_Deepness in the Sky_ comments
Kent Matthew Peterson
This may be partially the result of expectations that were raised
too high (same thing that happened with Babylon 5).
I'm somewhat disappointed.
Spoilers below.
It's a good story, that's for sure. A little slow in places - parts
of the narration with the Spiders, I found myself simply skipping over
a page or so at a time - just scanning it to make sure nothing unexpected
happened. Ok. This isn't big, I know some people had the same complaint
about the scenes with the Tines in _A Fire Upon the Deep_. And anyway, I
like the Spiders (though they're a bit too human for my tastes at times).
I didn't like the wait-it-out part of the scenario - too long, too quiet.
Do human beings really have that much patience? And the 'counterlurk'
wasn't too plausible, IMO - there should have been *some* indication,
to the reader at least, that something of the sort was going on, far
earlier.
Also, Vinge seems to like having the really evil characters manipulate
the innocent, good characters into loving them.
What bugs me - what REALLY bugs me - is the inconsistencies with
_A Fire Upon the Deep_. In _Deepness_, Pham is several hundred
years old. He's a legend on a level with Napoleon or MacArthur -
the great conqueror, universally admired, who founded the modern
Qeng Ho. He ends the story by proposing the scheme that (we know)
will eventually get him picked up by a Beyond probe ship.
Yet early in chapter 7 of aFUtD, he says a few things - specifcally,
"I know I don't look it, but I'm sixty-seven years old subjective."
And later: "I was almost the perfect skipper. Almost. I always
wanted to see what was beyond the space we had good records on.
Every time I got really rich, so rich I could launch my own subfleet
- I'd take some crazy chance and lose everything. I was the yo-yo
of the Fleet. One run I'd be captain of five, the next I'd be
pulling maintenance programming on some damn container ship.
Given how time stretches out with sublight commerce, there were
whole generations who thought I was a legendary genius - and
others who used my name as a synonym for goofball."
And in the next paragraph: "... There was this captain of twenty
who was crazier than I ... Anyway, this guy was willing to bet
*everything* on the sort of thing normal folks would argue about
over beer. He called his ship the, um, it translates as something
like 'wild witless bird' - that gives you the idea about him. He
figured there must be some really high-tech civilizations somewhere
in the universe. ..."
This is not the same Pham Nuwen.
Now, these things can be explained by saying that Pham in aFUtD was
partially pieced together from other people and had some wrong
memories. But is such an explanation really necessary? WHY is it
necessary? Why would it not have been possible to make him a little
less of a titanic figure, a little more interesting? It is strongly
implied in various ways in aFUtD that Pham's memories are indeed
accurate (the final scene with the ghost of Old One, near the end,
for instance). What cost would there have been to the story in
aDitS to make it fit better with the story in aFUtD? As far as I
can see, just the interaction with Tomas Nau and Ezr Vinh would have
been seriously affected - and the basic awe in both of those could
have been retained, with suitable modifications to the history. It
would have allowed interactions with Pham far more complex and
interesting than simple hero-worship. It could have made the
flashbacks far more interesting, as well.
The antigravity thing is also problematic. Antigravity fabric at
Relay, in the Middle Beyond, is described as wearing out in about
a day, and costing massively. Bringing high-level stuff into a
lower zone of thought results in it decomposing or melting or
SOMETHING that doesn't leave anything useful behind (except where
specifically designed for the purpose, like the Skrodes or the
'bottom feeder' ships). So how can the antigravity function at all?
Is this something totally new that the entire Beyond has missed, or
that only functions in the Slow Zone?
Anyway, I just think the Pham described in aFUtD is a far more
interesting person, and if *that* had been the character in aDitS, it
would have made the whole book far better. Not that it was bad - as
a stand-alone, it's quite good. But it could have been better.
Coyu
>Date: Tue, Mar 2, 1999 09:00 EST
>Spoilers below.
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>Now, these things can be explained by saying that Pham in aFUtD was
>partially pieced together from other people and had some wrong
>memories. But is such an explanation really necessary? WHY is it
>necessary? Why would it not have been possible to make him a little
>less of a titanic figure, a little more interesting? It is strongly
>implied in various ways in aFUtD that Pham's memories are indeed
>accurate (the final scene with the ghost of Old One, near the end,
>for instance).
I think that Vernor Vinge knew exactly what he was doing.
How easy it would have been, for instance, to turn Cindi into the great
passion of Pham's life, to better fit the backstory in aFutD. As it is, she
gets what, three paragraphs? but we learn the deep symbolic resonance
she has to Pham - which is exactly the sort of thing to survive his later
damage.
And I thought that this:
>There was this captain of twenty
>who was crazier than I ... Anyway, this guy was willing to bet
>*everything* on the sort of thing normal folks would argue about
>over beer.
was a distorted reference to Sammy Park.
>WHY is it necessary?
Because Vinge likes subtlety?
Look at Pham Nuwen's insight into the Blight as a parasite in _time_.
Now we know exactly _where_ he got that idea from.
I think VV has had the essentials of these books mapped out for
a long time, and is in near-perfect control of his art.
>The antigravity thing is also problematic.
Let's look at the cases where Beyond materials have worked
in the Slow Zone - at the end of aFutD, where the sun goes out... hm...
in 'The Blabber' - not canon, yet - where the agrav works in the Slow
Zone, but wears out in a few years, and the ansible dims the sun
by one percent... hm...
And then there's Arachna, where the entire star turns off for 250 years
at a time, for no reason apparent to our astrophysics. Hm!
>So how can the antigravity function at all?
>Is this something totally new that the entire Beyond has missed, or
>that only functions in the Slow Zone?
I think Vinge is playing by consistent rules.
Kent Matthew Peterson
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>>Now, these things can be explained by saying that Pham in aFUtD was
>>partially pieced together from other people and had some wrong
>>memories. But is such an explanation really necessary? WHY is it
>>necessary? Why would it not have been possible to make him a little
>>less of a titanic figure, a little more interesting? It is strongly
>>implied in various ways in aFUtD that Pham's memories are indeed
>>accurate (the final scene with the ghost of Old One, near the end,
>>for instance).
>
>I think that Vernor Vinge knew exactly what he was doing.
>How easy it would have been, for instance, to turn Cindi into the great
>passion of Pham's life, to better fit the backstory in aFutD. As it is, she
>gets what, three paragraphs? but we learn the deep symbolic resonance
>she has to Pham - which is exactly the sort of thing to survive his later
>damage.
This is completely irrelevant. Cindi does not get mentioned,
anywhere, in aFUtD. I'm talking about the difference between
the superhero Pham in _Deepness_ and the yo-yo Pham in _Fire_.
The yo-yo makes for a better character.
