits
> a handful of free thinking types (an astronaut, a sick boy etc) against
> a tyranical organization of evil scientists armed with the bobble, something
> like Niven stasis fields, said organization having saved civilization from
> atomic war by reducing it to a pitiful shadow of itself. Darn those central
> planners! Darn them to heck! Between a small plucky band of individualists
> and heavily armed, entrenched collectivists Who! Will! Win??????
>
> (Hint: it was published in Analog)
Yeah, this was kinda stretched out beyond the story he had to tell.
> Marooned in Real Time
>
> This is an odd example of a sequel that is better than the original.
> This is a murder mystery set against a future in which virtually all of
> humanity has disappeared due to causes unknown. A band of humans is jumping
> through time using bobble technology, collecting all the known bobbled humans
> as they go. One of their number is left behind on one of the jumps and our
> hero has to figure out why.
>
> Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology, mostly
> lifted from a Dixon book, as I recall. I had actually written Vinge off
> because of TPW and a novella sequel whose title I forget, but this was
> readable.
Agreed!
> The Zone Novels
>
> A Fire Upon the Deep
>
> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet) portions of this verged on
> the interesting despite the contrived background. In a galaxy strangely
> like the one in Anderson's _Brain Wave_, where the type and speed of
> computations one can perform depend on location, some stupid archaeologists
> goes looking for treasure but finds an apocalyptic monster. Half the book
> follows the young survivors of this expedition, marooned on telepathic-dog
> world. The other follows a human female who gets entangled in the vast disaster
> the discovery unleashed. Eventually the two plots converge and a solution
> to the problem, although not an especially humane one, is handed to the
> characters (Probably for the best, as they were hopelessly outclassed).
>
> Some slow bits, some dull bits but I did like the doggies. Boy, do
> the net-parts date this badly.
Well, yeah, but still an enjoyable reread...
> A Deepness in the Sky
>
> Set a long time before AFUD, this supplies us with the back stories
> to one of the characters in AFUD. An STL trade and exploration expedition to
> an anomolous star runs into an STL expedition from a centrally planned
> civilization who surprisingly turn out to be evil. Actually, not just
> evil. Eeeeevil, with a capital Sadistic, with some tools to help them in
> this that I could flog on Bay Street for millions. When the planet of the
> weird star turns out to be inhabited, a many sided struggle to prevail
> results. Who! Will!--
>
> Well, you know how that goes.
>
> Parts of this I really liked, a much higher percentage than any
> other VV novel. As one expects the bad guys are very bad indeed and Focus,
> a work-ethic enhancer, is misused horribly in their service. Some interesting
> bits on running STL trade networks and the problems of running civilizations
> without them falling over and spinning around on one wheel get a significant
> amount of stage time.
I liked it about like you did...
Richard Horton
>
> STAND ALONE
>
> The Witling
>
> Vinge's first novel,
Actually, the original version of _Tatja Grimm's World_, called just
_Grimm's World_, was his first novel.
>
> Tatja's Grimm's World
>
> There are at least two versions of this book, the second of
>which is much longer than the first. In this story set on a metal-poor
>ocean world, a superior woman goes from being the object of protection
>by Analog Maga^H a nomadic press organization to playing a central role
>in the planet's history. The ending involves something that often comes
>up in Vinge's fiction, the idea of intelligence amplification and the
>singularity that makes meaningful communication across the technological
>difficult if not impossible.
>
> I thought this was mostly harmless. I also seem to have forgotten
>what exactly the differences are between the two editions.
>
I seem to recall that the main difference was that a later written
novelette was glommed onto it.
> Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology, mostly
>lifted from a Dixon book, as I recall. I had actually written Vinge off
>because of TPW and a novella sequel whose title I forget, but this was
>readable.
>
The novella is "The Ungoverned".
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.tangentonline.com)
Vadim S Kaplunovsky
James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote, among other things:
>
> A Fire Upon the Deep
>
> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
>but no web because that hadn't caught on yet) portions of this verged on
>the interesting despite the contrived background. In a galaxy strangely
>like the one in Anderson's _Brain Wave_, where the type and speed of
>computations one can perform depend on location, some stupid archaeologists
>goes looking for treasure but finds an apocalyptic monster. Half the book
>follows the young survivors of this expedition, marooned on telepathic-dog
>world. The other follows a human female who gets entangled in the vast disaster
>the discovery unleashed. Eventually the two plots converge and a solution
>to the problem, although not an especially humane one, is handed to the
>characters (Probably for the best, as they were hopelessly outclassed).
>
> Some slow bits, some dull bits but I did like the doggies. Boy, do
>the net-parts date this badly.
>
but actually it isn't. The Galactic Net is similar to the pre-Internet
Usenet -- messages forwarded from node to node over a mixed net of various
protocols and connection types, from UUCP to Arpanet -- because it operates
under the same constraints: Low-bandwidth, *expensive* Galactic links
between planetary nets which are effectively unlimited and free. Consequently,
the best way to broadcast information is to send it *once* to each planetary
node and have it cached there for all the local users, rather than let *zillions* of
individual users download it again and again and again. Here on Earth, the
Web transmits low-demand pages but caches the high-demand pages; the caching
is invisible to most users, so it looks like all the downloads are real-time,
but behind the scene, many pages are cached at local *hubs* just like everything
was cached in Usenet days. Change the net topology into a Galactic Net and it
would make more sense to cache everything, hence the Galactic Usenet, just as
VV described it.
--Vadim.
--
*******************************************************************
Vadim S. Kaplunovsky, | va...@physics.utexas.edu
Professor of Physics, | #include <std_disclaimer.h>
University of Texas at Austin. | #excuse bad_typing.
Mark Atwood
> atomic war by reducing it to a pitiful shadow of itself. Darn those central
> planners! Darn them to heck!
The funny think is, in early Vinge stories, central economic planning
is sympathetically shown as part of the backstory.
In fact, in "Run, Bookworm!", several years of harsh but non-corrupted
forced central economic planning was revealed at the end of the story
to have WORKED at saving Western civ, or at least the US econony and
nation, from utter destruction.
In "True Names", one of ways that the badguy was taking over the world
was by infiltrating and reprogramming the software that was running
the government controlled economic model and control systems that were
ubiquious thruout society.
What it looks like is that at some point, Vinge read Von Mises.
Funny thing is, if there is any place in Vinge's worlds where the
"calculation problem" would go away, and central planning would work,
it would be in the Beyond!
--
Mark Atwood | Well done is better than well said.
m...@pobox.com |
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Richard James
> Some slow bits, some dull bits but I did like the doggies. Boy, do
> the net-parts date this badly.
If the net parts date it badly why are we still using usenet? I really liked
the concept of different "physics" in each zone with the higher zones able
to sustain unimaginable programs.
Richard :)
--
Will kill for Documentation.
A Vic 20 is faster than a C64: 8bit roxs
http://dogmilk.homelinux.com/
Mark Atwood
>
> Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology, mostly
> lifted from a Dixon book, as I recall. I had actually written Vinge off
> because of TPW and a novella sequel whose title I forget, but this was
> readable.
"The Ungoverned".
I was given a copy of the SFBC's omnibus edition "Across Realtime" as
a holiday present in 1987. It contained both "The Peace War" (which I
had read from the library in `85, I think), and "Marooned in
Realtime".
You found tPW "boring". Tastes differ, because I found it utterly
riviting then, and I still do. In fact, I just happened to reread it
last night. Which is a refreshing change from all the SF I enjoyed so
much in my teens, that when I go back and reread, discover that
someone has taken my favorite stories and replaced them with rickety
shoddy crap.
Anyway, when I first read Marooned in Realtime, one thing that I found
frustrating was that the protaganist obviously had a backstory, and I
didn't know what it was. Why did the Peacers hate him so? Why was
he such a historically important person?
Until my ex found me a copy of "True Names... And Other Dangers" in
a used bookstore, and I got to read "The Ungoverned".
One of the questions I forgot to ask VV when I met him at ConJose'
(and I doubt I would get an answer anyway), is one of those things
that is as unanswered and as important as the "Are the Zones artificial?".
"Were Wil's 'Dreams in Blue', just dreams, or something more?"
Answering THAT question, I think, would also answer the "where did
everyone go?" question...
Mark Atwood
> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet)
No, not dated. Vinge specificially set up a situation where the nodes
had lots of processing power and lots of users, but intersteller coms where low
bandwidth, and there was no low level packet standard (there was not
"IETF").
When you have powerful multiuser nodes seperated by lowbandwidth
highlatency point-to-point links, you get a different sort of network
archtechture and culture than if you have cheap fast wide pipes
joining individual users.
Specifically, if the first case, you get UUCP or Fido type systems,
and in the second, you get WWW style systems.
Treknology always seemed to assume that ships and planets had infinite
bitrates with zero latency between each other, or else had no working
comms at all.
Vinge's playing with the implications of differnet bitrates can also
be seen in the ansible in "The Blabber", which, IIRC, had a bitrate of
a few bits an HOUR.
Chuck Bridgeland
> Tatja's Grimm's World
>
>
> I thought this was mostly harmless. I also seem to have forgotten
> what exactly the differences are between the two editions.