>And I thought that this:
>
>>There was this captain of twenty
>>who was crazier than I ... Anyway, this guy was willing to bet
>>*everything* on the sort of thing normal folks would argue about
>>over beer.
>
>was a distorted reference to Sammy Park.
Why? Park's not crazy. He's a realistic, hard-headed sort of
guy. A successful businessman. It would never occur to him to
propose such a wild scheme. Absolutely no connection to the
character described above.
>>WHY is it necessary?
>
>Because Vinge likes subtlety?
>
>Look at Pham Nuwen's insight into the Blight as a parasite in _time_.
>Now we know exactly _where_ he got that idea from.
Huh? What does lurking around in time have to do with Pham
Nuwen not being the same character from book to book?
>I think VV has had the essentials of these books mapped out for
>a long time, and is in near-perfect control of his art.
Considering you didn't bother responding to two of my three
main points, I have trouble seeing how you can make that
assertion.
>>The antigravity thing is also problematic.
>
>Let's look at the cases where Beyond materials have worked
>in the Slow Zone - at the end of aFutD, where the sun goes out... hm...
>in 'The Blabber' - not canon, yet - where the agrav works in the Slow
>Zone, but wears out in a few years, and the ansible dims the sun
>by one percent... hm...
Never read (or heard of) 'The Blabber', but cases where Beyond
materials *do* work in the Slow Zone are all specially designed
to do so. Beyond materials *not* specially designed that way
stop functioning. Period.
And for OnOff, there's no evidence it's not a natural phenomenon.
>I think Vinge is playing by consistent rules.
I think you're just making stuff up without thinking about it.
Steve Coltrin
> In article <19990302100823...@ng100.aol.com>,
> Coyu <co...@aol.com> wrote:
> >I think that Vernor Vinge knew exactly what he was doing.
> >How easy it would have been, for instance, to turn Cindi into the great
> >passion of Pham's life, to better fit the backstory in aFutD. As it is, she
> >gets what, three paragraphs? but we learn the deep symbolic resonance
> >she has to Pham - which is exactly the sort of thing to survive his later
> >damage.
>
> This is completely irrelevant. Cindi does not get mentioned,
> anywhere, in aFUtD.
Chapter 22:
"My own memories?" Scattered amid the
unintelligible he would stumble on them: himself
at five years, sitting on the straw in the great
hall, alert for the appearance of any adult;
royals were not supposed to play in the filth. Ten
years later, making love to Cindi for the first
time. A year after that, seeing his first flying
machine, the orbital ferry that landed on his
father's parade field. The decades aspace. "Yes,
the Qeng Ho. Pham Nuwen, the great Trader of the
Slowness. All the memories are still there. And
for all I know, it's all the Old One's lie, an
afternoon's fraud to fool the Relayers."
Chapter 41:
Somewhere barriers slipped aside, the final
failing of Old One's control, or His final gift.
It did not matter which now, for whatever the
ghost said, the truth was obvious to Pham Nuwen
and he would not be denied:
Canberra, Cindi, the centuries avoyaging with
Qeng Ho, the final flight of the Wild Goose. It
was all real.
-spc
Rodrick Su
Kent Matthew Peterson <km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>In article <19990302100823...@ng100.aol.com>,
>Coyu <co...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Spoilers below.
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>>>Now, these things can be explained by saying that Pham in aFUtD was
>>>partially pieced together from other people and had some wrong
>>>memories. But is such an explanation really necessary? WHY is it
>>>necessary? Why would it not have been possible to make him a little
>>>less of a titanic figure, a little more interesting? It is strongly
>>>implied in various ways in aFUtD that Pham's memories are indeed
>>>accurate (the final scene with the ghost of Old One, near the end,
>>>for instance).
>>
>>How easy it would have been, for instance, to turn Cindi into the great
>>passion of Pham's life, to better fit the backstory in aFutD. As it is, she
>>gets what, three paragraphs? but we learn the deep symbolic resonance
>>she has to Pham - which is exactly the sort of thing to survive his later
>>damage.
>
>This is completely irrelevant. Cindi does not get mentioned,
>the superhero Pham in _Deepness_ and the yo-yo Pham in _Fire_.
>The yo-yo makes for a better character.
Hum. Cindi got mention twice in aFUtD. I have the CD-ROM version of the story
and she is mentioned twice, the second time when he realize that his memories
are indeed valid, just before he dies.
--
[ Rodrick Su [ ]
[ r...@tigana.com [ Life is a work in progress ]
Kent Matthew Peterson
Steve Coltrin <spco...@dillinger-2.io.com> wrote:
>km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU (Kent Matthew Peterson) writes:
>
>> Coyu <co...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>
>> >I think that Vernor Vinge knew exactly what he was doing.
>> >How easy it would have been, for instance, to turn Cindi into the great
>> >passion of Pham's life, to better fit the backstory in aFutD. As it is, she
>> >gets what, three paragraphs? but we learn the deep symbolic resonance
>> >she has to Pham - which is exactly the sort of thing to survive his later
>> >damage.
>>
>> This is completely irrelevant. Cindi does not get mentioned,
>> anywhere, in aFUtD.
>
>
> "My own memories?" Scattered amid the
> unintelligible he would stumble on them: himself
> at five years, sitting on the straw in the great
> hall, alert for the appearance of any adult;
> royals were not supposed to play in the filth. Ten
> years later, making love to Cindi for the first
>
>Chapter 41:
>
<snip>
> Canberra, Cindi, the centuries avoyaging with
> Qeng Ho, the final flight of the Wild Goose. It
> was all real.
Oops. Ok. But that only makes my other points all the more
valid. If such a minor thing as this - there isn't even any
context to where/when he knows this girl, in aFUtD - can get
transferred ok, why did he screw up the important points?
Coyu
>Oops. Ok. But that only makes my other points all the more
>valid. If such a minor thing as this - there isn't even any
>context to where/when he knows this girl, in aFUtD - can get
>transferred ok, why did he screw up the important points?
Why, against all evidence to the contrary, do you think Vernor Vinge
is too indifferent or ignorant to care about continuity? Remember,
he _annotated_ aFutD for CD-ROM; he's been working on these
books since the late 80s.
The easier hypothesis is, he didn't, and _your_ perceptions are flawed.
HTH!
Lydia Nickerson
>Spoilers below.
>I didn't like the wait-it-out part of the scenario - too long, too quiet.
>Do human beings really have that much patience? And the 'counterlurk'
>wasn't too plausible, IMO - there should have been *some* indication,
>to the reader at least, that something of the sort was going on, far
>earlier.