The first one was just called _Grimm's World_. IIRC, _Tatja Grimm's World_
included the piece "The Barbarian Princess", published in Analog much later.
> Marooned in Real Time
>
> Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology, mostly
> lifted from a Dixon book, as I recall. I had actually written Vinge off
> because of TPW and a novella sequel whose title I forget, but this was
> readable.
"The Ungoverned", about the New Mexican incursion incident mentioned in
_Marooned_. The good guys have bobbler equipped cruise missles they use for
tornado abatement. Some of them are also prickly enough about self defense
to have their own nukes. Anarchists one, dumbass New Mexicans zip.
--
"Since Jesus was a carpenter he would be driving a Dodge Ram pickup
truck with a V8 engine and one of those silver tool chests in the
back. Probably with extra large wheels to get around the rocky terrain
of the Middle East."
chuck bridgeland, chuckbri at computerdyn dot com
http://www.essex1.com/people/chuckbri
Chuck Bridgeland
> Vinge's playing with the implications of differnet bitrates can also
> be seen in the ansible in "The Blabber", which, IIRC, had a bitrate of
> a few bits an HOUR.
Minor nit: I think the quoted rate was a slightly more usable 6 bits/minute.
David Bilek
>In article <asttpf$lqk$1...@panix3.panix.com>,
>James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote, among other things:
>>
>> A Fire Upon the Deep
>>
*snip*
>>
>> Some slow bits, some dull bits but I did like the doggies. Boy, do
>>the net-parts date this badly.
>>
>The Usenet-style Galactic Net in aFUtD may look dated to an average PC user,
>but actually it isn't. The Galactic Net is similar to the pre-Internet
>Usenet -- messages forwarded from node to node over a mixed net of various
>protocols and connection types, from UUCP to Arpanet -
(etc)
I think that James may mean that the net parts are very dated
sociologically. Not technically.
-David
Mark Atwood
> On 07 Dec 2002 17:20:57 -0800, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>
> > Vinge's playing with the implications of differnet bitrates can also
> > be seen in the ansible in "The Blabber", which, IIRC, had a bitrate of
> > a few bits an HOUR.
>
> Minor nit: I think the quoted rate was a slightly more usable 6 bits/minute.
I just pulled my copy, and you are correct.
It is also notable that this world was one of the very very few places
in the galaxy where this ansible was useful (It would only work thru a
few lightyears worth of Slowness, required Beyond at the other end,
and sucked up a noticablly dimming amount of local sun's power.)
Hmmm... Dimming the sun is anther common Vinge thing. I had forgotten
about it in The Blabber. It also shows up Fire, Deepness, *and* Marooned!
(In Marooned, the small mining company that Tunc had worked for was
distilling antimatter out of the Sun in hundred megaton lots. Their
backers had had to pay a forture to purchase the easements necessary,
due to the resulting dimming of Sol's south pole.)
What other SF deals realistically with THAT MUCH ENERGY. Most SF goes
up to the power of a nuke, or else skips over to Smithian
smash-stars-as-colladeral-damage levels, and just glosses over the
energy necessary for NAFAL starships.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) writes:
>> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
>> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet)
> No, not dated. Vinge specificially set up a situation where the nodes
> had lots of processing power and lots of users, but intersteller coms where low
> bandwidth, and there was no low level packet standard (there was not
> "IETF").
Correction: there seem to be lots of local standards, and gateways
between them. There'd have to be - High Beyond civilizations can
support much better protocols than Low Beyond civilizations can. A
Transcendant packet would probably be at least a human-intelligence
agent.
"The great thing about standards is, we have so many to choose from!"
> When you have powerful multiuser nodes seperated by lowbandwidth
> highlatency point-to-point links, you get a different sort of network
> archtechture and culture than if you have cheap fast wide pipes
> joining individual users.
> Specifically, if the first case, you get UUCP or Fido type systems,
> and in the second, you get WWW style systems.
Exactly. Imagine trying to surf the web from McMurdo Sound. Now
multiply that by a thousand.
A bare-minimum Web request, even for just a single text page, looks
like this (I've left out the dozens of mostly-useless headers that
really get sent in HTTP/1.1, the current standard):
[client opens connection to server]
[client sends:]
GET /index.html HTTP/1.0
[client closes outgoing stream]
[server sends:]
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
<html><head><title>Hexapodia as the Key Insight</title></head>
<body><h1>Hexapodia as the Key Insight</h1>
<h4>by Twirlip of the Mists</h4>
</body></html>
[server closes connection]
[client closes connection and displays page]
Each of those things in brackets requires you to wait for the other
side. If you have a 25ms ping time, and ignore bandwidth, it'll take
75ms to complete that request. If you have a 2-hour ping time, it'll
take 6 hours to complete that request... Assuming you have no dropped
packets. Which on a galaxy-wide network, you will. Each dropped packet
is another 2 pings.
USENET doesn't care about latency, and bandwidth limitations aren't
visible to the users until you max out. You send an index of everything
you have to your nearest neighbors, and they request everything they
want from it, and vice versa. Eventually everyone gets everything, more
or less, and can read it at local speeds.
USENET will rule the solar system, and if we ever get FTL comm, it'll
rule the stars.
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in
order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond
the stars to eat our brains." -Charlie Stross, _The Concrete Jungle_
Sea Wasp
>
> Vernor Vinge is easy to do because he has written so few novels.
> He's interesting to do because his recents novels are much better than
> the ones before, a relief from all the Novels of posts where the author
> falls prey to the Brain Eater. On the other hand, this improvement can
> have tragic consequences for young readers whose quirks compel them to
> hunt down all the books by an author they have just discovered, who go
> from _A Deepness in the Sky_, say, to _The Witling_.
I did that and wasn't disappointed.
>
> STAND ALONE
>
> The Witling
>
> Vinge's first novel, this has a human expedition (Slower
> than light) encountering a world whose inhabitants can teleport objects,
> with restrictions. Much of the book depends on the implications of the
> restrictions (which include conservation laws but not, as I recall, C.
> This latter point does get discussed). Bit of a mixed bag, I am afraid,
> as the unhappy intellectual female character finds Twue Wuv as result
> of brain damage. Odd that the aliens are so attractive to us.
The latter part was the only part I found annoying. And the aliens
aren't attractive to US, we're attractive to THEM. Overall the aliens
look like they're built like diesel trucks, being heavy-planet natives.
We look like faeries to them -- impossibly delicate beautiful things.
The female character in question happens to be built very solidly by
human standards, making her a fashion-model impossibility on the alien
world.
The natives don't just teleport, either; they use all the standard psi
powers -- telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, etc -- and one cute touch
Vinge had in this one was that the undercover humans trying to study
their culture, before they got shipwrecked, found there were some
strange aspects of the language... ones that of course were related to
these powers, which the humans didn't understand.
This one gave me the feeling of some of the best of the late 50s-early
60s SF.
>
> Tatja's Grimm's World
This one I haven't seen directly; I saw the short story set in the same
world that's included in his short story collection.
> Bobble Novels
>
> The Peace War
>
> Possibly Vinge's worse novel, this eye-glazingly dull book pits
> a handful of free thinking types (an astronaut, a sick boy etc) against
> a tyranical organization of evil scientists armed with the bobble, something
> like Niven stasis fields, said organization having saved civilization from
> atomic war by reducing it to a pitiful shadow of itself. Darn those central
> planners! Darn them to heck! Between a small plucky band of individualists
> and heavily armed, entrenched collectivists Who! Will! Win??????
I enjoyed this one.
>
> (Hint: it was published in Analog)
>
> Marooned in Real Time
>
> This is an odd example of a sequel that is better than the original.
> This is a murder mystery set against a future in which virtually all of
> humanity has disappeared due to causes unknown. A band of humans is jumping
> through time using bobble technology, collecting all the known bobbled humans
> as they go. One of their number is left behind on one of the jumps and our
> hero has to figure out why.
>
> Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology, mostly
> lifted from a Dixon book, as I recall. I had actually written Vinge off
> because of TPW and a novella sequel whose title I forget, but this was
> readable.
OTOH, I found Marooned in Real Time less interesting than the preceding
Peace War. It had some interesting concepts in it, but seemed to DRAG an
awful lot.
>
> The Zone Novels
>
> A Fire Upon the Deep
>
> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet)
No more dated than many other things, and there's certainly ways to
explain it.
portions of this verged on
> the interesting despite the contrived background. In a galaxy strangely
> like the one in Anderson's _Brain Wave_, where the type and speed of
> computations one can perform depend on location, some stupid archaeologists
> goes looking for treasure but finds an apocalyptic monster. Half the book
> follows the young survivors of this expedition, marooned on telepathic-dog
> world. The other follows a human female who gets entangled in the vast disaster
> the discovery unleashed. Eventually the two plots converge and a solution
> to the problem, although not an especially humane one, is handed to the
> characters (Probably for the best, as they were hopelessly outclassed).
>
> Some slow bits, some dull bits but I did like the doggies. Boy, do
> the net-parts date this badly.
I actually like the net-parts (and Pham Nuwen) better than the
doggie-parts. And I *do* like the Tines. But they weren't as interesting
as the voyage of the Out Of Band II.