Interesting. I thought that the wait it out part was brilliant, in part
because it managed to evoke both tedium and tension. Especially given the
nature of the watches, I think people really are that patient. Qiwi lives
through more of it than most people, but she's not excercising patience so
much as working very, very hard to make sure everyone survives. One of
the things I think Vinge is doing by keeping the behind the scenes stuff
largely behind the scenes is to have the reader experience what it would
be like to wait that long for something that uncertain. There's a
swiftness and a slowness to the changes that I found believable, and
unpredictable. It's ever so nice to read something that doesn't follow my
ideas of the obvious, but still seems to be completely logical and in
keeping with the universe. Vinge's bending of the narrative structure for
that purpose pleases me.
As for the counterlurk, there is one hint of it. Pham frets about how it
is that Anne Reynolt can guess at his uses of the localizers because he
has been very careful not to mess with the ziphead processing. This
anomaly is actually the counter-lurk, and Pham provides a wonderful
diversion from the truth, all unknowing. I love the way people's actions
have unintended consequences. This is true in aFUtD, too.
>Also, Vinge seems to like having the really evil characters manipulate
>the innocent, good characters into loving them.
Nau, not Rister. And it is that, more than anything else, which causes me
to think of Nau as more evil than Rister, though Rister's homicidal use of
zipheads is another horrifying evil. I greatly appreciate the skill
required to create a character which is well known but for which the
reader cannot generate much empathy. This is a lot more difficult to do
than it seems, especially if you want the evil person to have any depth.
Most people think that they're the good guy in their own private movie,
and if you portray them as well-rounded, that often causes sympathy from
me as a reader. Nau I never managed to have sympathy for, even though Nau
clearly thought of himself as the hero. The only other villain I can
think of who the author explored in detail but for whom I could never
maintain any sympathy is Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in =Lolita=.
>What bugs me - what REALLY bugs me - is the inconsistencies with
>_A Fire Upon the Deep_. In _Deepness_, Pham is several hundred
>years old. He's a legend on a level with Napoleon or MacArthur -
>the great conqueror, universally admired, who founded the modern
>Qeng Ho. He ends the story by proposing the scheme that (we know)
>will eventually get him picked up by a Beyond probe ship.
>Yet early in chapter 7 of aFUtD, he says a few things - specifcally,
>"I know I don't look it, but I'm sixty-seven years old subjective."
This seems to me to be trivial. If I had to explain it, I would suggest a
lie or partial brain-fry.
>And later: "I was almost the perfect skipper. Almost. I always
>wanted to see what was beyond the space we had good records on.
>Every time I got really rich, so rich I could launch my own subfleet
>- I'd take some crazy chance and lose everything. I was the yo-yo
>of the Fleet. One run I'd be captain of five, the next I'd be
>pulling maintenance programming on some damn container ship.
>Given how time stretches out with sublight commerce, there were
>whole generations who thought I was a legendary genius - and
>others who used my name as a synonym for goofball."
>And in the next paragraph: "... There was this captain of twenty
>who was crazier than I ... Anyway, this guy was willing to bet
>*everything* on the sort of thing normal folks would argue about
>over beer. He called his ship the, um, it translates as something
>like 'wild witless bird' - that gives you the idea about him. He
>figured there must be some really high-tech civilizations somewhere
>in the universe. ..."
>This is not the same Pham Nuwen.
No, this is how Pham Nuwen saw himself. How he saw himself and how others
saw him appear to be very different things, but this can't be a surprise,
given how odd and broad a life Pham lived. I see nothing actually
inconsistent here, I see different points of view.
>Now, these things can be explained by saying that Pham in aFUtD was
>partially pieced together from other people and had some wrong
>memories. But is such an explanation really necessary? WHY is it
>necessary? Why would it not have been possible to make him a little
>less of a titanic figure, a little more interesting? It is strongly
>implied in various ways in aFUtD that Pham's memories are indeed
>accurate (the final scene with the ghost of Old One, near the end,
>for instance). What cost would there have been to the story in
>aDitS to make it fit better with the story in aFUtD? As far as I
>can see, just the interaction with Tomas Nau and Ezr Vinh would have
>been seriously affected - and the basic awe in both of those could
>have been retained, with suitable modifications to the history. It
>would have allowed interactions with Pham far more complex and
>interesting than simple hero-worship. It could have made the
>flashbacks far more interesting, as well.
Again, I think that Pham doesn't see himself in the same way as others do.
I think that he sees an essential failure where others see unalloyed
triumph. And Pham of aFUtD is doing extensive salesmanship and a number
of diversionary tactics to keep people from noticing his weak spots. Pham
is also suffering from significant memory loss in aFUtD, which also
explains much of this. One of the things that characterizes Pham in aFUtD
is that odd mixture of grandeur and loss, power and vulnerability. He
knows so much, and yet he's completely unprepared for the Beyond. By
making it all smoother, I think you lose authenticity. My life story as
told at different times in the last ten years has been remarkably
different, indeed contradictory, but I told the truth each time. People's
actual histories are not easily condensible. Pham strikes me as more real
and less fictional because of these odd lurches.
>The antigravity thing is also problematic. Antigravity fabric at
>Relay, in the Middle Beyond, is described as wearing out in about
>a day, and costing massively. Bringing high-level stuff into a
>lower zone of thought results in it decomposing or melting or
>SOMETHING that doesn't leave anything useful behind (except where
>specifically designed for the purpose, like the Skrodes or the
>'bottom feeder' ships). So how can the antigravity function at all?
>Is this something totally new that the entire Beyond has missed, or
>that only functions in the Slow Zone?
My theory is that OnOff was a counter in a Transcendant game, and was
launched from the Transcend or the High Beyond into the center of the
galaxy for some incomprehensible reason. The cavorite is the remnant of a
Transcendant product, who knows what. The Powers were capable of making
things that worked in the low Beyond, and maybe even the Slow Zone.
Perhaps they can make something that still has some arcane powers in the
Unthinking Depths. I think the excessive carbon forms are probably
left-overs from a Transcendant or High Beyond process or factory. I
suspect the spiders of having evolved from a Transcendant bilogical
product during the long long travel down to the unthinking depths and now
back in the Slow Zone.
--
----
Lydia Nickerson ly...@ddb.com
Christopher K Davis
> This may be partially the result of expectations that were raised
> too high (same thing that happened with Babylon 5).
> I'm somewhat disappointed.
> Spoilers below.
> I didn't like the wait-it-out part of the scenario - too long, too quiet.
> Do human beings really have that much patience?
Human beings who already have suspended animation, good medical care,
and *sublight star travel*? Yeah. The ones who didn't would never have
joined either expedition.
> And the 'counterlurk' wasn't too plausible, IMO - there should have
> been *some* indication, to the reader at least, that something of the
> sort was going on, far earlier.
Read more carefully; the foreshadowing is there. (Damn, I want a
greppable copy of this; I'm spoiled by that CD-ROM _AFutD_.) Ah, here
it is, page 414:
He recognized Underhill's shaky penmanship in one title: "Videomancy
for High Payload Steganography."
When I read that, a light went on. Sherk was up to something; he hadn't
lost it. I wasn't sure exactly *how much* counterlurk was going on, but
something was definitely foreshadowed. (I just thought it was a totally
indigenous effort to work around the compromised crypto so that Sherk,
Victory, and the Lighthills could get their jobs done without tipping
off the Emergents.)
The translator fight, too, more in hindsight than foresight--but I bet
if I reread with the clues in mind I'll spot more of them. Remember,
Focused humans are, well, focused on their Focus; anything or anyone
that might get in the way of that is an enemy. Obviously destroying the
Spiders that you've been listening to and empathizing with (due to the
nature of the translation process going through a *human* brain rather
than "emotionless AIs") is going to ruin your Focus object.
> The antigravity thing is also problematic. Antigravity fabric at
> Relay, in the Middle Beyond, is described as wearing out in about
> a day, and costing massively. Bringing high-level stuff into a
> lower zone of thought results in it decomposing or melting or
> SOMETHING that doesn't leave anything useful behind (except where
> specifically designed for the purpose, like the Skrodes or the
> 'bottom feeder' ships). So how can the antigravity function at
> all? Is this something totally new that the entire Beyond has
> missed, or that only functions in the Slow Zone?
I'm with the other poster on this thread (coyu); you can apparently play
some real games with zonographics as long as you have the ultrasupertech to
do it and a sun to power it. The ansible in "The Blabber", Countermeasure,
and cavorite are all Zone Control Mechanisms of some sort; they just use
stellar objects instead of AA batteries. Vinge has something going on
there, behind the scenes, that we poor readers can only guess at.
Someone or Something builds ZCMs. Powers beyond the Powers.
There are, as increasingly common for Vinge, some lovely turns of word;
the sheer evocativeness of things like "reality graphics" in _AFutD_ or
"videomancy" in _ADitS_ are joined by other great bits. When, exactly,
do we first see the Emergent civilization referred to as...the Emergency?
(Where's my dead tree grepper when I need it?)
--
Christopher Davis * <ckd...@ckdhr.com> * <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/ckd/>
Put location information in your DNS! <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/>
John S. Novak, III
<km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>Spoilers below.
>It's a good story, that's for sure. A little slow in places - parts
>of the narration with the Spiders, I found myself simply skipping over
>a page or so at a time - just scanning it to make sure nothing unexpected
>happened. Ok. This isn't big, I know some people had the same complaint
>about the scenes with the Tines in _A Fire Upon the Deep_. And anyway, I
>like the Spiders (though they're a bit too human for my tastes at times).
>I didn't like the wait-it-out part of the scenario - too long, too quiet.
>Do human beings really have that much patience? And the 'counterlurk'
>wasn't too plausible, IMO - there should have been *some* indication,
>to the reader at least, that something of the sort was going on, far
>earlier.
What, you mean the fact that the Spiders knew something was going on?
There were indications. First and foremost, if you lost faith in
Sherkaner, well, you wouldn't see most of them. Sherkaner obviously
knew something was up. It was fairly clear that his family was in on
something, too, with a paranoia so extreme that they wouldn't even let
Hrunkner in, because they suspected their own spymaster of being the
spy. You'd have to believe the Spiders were total idiots to buy the
"Lurksalot" argument. And at one point (not oo long after I was
musing over the possibility of writing a story where crypto was treated
correctly...) they actually mentioned the word "steganography" in
conjunction with Sherk's videomancy.
>What bugs me - what REALLY bugs me - is the inconsistencies with
>_A Fire Upon the Deep_.
[...]
>And in the next paragraph: "... There was this captain of twenty
>who was crazier than I ... Anyway, this guy was willing to bet
>*everything* on the sort of thing normal folks would argue about
>over beer. He called his ship the, um, it translates as something
>like 'wild witless bird' - that gives you the idea about him. He
>figured there must be some really high-tech civilizations somewhere
>in the universe. ..."
How can you not read _that_ one without feeling a profound irony?
The others are debatable, but I can easily read them as Pham being
cagey and not wanting to give much away to someone he oesn't know in a
realm he doesn't comprehend, or as his trying to brag down, as it
were.
The Pham of Deepness strikes me as paranoid on about the same level as
Corwin of Amber.
>The antigravity thing is also problematic. Antigravity fabric at
>Relay, in the Middle Beyond, is described as wearing out in about
>a day, and costing massively. Bringing high-level stuff into a
>lower zone of thought results in it decomposing or melting or
>SOMETHING that doesn't leave anything useful behind (except where
>specifically designed for the purpose, like the Skrodes or the
>'bottom feeder' ships). So how can the antigravity function at all?
>Is this something totally new that the entire Beyond has missed, or
>that only functions in the Slow Zone?
We don't know how high out of the Core OnOff goes, but we know it goes
pretty damned far. Easily into the Beyond, probably into the High
Beyond and perhaps even into the low Transcend. Now, if you were
staying in such a system for whatever reasons, would you not design
your stuff to last as long as it possibly could?
--
John S. Novak, III j...@concentric.net
The Humblest Man on the Net
John S. Novak, III
<km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>This is completely irrelevant. Cindi does not get mentioned,
>anywhere, in aFUtD. I'm talking about the difference between
>the superhero Pham in _Deepness_ and the yo-yo Pham in _Fire_.
>The yo-yo makes for a better character.
Entirely subjective.
Pham the great hero is perfectly interesting to me, simply because he
is also (initially) terribly flawed. Sometimes, I enjoy kicking back
and reading about Great Men doing Great Things.
>Never read (or heard of) 'The Blabber', but cases where Beyond
>materials *do* work in the Slow Zone are all specially designed
>to do so. Beyond materials *not* specially designed that way
>stop functioning. Period.
What's your point?
>And for OnOff, there's no evidence it's not a natural phenomenon.
Other than the Focussed physicist's fixation on the idea that it is a
broken square wave generator or some similar artifact. That the
Emergents assume he's off his rocker is simply a nice piece of irony--
it was that same Focussed who picked out the fact that the thing has
an eccentric Galactic orbit and came up with a theory that explained
perfectly (though was not described) the weird-assed construction of
the system itself (one planet, little debris except for the big
diamond chunks.)
John S. Novak, III
>(the usual spoilers.)
>There is another hint, which I took as slightly sloppy writing until
>I reached the end of the book. At one point, the translators are
>complaining about the lag to Arachna. Since, as far as I can tell,
>the translation and the active network monitoring were being done
>by different sets of people (er, zipheads), Trixia et al. shouldn't
>have been in two-way communication with the planet, and so shouldn't
>have experienced the lag.
D'oh!
Missed that!