This one grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go until I finished
it. It is one of a very, VERY small number of books which I re-read
IMMEDIATELY after finishing it. One of the biggest "hits" of "sense of
wonder" that I've had from any book.
>
> A Deepness in the Sky
>
> Set a long time before AFUD, this supplies us with the back stories
> to one of the characters in AFUD. An STL trade and exploration expedition to
> an anomolous star runs into an STL expedition from a centrally planned
> civilization who surprisingly turn out to be evil. Actually, not just
> evil. Eeeeevil, with a capital Sadistic, with some tools to help them in
> this that I could flog on Bay Street for millions. When the planet of the
> weird star turns out to be inhabited, a many sided struggle to prevail
> results. Who! Will!--
>
> Well, you know how that goes.
>
> Parts of this I really liked, a much higher percentage than any
> other VV novel. As one expects the bad guys are very bad indeed and Focus,
> a work-ethic enhancer, is misused horribly in their service. Some interesting
> bits on running STL trade networks and the problems of running civilizations
> without them falling over and spinning around on one wheel get a significant
> amount of stage time.
This novel astounded me when I read it. I didn't think he could
possibly equal _Fire_, and instead he surpassed it. I just re-read it,
worried that I'd find it had weakened, and found it was, if possible,
even better; I understood more of the whole sequence of manipulations on
both sides, while the first time through I didn't catch a lot of the
clues as to the actions of *spoiler* which show up much earlier than I'd
realized.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
http://www.wizvax.net/seawasp/index.htm
Dan Swartzendruber
> The natives don't just teleport, either; they use all the standard psi
> powers -- telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, etc -- and one cute touch
Are you sure about that? It's been a couple of years since I last read
it, but I don't recall telepathy or pyrokinesis?
Dan Swartzendruber
> > the net-parts date this badly.
>
> I actually like the net-parts (and Pham Nuwen) better than the
> doggie-parts. And I *do* like the Tines. But they weren't as interesting
> as the voyage of the Out Of Band II.
Funny, I had the same exact reaction. I found it hard to get into the
Tines, and at least one time I read the book, I skipped the Tinesworld
chapters :)
> This one grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go until I finished
> it. It is one of a very, VERY small number of books which I re-read
> IMMEDIATELY after finishing it. One of the biggest "hits" of "sense of
> wonder" that I've had from any book.
Yes!
Sea Wasp
No, he's answered that one. In the affirmative.
Sea Wasp
Possibly not. I thought they used something like that in destroying the
landing craft and skiff in the beginning. They certainly had
clairvoyance -- they could sense things at distance.
James Nicoll
arrive with considerable energy. This was, I think, considered
impolite.
David Dyer-Bennet
His complaint seems to be that there is Usenet but not the web. That
sounds like technological complaint to me -- and a completely bogus
one, as Vadim explained. That argument is laid out in considerable
detail in the book, in fact.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd...@dd-b.net / http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net
Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info
Nancy Lebovitz
Chuck Bridgeland <chuckbri at computerdyn dot com> wrote:
>On 7 Dec 2002 17:47:11 -0500, James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>> Tatja's Grimm's World
>>
>>
>> I thought this was mostly harmless. I also seem to have forgotten
>> what exactly the differences are between the two editions.
>
>The first one was just called _Grimm's World_. IIRC, _Tatja Grimm's World_
>included the piece "The Barbarian Princess", published in Analog much later.
IIRC, it starts with a really charming description of a produced and
transported by ship sf magazine as the unifying cultural element of
an archipelago culture. The actual plot was considerably less interesting.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com 100 new slogans
I want to move to theory. Everything works in theory.
Allan Griffith
>
> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet) portions of this verged on
> the interesting
Surely one of the dullest SF novels ever written.
Al
Dan Tilque
>
> Tatja's Grimm's World
>
> There are at least two versions of this book, the second of
> which is much longer than the first. In this story set on a
> metal-poor ocean world, a superior woman goes from being the
> object of protection by Analog Maga^H a nomadic press
> organization to playing a central role in the planet's
> history.
Actually, it was not a water world so much as a Pangaea world.
That is, it has only one humongous continent whose interior is
terra incognita. The civilization the nomadic press belongs to
occupies the islands surrounding the continent. I did find it
rather improbably that the magazine had been published for
several thousand years, though.
I thought this was an interesting background and wish he'd done
more with it. But maybe with the John Campbell/Analog analogs.
--
Dan Tilque
Dan Tilque
>
> Actually, it was not a water world so much as a Pangaea world.
...
>
> I thought this was an interesting background and wish he'd done
> more with it. But maybe with the John Campbell/Analog analogs.
I mean WITHOUT the John Campbell/Analog analogs, of course.
--
Dan Tilque
Dan Swartzendruber
Dan Swartzendruber
Ah, but now we're conflating their power with the traditional psi
powers. I don't remember all the various verbs they had, but they were
functional, not descriptive of different powers. IIRC, the clairvoyance
was just an aspect of the TK - to move something you have to be able to
sense it...
Dan Swartzendruber
> In article <3DF2D2...@wizvax.net>, Sea Wasp <sea...@wizvax.net> wrote:
> >Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
> >>
> >> In article <3DF2C9...@wizvax.net>, sea...@wizvax.net says...
> >> > The natives don't just teleport, either; they use all the standard psi
> >> > powers -- telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, etc -- and one cute touch
> >>
> >> Are you sure about that? It's been a couple of years since I last read
> >> it, but I don't recall telepathy or pyrokinesis?
> >
> >
> > Possibly not. I thought they used something like that in destroying the
> >landing craft and skiff in the beginning. They certainly had
> >clairvoyance -- they could sense things at distance.
> >
> They could tport down fragments of the moon, which would
> arrive with considerable energy. This was, I think, considered
> impolite.
No kidding. This is why NO ONE f*cked with the Guild (not more than
once anyway...) Interesting sociological construct there - how do you
cope with people who are much more powerful than anyone else around
them?
James Nicoll
attain understanding of dull.
Bertil Jonell
James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
> Bobble Novels
>
> The Peace War
>
> Possibly Vinge's worse novel, this eye-glazingly dull book pits
>a handful of free thinking types (an astronaut, a sick boy etc) against
>a tyranical organization of evil scientists armed with the bobble, something
>like Niven stasis fields, said organization having saved civilization from
I've always seen this as an Anti-Hogan novel, the reverse of the typical
"Scientists fighting evil and/or dumb military and buereaucratic superiors
discover a superweapon and use it to avert WWIII, and they ruled wisely
ever after."
It is just that it takes place long afterward, when the Peter-principle
and all-too-human corruption and nepotism have turned the wise rule into
something else.
-bertil-
--
"It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or
strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an
exercise for your kill-file."
Sea Wasp
>
> In article <asumai$3u1$1...@panix3.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...
> > In article <3DF2D2...@wizvax.net>, Sea Wasp <sea...@wizvax.net> wrote:
> > >Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
> > >>
> > >> In article <3DF2C9...@wizvax.net>, sea...@wizvax.net says...
> > >> > The natives don't just teleport, either; they use all the standard psi
> > >> > powers -- telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, etc -- and one cute touch
> > >>
> > >> Are you sure about that? It's been a couple of years since I last read
> > >> it, but I don't recall telepathy or pyrokinesis?
> > >
> > >
> > > Possibly not. I thought they used something like that in destroying the
> > >landing craft and skiff in the beginning. They certainly had
> > >clairvoyance -- they could sense things at distance.
> > >
> > They could tport down fragments of the moon, which would
> > arrive with considerable energy. This was, I think, considered
> > impolite.
That's a masterful understatement...
>
> No kidding. This is why NO ONE f*cked with the Guild (not more than
> once anyway...) Interesting sociological construct there - how do you
> cope with people who are much more powerful than anyone else around
> them?
This isn't an uncommon sf/f problem. It's something I'll be dealing
with in a number of stories (assuming my writing becomes popular enough
so that I get to publish a number of books, rather than just one or two
and then become a drunken old has-been in the gutter... ).
Bala Menon
news:MPG.185d33776...@news.supernews.net...
> In article <asumai$3u1$1...@panix3.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...
> > In article <3DF2D2...@wizvax.net>, Sea Wasp <sea...@wizvax.net>
wrote:
> > arrive with considerable energy. This was, I think, considered
> > impolite.
>
> No kidding. This is why NO ONE f*cked with the Guild (not
> more than once anyway...) Interesting sociological construct
> there - how do you cope with people who are much more
> powerful than anyone else around them?
John Ostrander had a rather interesting run on a comic called
FIRESTORM where he investigated this aspect of superheroes.
To quote a conversation between Zastrow (a Russian observer)
and a US General:
Zastrow: I think maybe all this demonstrates why my government
does not trust this concept of .... how you call them ... "zupermen" ?
Their powers, their secret identities, make them answerable to
no one. It tears down the social fabric of any society.
US General: They're called "superheroes". ... I seem to remember
your having someone like that during World War II.
Zastrow: Stalnoivolk. Steel Wolf in your language, yes. He too
became a symbol to us. He is the reason we do not trust these
superheroes.