John S. Novak, III
>Kent Matthew Peterson <km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU> writes:
>> Spoilers below.
>Read more carefully; the foreshadowing is there. (Damn, I want a
>greppable copy of this; I'm spoiled by that CD-ROM _AFutD_.) Ah, here
>it is, page 414:
> He recognized Underhill's shaky penmanship in one title: "Videomancy
> for High Payload Steganography."
But that one, I did catch...
It was very subtle, but anyone who knows what steganography is off the
top of their head should have caught that one immediately. The
boggling thing is, there's another point where Ritser thinks something
along the lines of, "If he didn't know better, he'd think this
videomancy stuff was a cover for a steganography routine."
Even the outright psychopath was pretty damned sharp.
>I'm with the other poster on this thread (coyu); you can apparently play
>some real games with zonographics as long as you have the ultrasupertech to
>do it and a sun to power it. The ansible in "The Blabber", Countermeasure,
>and cavorite are all Zone Control Mechanisms of some sort; they just use
>stellar objects instead of AA batteries. Vinge has something going on
>there, behind the scenes, that we poor readers can only guess at.
It's enough to make one speculate about, oh, say, a sequel?
>There are, as increasingly common for Vinge, some lovely turns of word;
>the sheer evocativeness of things like "reality graphics" in _AFutD_ or
>"videomancy" in _ADitS_ are joined by other great bits.
Videomancy may be my favorite (non-obscene) word of 1999.
> When, exactly,
>do we first see the Emergent civilization referred to as...the Emergency?
Heh.
See, I watch too much ER on television, and am used to the characters
therein referring to themselves as "Emergent Care Specialists" or
whatnot when trying to puff up their titles.
Emergent <-> Emergency I sort of expected. I mean, what better way to
maintain a tyranny than to live in a state of total, constant
emergency? Which reminds me... If Videomancy is my favorite word,
"Total Disaster Management" may be my favorite phrase. Heading for a
staff meeting near you.
Curtis Shenton
p...@panix.com says...
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> Christopher K Davis <ckd-...@ckdhr.com> wrote in <w4emn7a2d4.fsf@kline-
> station.ckdhr.com>:
>
> >There are, as increasingly common for Vinge, some lovely turns of word;
> >the sheer evocativeness of things like "reality graphics" in _AFutD_ or
> >do we first see the Emergent civilization referred to as...the
> >Emergency?
>
> happens, either, but I just about fell out of my chair.
>
>
It's amazing how much of a difference that made. I
don't remember the exact passage myself but I do
remember sitting there while a lot of information got
resorted in my mind. One word let me extrapolate so
much more about the Emergents. Vinge is every bit as
devious as Pham Nuwen is.
P Nielsen Hayden
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Christopher K Davis <ckd-...@ckdhr.com> wrote in <w4emn7a2d4.fsf@kline-
station.ckdhr.com>:
>There are, as increasingly common for Vinge, some lovely turns of word;
>the sheer evocativeness of things like "reality graphics" in _AFutD_ or
>"videomancy" in _ADitS_ are joined by other great bits. When, exactly,
>do we first see the Emergent civilization referred to as...the
>Emergency?
I absolutely adored this last bit. I don't remember exactly where it first
happens, either, but I just about fell out of my chair.
--
Patrick Nielsen Hayden : p...@panix.com : http://www.panix.com/~pnh
Wim Lewis
In article <lydy.92...@gw.ddb.com>, Lydia Nickerson <ly...@ddb.com> wrote:
>As for the counterlurk, there is one hint of it.
There is another hint, which I took as slightly sloppy writing until
I reached the end of the book. At one point, the translators are
complaining about the lag to Arachna. Since, as far as I can tell,
the translation and the active network monitoring were being done
by different sets of people (er, zipheads), Trixia et al. shouldn't
have been in two-way communication with the planet, and so shouldn't
have experienced the lag.
--
Wim Lewis * wi...@hhhh.org * Seattle, WA, USA
Lydia Nickerson
Me three. It was one of those crystal moments.
Lydia Nickerson
>On 2 Mar 1999 14:00:29 GMT, Kent Matthew Peterson
><km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>>Spoilers below.
>
>"Lurksalot" argument. And at one point (not oo long after I was
>musing over the possibility of writing a story where crypto was treated
>correctly...) they actually mentioned the word "steganography" in
>conjunction with Sherk's videomancy.
I must have blipped over that word because I didn't know what it meant.
What does it mean?
>We don't know how high out of the Core OnOff goes, but we know it goes
>pretty damned far. Easily into the Beyond, probably into the High
>Beyond and perhaps even into the low Transcend. Now, if you were
>staying in such a system for whatever reasons, would you not design
>your stuff to last as long as it possibly could?
I agree that OnOff is from the Beyond or the Transcend, but why do you
think the spiders were once residents of those realms? Weren't the fossil
records mixed in with the anomalous diamond layers and stuff?
Christopher K Davis
> (the usual spoilers.)
> In article <lydy.92...@gw.ddb.com>, Lydia Nickerson <ly...@ddb.com> wrote:
>> As for the counterlurk, there is one hint of it.
> There is another hint, which I took as slightly sloppy writing until
> I reached the end of the book. At one point, the translators are
> complaining about the lag to Arachna. Since, as far as I can tell,
> the translation and the active network monitoring were being done
> by different sets of people (er, zipheads), Trixia et al. shouldn't
> have been in two-way communication with the planet, and so shouldn't
> have experienced the lag.
I completely missed that one! Damn, Vernor is ingeniously devious
sometimes. (On second thought, strike that "sometimes".) Well, time
for _ADitS_ to go on the *re*read pile (along with _AFutD_).
Now I'm *really* looking forward to Lunacon this weekend....
Christopher K Davis
> j...@concentric.net (John S. Novak, III) writes:
>> On 2 Mar 1999 14:00:29 GMT, Kent Matthew Peterson
>> <km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>>> Spoilers below.
Remember, when quoting a control-L, delete the quote prefix or it won't
work for spoiler protection.
> j...@concentric.net (John S. Novak, III) writes:
>> And at one point (not oo long after I was musing over the possibility
>> of writing a story where crypto was treated correctly...) they
>> actually mentioned the word "steganography" in conjunction with
>> Sherk's videomancy.
> I must have blipped over that word because I didn't know what it meant.
> What does it mean?
The roots are "hidden" + "writing" (IIRC; I don't have a useful handy
reference, the online dictionaries are all being stupid today, and my
compact OED is at home). It's the technique of hiding information in
other information. For example, a digital recording of the latest hit
by Wooden Gnomes might contain a secret message in the lowest-order
bits...or "meaningless" high-resolution graphics, especially ones
designed for a different set of eyes, might have a few hidden bits
here and there.