--
Bala Menon (bala...@panix.com)
Richard Horton
>In article <MPG.185db51c8...@news-server.bigpond.net.au>,
>Allan Griffith <agri4042@REMOVE_THIS.bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>>In article <asttpf$lqk$1...@panix3.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...
>>> A Fire Upon the Deep
>>>
>>> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
>>> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet) portions of this verged on
>>> the interesting
>>
>>Surely one of the dullest SF novels ever written.
>
> No. Once you've read Jean Mark Gawron's _Algorithm_ you
>attain understanding of dull.
I saw this thread title, and I said to myself, "Well, MY nomination is
_Algorithm_."
I've probably posted this before, but I finished the novel out of
sheer stubbornness. I was literally reading disconnected words,
unable to make any sense of them in context.
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.tangentonline.com)
Nancy Lebovitz
It *may* be possible to do central planning for zones lower than one's
own, but why would you want to?
James Nicoll
What do you think the Abomination is, exactly? It's an economics
software package gone feral, I think.
Dan Swartzendruber
na...@unix1.netaxs.com says...
> >> Funny thing is, if there is any place in Vinge's worlds where the
> >> "calculation problem" would go away, and central planning would work,
> >> it would be in the Beyond!
> >
> >and probably does :)
>
> It *may* be possible to do central planning for zones lower than one's
> own, but why would you want to?
probably not worth the trouble, true (unless you're the Blight!)
Andrew Plotkin
> David Bilek <dbi...@attbi.com> writes:
>> I think that James may mean that the net parts are very dated
>> sociologically. Not technically.
> His complaint seems to be that there is Usenet but not the web. That
> sounds like technological complaint to me -- and a completely bogus
> one, as Vadim explained. That argument is laid out in considerable
> detail in the book, in fact.
Sociologically, Vinge's Net feels to me like Usenet in 1992, not
Usenet in 1996, 1999, or 2002. This is not technological.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
James Nicoll
Richard Horton <rrho...@prodigy.net> wrote:
>On 8 Dec 2002 11:14:34 -0500, jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
>
>>In article <MPG.185db51c8...@news-server.bigpond.net.au>,
>>Allan Griffith <agri4042@REMOVE_THIS.bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>>>In article <asttpf$lqk$1...@panix3.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...
>>>> A Fire Upon the Deep
>>>>
>>>> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
>>>> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet) portions of this verged on
>>>> the interesting
>>>
>>>Surely one of the dullest SF novels ever written.
>>
>> No. Once you've read Jean Mark Gawron's _Algorithm_ you
>>attain understanding of dull.
>
>I saw this thread title, and I said to myself, "Well, MY nomination is
>_Algorithm_."
>
>I've probably posted this before, but I finished the novel out of
>sheer stubbornness. I was literally reading disconnected words,
>unable to make any sense of them in context.
Be happy it was a 1970s 200+ pager and not a modern 600+ Six
Volume Epic...
David Dyer-Bennet
> Here, David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
> > David Bilek <dbi...@attbi.com> writes:
>
> >> I think that James may mean that the net parts are very dated
> >> sociologically. Not technically.
>
> > His complaint seems to be that there is Usenet but not the web. That
> > sounds like technological complaint to me -- and a completely bogus
> > one, as Vadim explained. That argument is laid out in considerable
> > detail in the book, in fact.
>
> Sociologically, Vinge's Net feels to me like Usenet in 1992, not
> Usenet in 1996, 1999, or 2002. This is not technological.
True. To me it feels pretty similar, though.
James Nicoll
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>Here, David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
>> David Bilek <dbi...@attbi.com> writes:
>
>>> I think that James may mean that the net parts are very dated
>>> sociologically. Not technically.
>
>> His complaint seems to be that there is Usenet but not the web. That
>> sounds like technological complaint to me -- and a completely bogus
>> one, as Vadim explained. That argument is laid out in considerable
>> detail in the book, in fact.
>
>Sociologically, Vinge's Net feels to me like Usenet in 1992, not
>Usenet in 1996, 1999, or 2002. This is not technological.
Exactly. For one thing, notice the lack of abusive use of
the net aside from flamewars. Spam could have happened earlier, I
think, than the Green Card Spam and could happen in the galactic
net but for some reason didn't.
Actually I seem to recall an earlier religious spam as well
as (this is very dim) some kid named Jay Jay trying to get people to
send him money for college. Late 1980s?
Kilian has abusive user nodes being clipped out of the galactic
net in his _Gryphon_ but I suspect if he had a real world model it might
have been sergar argic and might have been aspects of _Macroscope_.
Sea Wasp
>
> In article <at0445$jnc$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
> >Here, David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
> >> David Bilek <dbi...@attbi.com> writes:
> >
> >>> I think that James may mean that the net parts are very dated
> >>> sociologically. Not technically.
> >
> >> His complaint seems to be that there is Usenet but not the web. That
> >> sounds like technological complaint to me -- and a completely bogus
> >> one, as Vadim explained. That argument is laid out in considerable
> >> detail in the book, in fact.
> >
> >Sociologically, Vinge's Net feels to me like Usenet in 1992, not
> >Usenet in 1996, 1999, or 2002. This is not technological.
>
> Exactly. For one thing, notice the lack of abusive use of
> the net aside from flamewars. Spam could have happened earlier, I
> think, than the Green Card Spam and could happen in the galactic
> net but for some reason didn't.
In the Zones universe, G'reen Khardd spammed the Known Net. Their
planet was obliterated several minutes later by a Transcendent virus
supplied by three separate Powers simultaneously.
Their net is cleaner because the TOS agreements are much nastier.
James Nicoll
On the other hand, imagine the transcendent version of Dick
Depew's Auto-Active Retro Moderation.
www.ctrl-c.liu.se/~ingvar/legends/bad.html#depew
for those who were fortunate to miss the AARM episode.
Sea Wasp
That was called "The Perversion", I believe.
David Friedman
Dan Swartzendruber <dsw...@druber.com> wrote:
> Interesting sociological construct there - how do you
> cope with people who are much more powerful than anyone else around
> them?
Actually, this ties in with my theory of what was wrong with Star Trek
(original version).
There was an essential inconsistency in the imagined universe. On the
one hand, the Federation was supposed to be one of the Great Powers of
the Universe. On the other hand, every third planet contained some
godlike being, robot race, or whatever with powers undreamed of by
Captain Kirk et. al., at least until they had to deal with them.
The origin of that problem was the decision to make the Enterprise the
equivalent of a battleship instead of the equivalent of a PT boat or
lifeboat. If you have a battleship from one of the universe's most
advanced civilizations, you are in the "much more powerful than anyone
else around" role. Some interesting stories can be told from that role,
but there is a limited set of possibilities. To get out of that role you
need local supermen or the equivalent--someone who can actually threaten
what you care about with destruction. You can also do it via an
encounter with one of the other most advanced civilizations, of course,
but only so many times--and they did a lot of episodes.
Dan Swartzendruber
> > > In the Zones universe, G'reen Khardd spammed the Known Net. Their
> > >planet was obliterated several minutes later by a Transcendent virus
> > >supplied by three separate Powers simultaneously.
> > >
> > > Their net is cleaner because the TOS agreements are much nastier.
> >
> > On the other hand, imagine the transcendent version of Dick
> > Depew's Auto-Active Retro Moderation.
>
> That was called "The Perversion", I believe.
Imagine postings by Robert McElwaine:
The Secret Galaxy-wide Apocalypse millions and millions of years ago!
Where a rogue Power attempts to conquer the entire Galaxy and trillions
of sentient beings die in an attempt to stop it! Oh wait, that really
happened. Never mind...
Sea Wasp
Dan, Dan, you have to do these things right.
"The SECRET Galaxy-wide APOCALYPSE millions AND millions of years ago!
Where a ROGUE POWER attempted to CONQUER the ENTIRE GALAXY and TRILLIONS
of SENTIENT BEINGS died in an attempt to STOP it! As Doctor P-Terr Beetr
PROVED in his ..."
I always wondered if Twirlip was a sort of riff on McElwaine being
RIGHT -- read like a nutcase, but actually was telling everyone the
truth if anyone would listen...
Damien Sullivan
> Exactly. For one thing, notice the lack of abusive use of
>the net aside from flamewars. Spam could have happened earlier, I
>think, than the Green Card Spam and could happen in the galactic
>net but for some reason didn't.
The odd thing about the Galactic Net is that the posters seem to be entire
organizations, or even civilizations. Commerical spam seems less likely
there. Plus you've got near-sentient filters; spam may simply not propagate
past one's neighbors. Who may shut off your feed if you piss them off. Oh
yeah, and the feed is expensive, unlike private news access on Earth. Spam
depends on being cheap.
But really, we don't know if there was spam or not. We know Ravna was using
near-sentient filters and excluding the vast majority of postings. Twirlip
barely got through; she may have never seen spam.
-xx- Damien X-)
Dan Swartzendruber
> Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
> >
> > In article <3DF3A3...@wizvax.net>, sea...@wizvax.net says...
> > > > > In the Zones universe, G'reen Khardd spammed the Known Net. Their
> > > > >planet was obliterated several minutes later by a Transcendent virus
> > > > >supplied by three separate Powers simultaneously.
> > > > >
> > > > > Their net is cleaner because the TOS agreements are much nastier.
> > > >
> > > > On the other hand, imagine the transcendent version of Dick
> > > > Depew's Auto-Active Retro Moderation.
> > >
> > > That was called "The Perversion", I believe.
> >
> > Imagine postings by Robert McElwaine:
> >
> > The Secret Galaxy-wide Apocalypse millions and millions of years ago!
> > Where a rogue Power attempts to conquer the entire Galaxy and trillions
> > of sentient beings die in an attempt to stop it! Oh wait, that really
> > happened. Never mind...
>
> Dan, Dan, you have to do these things right.
>
> "The SECRET Galaxy-wide APOCALYPSE millions AND millions of years ago!
> Where a ROGUE POWER attempted to CONQUER the ENTIRE GALAXY and TRILLIONS
> of SENTIENT BEINGS died in an attempt to STOP it! As Doctor P-Terr Beetr
> PROVED in his ..."
crap, ya know? i actually did think later (maybe i should have done the
alternating caps lock thing...)
> I always wondered if Twirlip was a sort of riff on McElwaine being
> RIGHT -- read like a nutcase, but actually was telling everyone the
> truth if anyone would listen...
hee hee
Mark Atwood
> >
> >Sociologically, Vinge's Net feels to me like Usenet in 1992, not
> >Usenet in 1996, 1999, or 2002. This is not technological.
>
> Exactly. For one thing, notice the lack of abusive use of
> the net aside from flamewars. Spam could have happened earlier, I
> think, than the Green Card Spam and could happen in the galactic
> net but for some reason didn't.
Three points.
One. The galactic net would be generating trillions of message a day,
and the novel contained not even a hundred. That's a really tight
selection.
Two. They had GOOD automation and intellegent text processing in the
Beyond. If you can built a good realtime working natural language
translator, building a smart killfile would be trival.
Three. It *is* like the net of 1992 for the bandwidth and availablity
reasons we've already mentioned. USENET prior to 1992 mainly flowed
over UUCP and read access was via your school or lab. If you pissed
off enough people to convience your local newsmaster (there is no
cabal) to cut you off, you were CUT OFF. You have have to move, and
change jobs or schools to get back online. You couldn't just pick up a
new Earthlink or AOL or mom-n-pop ISP account, and be back online.
Similarly, in the galactic net if your local system network manager
cuts you off, you would have to pack your bags and move a hundred LY to
a new system to be able to post again.
--
Mark Atwood | Well done is better than well said.
m...@pobox.com |
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Sean O'Hara
>
> In article <at0445$jnc$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>
> >Sociologically, Vinge's Net feels to me like Usenet in 1992, not
> >Usenet in 1996, 1999, or 2002. This is not technological.
>
> Exactly. For one thing, notice the lack of abusive use of
> the net aside from flamewars. Spam could have happened earlier, I
> think, than the Green Card Spam and could happen in the galactic
> net but for some reason didn't.
>
number of messages being posted, I don't see how a human could
read the newsgroups without computer assistance, and I'd assume
that would include killing the spam.
--
Sean O'Hara
"Anchovies, anchovies, you're so delicious,
I love you more than all the other fishes."
--Dawn Summers, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
Joe Mason
>>Sociologically, Vinge's Net feels to me like Usenet in 1992, not
>>Usenet in 1996, 1999, or 2002. This is not technological.
>
> Exactly. For one thing, notice the lack of abusive use of
> the net aside from flamewars. Spam could have happened earlier, I
> think, than the Green Card Spam and could happen in the galactic
> net but for some reason didn't.
Note that we don't actually see much of the net in day-to-day use. Most
of what we see is specifically snips of what Ravna downloaded and sorted
through. Not only do we not get anything that the filtering software
already tossed, we only get examples of what she found interesting.
Joe
James A. Donald
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote in message
> Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology,
> mostly lifted from a Dixon book, as I recall. I had actually
> written Vinge off because of TPW and a novella sequel whose
> title I forget, but this was readable.
The novella you forgot was "The Ungoverned", which I found not
merely readable, but insanely great.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
ZZiIaGJO6MOI67Taw6euRXac1T418euqznkprOCj
48y236le94IpHR2QOfeRiQGUI87CcYh8yWkYaR+Vb
Matt Austern
You can certainly explain away the way the Net in that book looks:
we're seeing it after lots of automated translation software has been
run, we're seeing the results of semi-sapient filters, we're seeing a
specially chosen subset, we're seeing posts by whole civilizations
instead of by individuals, we're seeing a Net that has been shaped by
wars of extermination, etc. Some of those arguments are plausible.
But the original comment still applies: the Net that we see in the
book, after all those things are taken into account, looks very
specifically like the Usenet at the time the book was written, not
Usenet before or after that instant. This strikes me as unreasonable.
I think that the differences between the Net of a Million Lies and the
Usenet of ten years ago should be greater than the differences between
the Usenet of ten years ago and the Usenet of today.
Scott Forbes
pho...@ugcs.caltech.edu (Damien Sullivan) wrote:
> The odd thing about the Galactic Net is that the posters seem to be entire
> organizations, or even civilizations.
The distinction between "individual" and "civilization" gets blurry in
the High Beyond. Sandor Arbitration Intelligence, for example,
described itself as "comprised [of] twenty civilizations at the Top,"
but when those civilizations were consumed by the Blight, the remaining
intellect chose to disband (commit suicide?) rather than stumble along
at Middle Beyond levels of sentience.
One could imagine the Known Net as a conversation between a sentient
Ford Motor Company, the New Zealand government, Eric Raymond, and a
talking walrus... and probably be not far off the mark.
> But really, we don't know if there was spam or not. We know Ravna was using
> near-sentient filters and excluding the vast majority of postings. Twirlip
> barely got through; she may have never seen spam.
Much as I like the theory that spam-sending civilizations get taught a
valuable social lesson by Transcendent Powers, I'd tend to agree that a
filter working a near-sentient levels would eliminate all but the most
subtle or relevant spam. (Arguably one of Vrimini Org's competitors
*did* spam Relay's customers, after the Old One disrupted commercial
traffic in order to transmit the full sensorium while boinking Ravna,
but the spam was probably well-received in that instance.)
--
Scott Forbes for...@ravenna.com
Mark Atwood
> One could imagine the Known Net as a conversation between a sentient
> Ford Motor Company, the New Zealand government, Eric Raymond, and a
> talking walrus... and probably be not far off the mark.
Consider the hightechers in _MiRT_ talking about being linked.
Tunc's little mining company of 4 people couple be treated as one
intellegent entity when they were linked. The outer system
corporations were the same was, only with a few thousand people, and
Earth-Luna towards the end was described with awe dripped tones as
billions of people linked together.
I also got the implication that people didnt link up all the time,
just when they wanted to / found it necessary / were working.
I think it was Vinge who presented the thought experament of taking a
team of well-read well-educated people who worked well together,
locking them in a room with a good computer and an internet
connection, and giving the resulting "thing" an IQ test.
The resulting "thing" would blow the top off the test, but would
"think" rather slowly comparied to a single person, and a conversation
with "it" would be rather disjointed. However, the hope is that these
problems can be smoothed over with better CHI software and groupware.
You can see this idea in his "Fast Times..." where the high school
graduation exams included placing the students into situations pretty
much exactly like that, and then testing the ability of the resulting
gestalt.
Hmmm... You can see the same sort of idea going into the nature of
the intellegence of the Tines.
Keith Morrison
>>Imagine postings by Robert McElwaine:
>>
>>The Secret Galaxy-wide Apocalypse millions and millions of years ago!
>>Where a rogue Power attempts to conquer the entire Galaxy and trillions
>>of sentient beings die in an attempt to stop it! Oh wait, that really
>>happened. Never mind...
>
> Dan, Dan, you have to do these things right.
>
> "The SECRET Galaxy-wide APOCALYPSE millions AND millions of years ago!
> Where a ROGUE POWER attempted to CONQUER the ENTIRE GALAXY and TRILLIONS
> of SENTIENT BEINGS died in an attempt to STOP it! As Doctor P-Terr Beetr
> PROVED in his ..."
>
> I always wondered if Twirlip was a sort of riff on McElwaine being
> RIGHT -- read like a nutcase, but actually was telling everyone the
> truth if anyone would listen...
Impossible. Twirlip was moderately comprehensible, asked for information
in order to clear up something he didn't fully understand and didn't use
random capitalization.
--
Keith
David Tomlin
> Actually, this ties in with my theory of what was wrong with Star Trek
> (original version).
> There was an essential inconsistency in the imagined universe. On the
> one hand, the Federation was supposed to be one of the Great Powers of
> the Universe. On the other hand, every third planet contained some
> godlike being, robot race, or whatever with powers undreamed of by
> Captain Kirk et. al., at least until they had to deal with them.
I didn't think it was implausible. IIRC, it was usually clear that
the superbeings weren't Great Powers because they weren't interested
in being so. I thought that was part of The Message - that advanced
beings wouldn't be interested in that kind of power.