Andrew Plotkin
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> Christopher K Davis <ckd-...@ckdhr.com> wrote in <w4emn7a2d4.fsf@kline-
> station.ckdhr.com>:
> >There are, as increasingly common for Vinge, some lovely turns of word;
> >the sheer evocativeness of things like "reality graphics" in _AFutD_ or
> >"videomancy" in _ADitS_ are joined by other great bits. When, exactly,
> >do we first see the Emergent civilization referred to as...the
> >Emergency?
> I absolutely adored this last bit. I don't remember exactly where it first
> happens, either, but I just about fell out of my chair.
Ditto. Vinge has this weakness for terrible puns, and I wish he wasn't as
good at it so I could chide him for it... I stared at "Nigh't'Deepness"
for a while, too. It's so obviously a *good translation* of a *Spider*
pun.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
Andrew Plotkin
> This may be partially the result of expectations that were raised
> too high (same thing that happened with Babylon 5).
> I'm somewhat disappointed.
I'm piling into this thread a little late (I didn't finish the book until
last night.) So I'm responding not just to this post, but to a bunch of
the discussion I've seen.
I'm not disappointed at *all*.
> Spoilers below.
> It's a good story, that's for sure. A little slow in places - parts
> of the narration with the Spiders, I found myself simply skipping over
> a page or so at a time - just scanning it to make sure nothing unexpected
> happened. Ok. This isn't big, I know some people had the same complaint
> about the scenes with the Tines in _A Fire Upon the Deep_.
I had that problem with the Tines, but not the Spiders.
> And anyway, I
> like the Spiders (though they're a bit too human for my tastes at times).
True -- although Vinge goes to some pains to explain why. It's all
Trixia's translation, remember, and she's explicitly putting in an
anthropomorphized slant.
This isn't a complete excuse, because at the end, when the humans interact
directly with the Spiders, they don't really feel any more alien. Except
in the purely physical sense (which *does* come across well -- all those
claustrophobic pits and steep ladders.)
> I didn't like the wait-it-out part of the scenario - too long, too quiet.
> Do human beings really have that much patience? And the 'counterlurk'
> wasn't too plausible, IMO - there should have been *some* indication,
> to the reader at least, that something of the sort was going on, far
> earlier.
My sense of time didn't really catch the long wait. Or the passage
of Spider history either. I wound up *very* reminded of _Dragon's Egg_ --
big swatches of history, too tightly and too neatly compressed. More POVs
might have helped that a lot.
I visualized Qiwi as an adolescent all the way through the book, for
example.
> What bugs me - what REALLY bugs me - is the inconsistencies with
> _A Fire Upon the Deep_.
Quite the opposite for me. I thought it was perfect. They're how many
thousands of years apart? And how much of that time did Pham spend as a
incompetently-frozen corpsicle?
*Sure* Pham is a different person. He spent hundreds of years of his first
lifetime lying and lying and lying, and assembling the lies from pieces of
truth. (It's everyone *else's* perception that "Trinli"'s grandiose
stories are assembled from other people's adventures.) Rebuilt or copied
by a Transcend power (and there's not much distinction between those
verbs), everything went back into the pot.
The great danger of prequels, and sequels too, is rendering some bit of
background (or foreshadowing) flat by actually describing it. For example
-- Julian May's Metapsychic Rebellion stories absolutely didn't hold up
the sense of history that the Pliocene series gave them.
Vinge avoided that problem. He managed to write a book which stands
entirely on its own, but gains much added resonance if you've read _Dire
Feep_ (and know about Zones, Beyonder civilization, etc.) He managed to
write two self-contained stories about the same person. Which naturally
means the person is changed, deeply, in each story. It wouldn't be a good
story otherwise.
> Anyway, I just think the Pham described in aFUtD is a far more
> interesting person, and if *that* had been the character in aDitS, it
> would have made the whole book far better. Not that it was bad - as
> a stand-alone, it's quite good. But it could have been better.
I never cared much about the Pham in aFUtD, honestly. He felt like a
walking plot device -- Interzone Traveller with an Impressive Stack of
Tourist Photos. Probably the reason I'm so enthusiastic about _Deepness_
is that Vinge turned Pham into a real (and much more interesting) person.
What else...
Did I already say that I'm pleased with the Zones *not* being mentioned in
_Deepness_? I believe I did. I'll say it again. If you know the big
picture, there's a wonderful sense of tragedy to the Qeng Ho and that
human civilization. But the story loses nothing without that. And the
irony wouldn't work nearly as well if Vinge let anyone _Deepness_ have a
clue about the Zones.
I had no expectations at all about _Deepness_, by the way. I had
studiously avoided all previews, prognostications, and spoilers. The only
thing I knew was that it was "about Pham Nuwen".
As to the antigravity, well, I figure it's a Transcend technology. The
antigravity in AFUTD, which didn't work well even in Middle Beyond, was
High Beyond tech. Vinge isn't changing the rules; the ruleset is *really
big*, and AFUTD gave us only the tiniest slice of it.
Nobody has mentioned the interesting implication: if Slow civilization can
only be stable with "loving slaves", what does that mean about Beyonder
civilizations that use AI and Beyond-level automation?
Also: I really hope that Vinge's view of "mature programming environment"
looks as dated in ten years as AFUTD's Usenet does today.
Andrew Plotkin
> >On 2 Mar 1999 14:00:29 GMT, Kent Matthew Peterson
> ><km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
> >>Spoilers below.
> >
> >"Lurksalot" argument. And at one point (not oo long after I was
> >musing over the possibility of writing a story where crypto was treated
> >correctly...) they actually mentioned the word "steganography" in
> >conjunction with Sherk's videomancy.
> I must have blipped over that word because I didn't know what it meant.
> What does it mean?
Decryption, more or less.
I caught that, but completely missed the "High Payload" hint.
Speaking of highly compressed data -- perhaps my favorite moments are
"This is all messed up" and the line that reveals that Trixia chose
(chose!) to contact Sherkaner. Broad swatches of meaning and implication
in a single sentence.
Ethan A Merritt
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>> Christopher K Davis <ckd-...@ckdhr.com> wrote in <w4emn7a2d4.fsf@kline-
>> station.ckdhr.com>:
>>
>> >There are, as increasingly common for Vinge, some lovely turns of word;
>> >the sheer evocativeness of things like "reality graphics" in _AFutD_ or
>> >"videomancy" in _ADitS_ are joined by other great bits. When, exactly,
>> >do we first see the Emergent civilization referred to as...the
>> >Emergency?
>>
>> I absolutely adored this last bit. I don't remember exactly where it first
>> happens, either, but I just about fell out of my chair.
>>
>>
It's right at the opening of Part 2, in an internal monologue by Nau.
It struck me, too, right as I hit it (just last night, haven't finished it yet).
Ethan A Merritt
mer...@u.washington.edu
Damien Neil
>We don't know how high out of the Core OnOff goes, but we know it goes
>pretty damned far. Easily into the Beyond, probably into the High
>Beyond and perhaps even into the low Transcend. Now, if you were
>staying in such a system for whatever reasons, would you not design
>your stuff to last as long as it possibly could?
As has been mentioned by several others, I'll bet you can get a hell of
a lot done with 200 years of stellar output. (Care to bet that the
cavorite doesn't work outside the OnOff system?)
My guess is that OnOff is a Transcendant probe. Hmm. Or maybe the
hook on the end of a fishing line, with the cavorite as bait. Toss
a planet into the depths, with an intriguing flicker as bait. Whoever
comes to explore will find agrav, which doesn't work outside the system.
About as close to a guarantee of having someone intelligent living in
the area when it emerges as you can have, I'd say.
Doesn't explain the Spiders, though.
- Damien
Steve Coltrin
> Oops. Ok. But that only makes my other points all the more
> valid. If such a minor thing as this - there isn't even any
> context to where/when he knows this girl, in aFUtD - can get
> transferred ok, why did he screw up the important points?
I don't have my greppable _Fire_ at hand, but are the Pham details inconsisten
with _Deepness_ found in his point-of-view, or only in what he tells Ravna
and Vrimini Org? The Pham of _Deepness_ would never tell his entire, true
life story to unknown people in an unknown environment, especially if his
memories were as fragmented - or even mosaics of several peoples' - as
his point-of-view suggests.
(He'd've kept no secrets from Old One, but why would Old One bother to
reveal his lies?)
-spc
Andrew Plotkin
> P Nielsen Hayden (p...@panix.com) wrote:
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> > I absolutely adored this last bit. I don't remember exactly where it first
> > happens, either, but I just about fell out of my chair.
> Ditto. Vinge has this weakness for terrible puns, and I wish he wasn't as
> good at it so I could chide him for it... I stared at "Nigh't'Deepness"
> for a while, too. It's so obviously a *good translation* of a *Spider*
> pun.
Oh! Oh! I nearly forgot...
"Attercop".
The bastard.
John S. Novak, III
Spoilers
>>"Lurksalot" argument. And at one point (not oo long after I was
>>musing over the possibility of writing a story where crypto was treated
>>correctly...) they actually mentioned the word "steganography" in
>>conjunction with Sherk's videomancy.
>I must have blipped over that word because I didn't know what it meant.
>What does it mean?
More than one person has asked me this in e-mail, as well.
Steganography is a technique by which encrypted messages are sent in
such a way that they seem to be the cleartext of something else.
One example is to take a message and PGP encrypt it. It is not easy
(an expert can tell us if it's impossible) to tell a PGP encrypted
stream of information with no headers from a string of random noise,
from what I understand. So you take this, and according to an
agreed-upon scheme, you replace the lowest order bits in an audio or
video stream with these encrypted messages. (There are other
variants, as well.)
Now it's damned near impossible detect, much less decrypt.
Why would you do this? Because if Anne Reynolt saw so much as one
burst of communication she couldn't interpret and resolve, she'd
suspect encryption. More than one, and someone would end up sucking
hard vacuum. With steganography, if you're allowed to throw digital
representations of natural phenomena around, you can communicate in
relative security.
This, more than anything else, is probably the reason why the Qeng Ho
interfaces to the computers and interfaces were limited.
>>We don't know how high out of the Core OnOff goes, but we know it goes
>>pretty damned far. Easily into the Beyond, probably into the High
>>Beyond and perhaps even into the low Transcend. Now, if you were
>>staying in such a system for whatever reasons, would you not design
>>your stuff to last as long as it possibly could?
>I agree that OnOff is from the Beyond or the Transcend, but why do you
>think the spiders were once residents of those realms? Weren't the fossil
>records mixed in with the anomalous diamond layers and stuff?
I didn't say the Spiders were.
The previous inhabitants, if any, of that planet is who I was thinking
of. The Spiders are probably incidental and accidental. (Although I
suppose their primitive forms may have been left on purpose as well.)
--
John S. Novak, III j...@concentric.net
John S. Novak, III
<km...@node11.unix.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>>>Spoilers below.
>>correctly...) they actually mentioned the word "steganography" in
>>conjunction with Sherk's videomancy.
>I thought that was another made-up word, like videomancy, until
>I saw this thread. 'stegan' rings absolutely no language bells
>for me.
Not even stego-saurus?
It's not that common a word, outside crypto circles.
But if you do know what it means, you'll raise an eyebrow whenever you
see it, because by and large anyone who uses it is either up to
something or thinks he's being listened to.
(There will now appear four hundred and seventeen privacy freaks who
pop up and assure me that they're not up to anbything, and above all,
they're _not_ paranoid about the No Such Agency. And they all grep
their news spools for 'steganography...')
>Well, here's my take on this argument:
> - in aFUtD, when he tells his story to Ravna, he's telling it
>from the hip, so to speak. He is recounting it straight from
>memory, so straight that he doesn't even know where the holes
>or weak points in his memory are. This is not the picture of
>a man who knows his own life story well enough to know how/where
>to modify it to change others' opinions of him. Heck, he probably
>hasn't had *time* to think over his life story and whether/how he
>wants to lie about parts of it. Therefore we can assume it is
>accurate; and this story claims he's 67, been up and down too
>many times to count, and was roped into a wild project as a mid-
>level crewman - a project that wasn't his.
<Shrug>
Vinge may or may not have intentionally changed his mind on Pham.
It's not important to me because if he did so, he did so well enough
that I'm not bothered by it. The Pham as displayed in Deepness is
very intelligent, very subtle, and cautiously paranoid to the point of
obsession. Even as a half crazy dying man, he was sharp enough to
tell Sammy to bring nukes-- lots of nukes-- knowing little about the
mission except the initial three paragraphs of data.
It seems perfectly in character for such a man to want to throw as
much confusion about his actual nature into the playing field as
possible. Would you admit to being the closest thing to Julius Caesar
that the Qeng Ho ever had in a situation like that? I wouldn't, if I
thought fast enough.
Wim Lewis
(re, steganography):
In article <lydy.92...@gw.ddb.com>, Lydia Nickerson <ly...@ddb.com> wrote:
>I must have blipped over that word because I didn't know what it meant.
>What does it mean?
It's the technique of concealing information in the redundancies of other
information. Making imperceptible modifications to a sound or image file,
for example, which encode a message which can only be extracted by someone
with the right algorithm and key.