Karl M. Syring
> In article <MPG.185db51c8...@news-server.bigpond.net.au>,
> Allan Griffith <agri4042@REMOVE_THIS.bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>> In article <asttpf$lqk$1...@panix3.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com
>> says...
>>> A Fire Upon the Deep
>>>
>>> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
>>> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet) portions of this
>>> verged on the interesting
>>
>> Surely one of the dullest SF novels ever written.
>
> No. Once you've read Jean Mark Gawron's _Algorithm_ you
> attain understanding of dull.
Even if you own "Clean Underwear" and "Lady Bug Rainboots"?
Karl M. Syring
Matt Ruff
>
> The Peace War
>
> Possibly Vinge's worse novel,
I thought "The Witling" was worse, although I never finished it.
> this eye-glazingly dull
I didn't find it dull, just a little too Capraesque. In the real world I
expect the Tinkers would have gotten their asses kicked.
> Marooned in Real Time
>
> This is an odd example of a sequel that is better than the original.
What I liked about it was that, rather than being more of the same, it
explored an entirely different implication of Bobble technology.
> This is a murder mystery set against a future in which virtually all of
> humanity has disappeared due to causes unknown. A band of humans is jumping
> through time using bobble technology, collecting all the known bobbled humans
> as they go. One of their number is left behind on one of the jumps and our
> hero has to figure out why.
>
> Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology,
Although I thought the drawing-room style climax where he named the
murderer was the weakest part of the book.
> The Zone Novels
>
> A Fire Upon the Deep
>
> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet)
I dunno, I reread it recently and it didn't feel dated to me. I also
don't think a Galactic Web would have worked as well as a literary
device; by limiting the 'net to text messages only, he was able to
reproduce them on the page, epistolery style, whereas Web sites would
need to be described.
-- M. Ruff
Matt Ruff
>
> Funny, I had the same exact reaction. I found it hard to get into the
> Tines, and at least one time I read the book, I skipped the Tinesworld
> chapters :)
Me too.
-- M. Ruff
Mark Atwood
> > I always wondered if Twirlip was a sort of riff on McElwaine
> > being RIGHT -- read like a nutcase, but actually was telling
> > everyone the truth if anyone would listen...
>
> Impossible. Twirlip was moderately comprehensible, asked for information
> in order to clear up something he didn't fully understand and didn't use
> random capitalization.
Well, the first and third may be simply artifacts of the translation
software.
Remember, TotM lived, IIRC, on/in a gas giant, and probably didn't even
use alphabetic glyphs, let alone letter case...
Karl M. Syring
> In article <e2MI9.2164$cX3.1...@newshog.newsread.com>,
> Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix1.netaxs.com> wrote:
> and probably does :)
>>
>> It *may* be possible to do central planning for zones lower than
>> one's own, but why would you want to?
>
> What do you think the Abomination is, exactly? It's an economics
> software package gone feral, I think.
It is properly called a Wall Street asset stripper, see
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/27282.html
Karl M. Syring
John Andrew Fairhurst
> I actually like the net-parts (and Pham Nuwen) better than the
> doggie-parts. And I *do* like the Tines. But they weren't as interesting
> as the voyage of the Out Of Band II.
>
I found that the shipboard side, overhearing/participating in the net
traffic, was far more enjoyable (and comprehensible :-)) once I had
started participating in Usenet myself.
Incidentally, are the Tines more doglike, or wolflike?
--
John Fairhurst
In Association with Amazon worldwide:
http://www.johnsbooks.co.uk/
Your One-Stop Site for Classic SF!
Updated for December 2002 Publications
A Quarter of a Millennium of healthcare In Manchester:
http://www.mri250.org
John Andrew Fairhurst
>
> There are at least two versions of this book, the second of
> which is much longer than the first. In this story set on a metal-poor
> ocean world, a superior woman goes from being the object of protection
> by Analog Maga^H a nomadic press organization to playing a central role
> in the planet's history.
>
You know, it actually took a few minutes to sink in, but I have read
this.
I wouldn't have remembered it as a Vinge though...
Mark Jones
(David Tomlin)' confessed his crimes:
I think that was Roddenberry's intended message, yes. But I like the
theory someone recently posted (I forget who): when an individual or a
species gets much more advanced than the Federation currently is (and
will remain from TOS thru Voyager), they hit the Singularity and
transcend, whether they like it or not--and thus get taken out of the
power politics.
This neatly explains the Federation's unspoken but obvious set of
prohibitions on AIs, genetic engineering and cyberware--all things
which could easily push them across the threshold.
--
"It will let you do things nobody else can do, see things nobody else can see."
"_Real_ things?"
--Egg Shen and Jack Burton
pacm...@hotmail.com
> Here, David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
>> David Bilek <dbi...@attbi.com> writes:
>>> I think that James may mean that the net parts are very dated
>>> sociologically. Not technically.
>> His complaint seems to be that there is Usenet but not the web. That
>> sounds like technological complaint to me -- and a completely bogus
>> one, as Vadim explained. That argument is laid out in considerable
>> detail in the book, in fact.
> Sociologically, Vinge's Net feels to me like Usenet in 1992, not
> Usenet in 1996, 1999, or 2002. This is not technological.
But few real people had direct access to Vinge's Net (access was
expensive), so sociologically it could very well be like Usenet in
1992.
--
Paul Carter
stre...@rohan.sdsu.edu
>
> It *may* be possible to do central planning for zones lower than one's
> own, but why would you want to?
Homework assignment.
--
--Stewart Stremler----------------...@rohan.sdsu.edu--
Open source cyberspace jacks. Definitely an idea whose time has come.
-- Peter da Silva (1999)
Andrea Leistra
James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
[_Marooned in Realtime_]
> Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology, mostly
>lifted from a Dixon book, as I recall. I had actually written Vinge off
>because of TPW and a novella sequel whose title I forget, but this was
>readable.
The novella you're thinking of is probably _The Ungoverned_, which is
collected with TPW and MiR in _Across Realtime_, and is truly dreadful.
It involves private ownership of nuclear weapons, portrayed as a Very
Good Thing, and that's all I remember about it.
--
Andrea Leistra
Joe Mason
To be fair, not a Very Good Thing - more a necessary evil.
Joe
Paul
I'm wondering if anyone has read the recent short story collection by
Vinge? I was thinking about asking for it for Christmas, but I wasn't
sure if it'd be worth it.
Opinions appreciated,
Paul
On 7 Dec 2002 17:47:11 -0500, jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
snip
Chuck Bridgeland
> The novella you're thinking of is probably _The Ungoverned_, which is
> collected with TPW and MiR in _Across Realtime_, and is truly dreadful.
> It involves private ownership of nuclear weapons, portrayed as a Very
> Good Thing, and that's all I remember about it.
Actually not. The comment was made in the story that had his neighbors
known, the guy who owned the nuke would have been lynched.
Also, gov't ownership of nuclear weapons is any better than private ownership?
--
"Since Jesus was a carpenter he would be driving a Dodge Ram pickup
truck with a V8 engine and one of those silver tool chests in the
back. Probably with extra large wheels to get around the rocky terrain
of the Middle East."
chuck bridgeland, chuckbri at computerdyn dot com
http://www.essex1.com/people/chuckbri
Sea Wasp
>
> In article <3DF2C9...@wizvax.net>, sea...@wizvax.net says...
> > I actually like the net-parts (and Pham Nuwen) better than the
> > doggie-parts. And I *do* like the Tines. But they weren't as interesting
> > as the voyage of the Out Of Band II.
> >
>
> I found that the shipboard side, overhearing/participating in the net
> traffic, was far more enjoyable (and comprehensible :-)) once I had
> started participating in Usenet myself.
I'd already been on Usenet for a while before I read it.
>
> Incidentally, are the Tines more doglike, or wolflike?
Ratlike, actually, from the description. The
predators-evolved-from-rats shown in "After Man" probably look pretty
close, without the tympana of course.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
http://www.wizvax.net/seawasp/index.htm
Sea Wasp
So you don't remember it clearly at all.
The "turtle" who had the nuke would've been lynched by his neighbors if
they'd known he had it -- and this was made very clear.
Sea Wasp
>
> As usual, this is all great information.
> I'm wondering if anyone has read the recent short story collection by
> Vinge? I was thinking about asking for it for Christmas, but I wasn't
I thought it was great, but I had never read ANY of his short stories
before. If you've already got them, then there's only the one additional
short as new material.
Bill Woods
> In article <MPG.185db51c8...@news-server.bigpond.net.au>,
> Allan Griffith <agri4042@REMOVE_THIS.bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> >In article <asttpf$lqk$1...@panix3.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...
> >> A Fire Upon the Deep
> >>
> >> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
> >> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet) portions of this verged on
> >> the interesting
> >
> >Surely one of the dullest SF novels ever written.
>
> No. Once you've read Jean Mark Gawron's _Algorithm_ you
> attain understanding of dull.
Can't remember the name, but there was a book written in the early
'80s. A review said it was about an immortal hermit (with a cat)
to whom nothing ever happened. The reviewer thought the book conveyed
the impression of this situation *really* well. A friend had started
to read it a couple of times but never got past page 50 or so.
--
Bill Woods
"New Zealand is as close as we will get
to the opportunity to study life on another planet".
-- Jared Diamond
Joe Mason
> Paul wrote:
>>
>> As usual, this is all great information.
>> I'm wondering if anyone has read the recent short story collection by
>> Vinge? I was thinking about asking for it for Christmas, but I wasn't
>> sure if it'd be worth it.\
>
> I thought it was great, but I had never read ANY of his short stories
> before. If you've already got them, then there's only the one additional
> short as new material.
I second that - if you liked his novels, you'll probably like at least
enough of his short stories to be worth it. My only gripe was that it
didn't have True Names.
Joe
Mark Atwood
>
> The novella you're thinking of is probably _The Ungoverned_, which is
> collected with TPW and MiR in _Across Realtime_, and is truly dreadful.
> It involves private ownership of nuclear weapons, portrayed as a Very
> Good Thing, and that's all I remember about it.
Why does everyone who hated it gloss over the fact that if **'s
neighbors had known that he possessed a nuke, they would have lynched
him the moment he stepped off his property?
W.W.B was talking really fast to the New Mexicans by that point, and
was trying to give them the impression that Armadillos were much more
common then they really were, and that they were all willing to
spoilsport nuke tresspassers.
When in fact, ** was the only hardcore Armadillo inside Big Al's
service area, and nuke ownership amoung Armadillos was rare. (It was
also not a big citybusting multimegaton, but a little tiny thing, with
minimal explosive yield, probably originally designed for small scale
tactical battlefield use, . You could probably make a bigger bang
with a garage built Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion (BLEVE)
bomb, and could have made a more lethal weapon with a nerve gas bomb
(with at the tech level of the story would have been a just a small
shop operation.)
Your horror at "private ownership of nukes" as a symptom of both your
place in history, and the fact that you are infected with the
"neutrons are evil and corrupt all the touch" dark fairy tale.
David Friedman
Bill Woods <wwo...@popd.ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> James Nicoll wrote:
>
> > In article <MPG.185db51c8...@news-server.bigpond.net.au>,
> > Allan Griffith <agri4042@REMOVE_THIS.bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> > >In article <asttpf$lqk$1...@panix3.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...
> > >> A Fire Upon the Deep
> > >>
> > >> Now sadly dated (The Galaxy has a net, just like the one in 1990,
> > >> but no web because that hadn't caught on yet) portions of this verged on
> > >> the interesting
> > >
> > >Surely one of the dullest SF novels ever written.
> >
> > No. Once you've read Jean Mark Gawron's _Algorithm_ you
> > attain understanding of dull.
>
> Can't remember the name, but there was a book written in the early
> '80s. A review said it was about an immortal hermit (with a cat)
> to whom nothing ever happened. The reviewer thought the book conveyed
> the impression of this situation *really* well. A friend had started
> to read it a couple of times but never got past page 50 or so.
I offer _Highway of Eternity_ by Simak. I've been part way through it
for a while.
Steve Coltrin
> In article <3DF2D2...@wizvax.net>, Sea Wasp <sea...@wizvax.net> wrote:
> >Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
> >>
> >> In article <3DF2C9...@wizvax.net>, sea...@wizvax.net says...
> >> > The natives don't just teleport, either; they use all the standard psi
> >> > powers -- telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, etc -- and one cute touch
> >>
> >> Are you sure about that? It's been a couple of years since I last read
> >> it, but I don't recall telepathy or pyrokinesis?
> >
> >
> > Possibly not. I thought they used something like that in destroying the
> >landing craft and skiff in the beginning. They certainly had
> >clairvoyance -- they could sense things at distance.
> >
> They could tport down fragments of the moon, which would
> arrive with considerable energy. This was, I think, considered
> impolite.
Only the Adepts could teleport from places they hadn't been, and I'm not
sure if they had that much range. Soldiers just teleported in pebbles
(or in the landing craft's case, *air*) from the opposite side of the
planet; since momentum was conserved, it arrived at bullet speed.
(And to do that, they had to first go on pilgramage.)
They also had a purely-combatant faculty which used small-scale teleportation
to scramble an opponent's innards, and a defensive faculty to prevent same.
--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org
On the plus side, people who GPL their code are generally socialists,
and they rarely have enough money to enforce in the courts, as a
result. - Terry Lambert
Steve Coltrin
> >> Funny thing is, if there is any place in Vinge's worlds where the
> >> "calculation problem" would go away, and central planning would work,
> >> it would be in the Beyond!
> >
> >and probably does :)
>
> It *may* be possible to do central planning for zones lower than one's
> own, but why would you want to?
So the lower zones will send you a constant supply of souls to eat, of
course.
Matthew Hunter
Probably because it was released in "True Names: And the opening of the
Cyberspace Frontier" shortly before the hardcover collection.
--
Matthew Hunter (mat...@infodancer.org)
Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt
Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp
Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp
GSV Three Minds in a Can
wonderful person Paul <phd...@hotmail.com> said
>As usual, this is all great information.
>I'm wondering if anyone has read the recent short story collection by
>Vinge? I was thinking about asking for it for Christmas, but I wasn't
>sure if it'd be worth it.
>
>Opinions appreciated,
If you mean _The collected stories of V.V._, then yes, I've just read it
.. mainly because Uk editions of _Across Realtime_ don't have _The
Ungoverned_ in, and because getting hold of the two original collections
_True Names and other dangers_ and _Threats and other promises_ is nigh
on impossible.
Well worth a read, IMO, even if you can only get it in over-large TB
format (hiss!). It is still missing the _True Names_ story, which is
supposed to be out in another new collection - everything else is there,
along with one new novella.
--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Joe Mason
> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 03:48:03 GMT, in rec.arts.sf.written,
> Joe Mason <j...@notcharles.ca> wrote:
>> In article <3DF555...@wizvax.net>, Sea Wasp wrote:
>>> Paul wrote:
>>>> As usual, this is all great information.
>>>> I'm wondering if anyone has read the recent short story collection by
>>>> Vinge? I was thinking about asking for it for Christmas, but I wasn't
>>>> sure if it'd be worth it.\
>>> I thought it was great, but I had never read ANY of his short stories
>>> before. If you've already got them, then there's only the one additional
>>> short as new material.
>> I second that - if you liked his novels, you'll probably like at least
>> enough of his short stories to be worth it. My only gripe was that it
>> didn't have True Names.
>
> Probably because it was released in "True Names: And the opening of the
> Cyberspace Frontier" shortly before the hardcover collection.
Well, yes, that's what the introduction says. (Paraphrasing, "This
included all of my published short fiction except for 'True Names',
which is in _True Names and Other Stories_.) Which actually makes it
more annoying - now I have to buy True Names, too, and get duplicates of
whatever's in that book.
I hate collections which overlap by more than a trivial amount.
Joe
Ben H
>
> One. The galactic net would be generating trillions of message a day,
> and the novel contained not even a hundred. That's a really tight
> selection.
>
> Two. They had GOOD automation and intellegent text processing in the
> Beyond. If you can built a good realtime working natural language
> translator, building a smart killfile would be trival.
>
> Three. It *is* like the net of 1992 for the bandwidth and availablity
> reasons we've already mentioned. USENET prior to 1992 mainly flowed
Also, what product could you advertise via spam that would make the
bandwidth costs worth it? Assuming computer security has advanced
enough that you can't steal other people's bandwidth.
I can't imagine that porn, herbal supplements etc. would be worth it.
The only thing I can think of that might be profitable is the Nigerian
419 scam.
Sea Wasp
No overlap between the two.
"True Names" holds no other stories. It's "True Names and Other
Dangers", IIRC, not "stories". It's the story "True Names" and a number
of scholarly articles on the issues raised by True Names.
Joel Baxter
> "True Names" holds no other stories. It's "True Names and Other
> Dangers", IIRC, not "stories". It's the story "True Names" and a number
> of scholarly articles on the issues raised by True Names.
There must be two different books with similar names, then. I have
_True Names and Other Dangers_ and it's a short story collection, which
includes (but is not limited to :-) ) "True Names". I can't check the
library right now, but ISFDB agrees:
http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/pwork.cgi?9e6e88
Richard Horton
> "True Names" holds no other stories. It's "True Names and Other
>Dangers", IIRC, not "stories". It's the story "True Names" and a number
>of scholarly articles on the issues raised by True Names.
It's true that there is an earlier collection by Vinge called _True
Names and Other Dangers_. That collection, however, overlaps almost
completely (except for the title story) with Vinge's Collected
Stories.
_True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier_ is the
collection of articles plus "True Names".
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.tangentonline.com)
Joe Mason
>> Well, yes, that's what the introduction says. (Paraphrasing, "This
>> included all of my published short fiction except for 'True Names',
>> which is in _True Names and Other Stories_.) Which actually makes it
>> more annoying - now I have to buy True Names, too, and get duplicates of
>> whatever's in that book.
>
> No overlap between the two.
>
> "True Names" holds no other stories. It's "True Names and Other
> Dangers", IIRC, not "stories". It's the story "True Names" and a number
> of scholarly articles on the issues raised by True Names.
Huh, interesting. I'll have to track that down.
Joe
Joe Mason
> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 13:17:21 GMT, Sea Wasp <sea...@wizvax.net> wrote:
>
>> "True Names" holds no other stories. It's "True Names and Other
>>Dangers", IIRC, not "stories". It's the story "True Names" and a number
>>of scholarly articles on the issues raised by True Names.
>
> It's true that there is an earlier collection by Vinge called _True
> Names and Other Dangers_. That collection, however, overlaps almost
> completely (except for the title story) with Vinge's Collected
> Stories.
>
> _True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier_ is the
> collection of articles plus "True Names".
Thanks for the clarification. I'll look for that one.
Joe
James Nicoll
Paul <phd...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>As usual, this is all great information.
>I'm wondering if anyone has read the recent short story collection by
>Vinge? I was thinking about asking for it for Christmas, but I wasn't
>sure if it'd be worth it.
It's fairly complete (Aside from _True Names_). I would say buy
it just for the overview it gives of his career.
--
"Repress the urge to sprout wings or self-ignite!...This man's an
Episcopalian!...They have definite views."
Pibgorn Oct 31/02
Jens Kilian
> The only thing I can think of that might be profitable is the Nigerian
> 419 scam.
And if you don't make 100% sure that no Power gets the message, last week's
User Friendly nicely illustrates your probable fate :-)
<URL:http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20021202&mode=classic>
--
mailto:j...@acm.org phone:+49-7031-464-7698 (TELNET 778-7698)
http://www.bawue.de/~jjk/ fax:+49-7031-464-7351
PGP: 06 04 1C 35 7B DC 1F 26 As the air to a bird, or the sea to a fish,
0x555DA8B5 BB A2 F0 66 77 75 E1 08 so is contempt to the contemptible. [Blake]
Aaron Bergman
wrote:
> "True Names" holds no other stories. It's "True Names and Other
> Dangers", IIRC, not "stories". It's the story "True Names" and a number
> of scholarly articles on the issues raised by True Names.
There was _True Names and Other Dangers_ (or something like that), but
the one you're talking about is _True Names and the Opening of the
Cyberspace Frontier_.
Aaron
--
Aaron Bergman
<http://www.princeton.edu/~abergman/>
<http://aleph.blogspot.com>
GSV Three Minds in a Can
person Joel Baxter <jba...@remove.this.neogeographica.com> said
>Sea Wasp wrote:
>> "True Names" holds no other stories. It's "True Names and Other
>>Dangers", IIRC, not "stories". It's the story "True Names" and a
>>number of scholarly articles on the issues raised by True Names.
>
>There must be two different books with similar names, then.
_True Names and other Dangers_ was the original V.V. short stories book,
way-back-when. The recent volume is not the same thing at all, although
it does have the title story in it. All the rest of _TN&OD_ is in the
_Collected stories of V.V._ (along with all of _Threats and Other
Promises_).
Nancy Lebovitz
If there's commerce at all, then it would be possible to sell information.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com 100 new slogans
I want to move to theory. Everything works in theory.
Nancy Lebovitz
Joe Mason <j...@notcharles.ca> wrote:
>In article <at2o84$er6$1...@oasis.ccit.arizona.edu>, Andrea Leistra wrote:
>> In article <asttpf$lqk$1...@panix3.panix.com>,
>>
>> [_Marooned in Realtime_]
>>
>>> Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology, mostly
>>>lifted from a Dixon book, as I recall. I had actually written Vinge off
>>>because of TPW and a novella sequel whose title I forget, but this was
>>>readable.
>>
>> collected with TPW and MiR in _Across Realtime_, and is truly dreadful.
>> It involves private ownership of nuclear weapons, portrayed as a Very
>> Good Thing, and that's all I remember about it.
>
I'd rate it as in between. The privately owned nukes didn't do any
harm, and turned out to be useful in an emergency.
Matt Austern
> In article <asttpf$lqk$1...@panix3.panix.com>,
> James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> [_Marooned in Realtime_]
>
> > Well, I liked the mystery and I liked the future ecology, mostly
> >lifted from a Dixon book, as I recall. I had actually written Vinge off
> >because of TPW and a novella sequel whose title I forget, but this was
> >readable.
>
> The novella you're thinking of is probably _The Ungoverned_, which is
> collected with TPW and MiR in _Across Realtime_, and is truly dreadful.
> It involves private ownership of nuclear weapons, portrayed as a Very
> Good Thing, and that's all I remember about it.
Mostly, what I remember about it is that it turns some interesting
backstory from _Marooned in Realtime_ into a very uninteresting story.
I'd much rather just reread _Marooned in Realtime_ (an underrated
book) and pick up the backstory mysefl.
Andrea Leistra
Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>alei...@bast.u.arizona.edu (Andrea Leistra) writes:
>Your horror at "private ownership of nukes" as a symptom of both your
>place in history, and the fact that you are infected with the
>"neutrons are evil and corrupt all the touch" dark fairy tale.
Er, no.
I have a degree in physics. I think nuclear power is just fine, and the
elimination of the word "nuclear" from the name of MRI to be totally
idiotic.
I'd be equally unhappy with private ownership of conventional weaponry
of equivalent destructive power.
--
Andrea Leistra
Andrea Leistra
>> included all of my published short fiction except for 'True Names',
>> which is in _True Names and Other Stories_.) Which actually makes it
>> more annoying - now I have to buy True Names, too, and get duplicates of
>> whatever's in that book.
>
> No overlap between the two.
>
> "True Names" holds no other stories. It's "True Names and Other
>Dangers", IIRC, not "stories". It's the story "True Names" and a number
>of scholarly articles on the issues raised by True Names.
Not quite.
The old and difficult-to-find Vinge collection is _True Names...and
Other Dangers_. In addition to "True Names", it contains "Bookworm,
Run!", "Long Shot", "The Peddler's Apprentice", and "The Ungoverned".
The more recent story + essays book is _True Names and the Opening
of the Cyberspace Frontier_. The only Vinge story in it is "True
Names".
For the sake of completeness, the _other_ old and difficult-to-find
Vinge collection is _Threats and Other Promises_. It contains
"Apartness", "The Blabber", "Conquest by Default", "Gemstone", "Just
Peace", "Original Sin", and "The Whirligig of Time".
There are three or four stories in _The Collected Stories of Vernor
Vinge_ that are not in any other Vinge collection. There are no stories
in the older Vinge collection that are not in either the new one or
_True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier_. (It is somewhat
odd that the collected stories don't include Vinge's best-known story,
but I understand the reason.) Since the cheapest copy of _TN and Other
Dangers_ is $20 on bookfinder, getting _TN and the Opening..._ is probably
both the easiest and the cheapest way of reading "True Names".
--
Andrea Leistra
Matt Austern
> There are three or four stories in _The Collected Stories of Vernor
> Vinge_ that are not in any other Vinge collection. There are no stories
> in the older Vinge collection that are not in either the new one or
> _True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier_. (It is somewhat
> odd that the collected stories don't include Vinge's best-known story,
> but I understand the reason.) Since the cheapest copy of _TN and Other
> Dangers_ is $20 on bookfinder, getting _TN and the Opening..._ is probably
> both the easiest and the cheapest way of reading "True Names".
Unless, of course, you already have a copy of _True Names and Other
Dangers_. I'd hoped that I could buy a single hardback collection and
get rid of my two paperbacks collections. Sigh.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Yes, but that's not the same as _True Names and the Opening of the
Cyberspace Frontier_, which is in print, and just the story "True Names"
and a bunch of essays and stories from the early days of the Web.
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in
order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond
the stars to eat our brains." -Charlie Stross, _The Concrete Jungle_
James Nicoll
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes <kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote:
>Tue, 10 Dec 2002 12:41:00 GMT, Joe Mason <j...@notcharles.ca>:
>> In article <slrnavbebg.9nv...@infodancer.org>, Matthew Hunter wrote:
>>> Probably because it was released in "True Names: And the opening of the
>>> Cyberspace Frontier" shortly before the hardcover collection.
>> Well, yes, that's what the introduction says. (Paraphrasing, "This
>> included all of my published short fiction except for 'True Names',
>> which is in _True Names and Other Stories_.) Which actually makes it
>> more annoying - now I have to buy True Names, too, and get duplicates of
>> whatever's in that book.
>> I hate collections which overlap by more than a trivial amount.
>
> Yes, but that's not the same as _True Names and the Opening of the
>Cyberspace Frontier_, which is in print, and just the story "True Names"
>and a bunch of essays and stories from the early days of the Web.
>
OK, confusing and similar names for anthologies is one thing
that can irk readers (Disclaimer: sometime one story by an author is
so well known it will be used as the title over and over).
Another irritating trick is to publish a collection that soon
goes out of print and then reprint only some of the stories elsewhere.
I spent years looking for a copy of _Shape of Space_ before Niven
addressed the problem with, I think, _Convergent Series_. The problem
may have been that SoS (which I have never seen) was a mixed Known
Space/Other Setting collection and after the early 1970s KS stories
were popular enough to be put into dedicated anthologies.
There's also what I think of as The Laumer Effect but only
because I am a geezer who collected him in the 1970s. This trick
involves overlapping anthologies each with one or two unique stories,
brought out over a short period of time. Grrr and hisss I say. The
recent Baen collections do not do this.