A very simple example: it's easy to recast an English sentence to use
one more or fewer word. So you could write a long letter to someone,
about something completely innocuous, but carefully making each sentence
of even or odd length. The reader extracts from these a sequence of
bits (even - even - even - odd - odd - odd - odd - even, in the case
of this message). You've presumably pre-arranged meanings for these
sequences.
There are more sophisticated techniques, with higher payloads, or
which combine encryption with steganography so that the reader needs not
just the technique but a secret key as well.
Videomancy --- extremely high-resolution, 12-channel imagery for a
visual system we don't particularly understand --- is a *perfect*
place to use stego.
Kent Matthew Peterson
John S. Novak, III <j...@concentric.net> wrote:
>On 2 Mar 1999 14:00:29 GMT, Kent Matthew Peterson
><km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>
>>Spoilers below.
>
>
>
>There were indications. First and foremost, if you lost faith in
>correctly...) they actually mentioned the word "steganography" in
>conjunction with Sherk's videomancy.
I thought that was another made-up word, like videomancy, until
I saw this thread. 'stegan' rings absolutely no language bells
for me.
>>What bugs me - what REALLY bugs me - is the inconsistencies with
>>_A Fire Upon the Deep_.
>
>[...]
>
>>And in the next paragraph: "... There was this captain of twenty
>>who was crazier than I ... Anyway, this guy was willing to bet
>>*everything* on the sort of thing normal folks would argue about
>>over beer. He called his ship the, um, it translates as something
>>like 'wild witless bird' - that gives you the idea about him. He
>>figured there must be some really high-tech civilizations somewhere
>>in the universe. ..."
>
>How can you not read _that_ one without feeling a profound irony?
>The others are debatable, but I can easily read them as Pham being
>cagey and not wanting to give much away to someone he oesn't know in a
>realm he doesn't comprehend, or as his trying to brag down, as it
>were.
>
>The Pham of Deepness strikes me as paranoid on about the same level as
>Corwin of Amber.
Well, here's my take on this argument:
- in aFUtD, when he tells his story to Ravna, he's telling it
from the hip, so to speak. He is recounting it straight from
memory, so straight that he doesn't even know where the holes
or weak points in his memory are. This is not the picture of
a man who knows his own life story well enough to know how/where
to modify it to change others' opinions of him. Heck, he probably
hasn't had *time* to think over his life story and whether/how he
wants to lie about parts of it. Therefore we can assume it is
accurate; and this story claims he's 67, been up and down too
many times to count, and was roped into a wild project as a mid-
level crewman - a project that wasn't his.
- The information we have about the general shape of his life in
_Deepness_ is not from Pham, thus is not colored by whatever slant
he wishes to give it. It comes from random background, from
comments and actions by other characters, and from our own
observations of his actions. Therefore it too is accurate; and this
story claims he's hundreds of years old, been generally upwards
between Canberra and Brisgo Gap and generally downwards after that,
and the wild project is his own idea, with him in charge.
Therefore we have two accurate descriptions of his life, which are
at least partially contradictory.
Now, it is entirely possible that Vinge meant for us to assume that
one of the viewpoints was flawed or slanted (if so, he could've done
a better job). However, I think it also possible that he decided to
retroactively change the character. What I would like to know is, is
it possible that he simply overlooked a few things.
Tony Zbaraschuk
P Nielsen Hayden <p...@panix.com> wrote:
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>Christopher K Davis <ckd-...@ckdhr.com> wrote in <w4emn7a2d4.fsf@kline-
>station.ckdhr.com>:
>
>>There are, as increasingly common for Vinge, some lovely turns of word;
>>the sheer evocativeness of things like "reality graphics" in _AFutD_ or
>>"videomancy" in _ADitS_ are joined by other great bits. When, exactly,
>>do we first see the Emergent civilization referred to as...the
>>Emergency?
>
>happens, either, but I just about fell out of my chair.
I don't remember exactly where it shows up -- it just sort of
naturally falls into place.
But the thing that hit _me_ was the title. I'd been reading the
first Spider section for a bit, and noticing "hmm, OK, they refer
to their winter refuges as "deepnesses" -- WAITAMINNIT!" The
whole meaning of the title just turned over in my head and I
sat there stunned for a bit.
Not "vast and empty" deepness, but "comfort and shelter" -- which,
I have just realized, is exactly how the Qeng Ho see things; space
is their natural home, their deepness.
Tony Z
--
"The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
His fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stays will die for naught, and home there's no returning."
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.--A.E. Housman
Lydia Nickerson
Wow. That is so extremely cool. As usual, I missed _lots_ of stuff on
the first read through. Thanks for the explanation, it will make my next
read much more enjoyable.
cd skogsberg
>This may be partially the result of expectations that were raised
>too high (same thing that happened with Babylon 5).
>I'm somewhat disappointed.
Haven't got my copy yet, but...
>The antigravity thing is also problematic. Antigravity fabric at
>Relay, in the Middle Beyond, is described as wearing out in about
>a day, and costing massively.
Minor nitpick: agrav fabric at Relay is described as wearing out in
about a *year*, with a square yard, as you say, costing a years'
salary for someone working at the Archives there...
/cd
--
"A killfile on Usenet can get you peace and quiet. A killfile in the real
world can get you 20 to life."
--Nils Nieuwejaar
Andrea Leistra
Kent Matthew Peterson <km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>>>Spoilers below.
>And for OnOff, there's no evidence it's not a natural phenomenon.
Please.
We have a star that is indistinguishable from an ordinary G star,
which then suddenly *turns off*, but which doesn't collapse. As
I mentioned earlier, this isn't possible without Magic Tech. That's
not a complicated result of quantum mechanics or relativity, that's just
basic Newtonian gravity; without the pressure from the radiation, there's
nothing to hold the star up. Obviously, as characters in DitS note,
there has to be something right at the edge of the photosphere that
does *something* with the incoming radiation. Turns it into neutrinos,
maybe, but whatever it does it isn't natural. And then the star *turns
on* again, which is even less natural.
--
Andrea Leistra
Wim Lewis
In article <7bruqt$5bg$1...@news.ccit.arizona.edu>,
It turns on in a way which almost cannot be natural in the Slow Zone:
# "Wave front to arrive in ten seconds."
#
# *Still* no change in the view from the microsat. [....]
#
# "Relight."
#
# In the full-disk view, a point of brilliance burned in the exact center
# of the disk, spread outward, and in less than two seconds filled the disk.
# The low-altitude view has vanished sometime during that spread. [....]
"Less than two seconds", eh? Sol is a bit under two light-seconds in radius,
and OnOff is basically Sunlike. The obvious interpretation of this passage
is that OnOff ignited *simultaneously* all over. There are two ways this
can happen --- closely synchronized clocks at many points on the
surface (that is, automation), or some FTL effect propagating from the
initiator point. (IIRC, similar reasoning was used in RL to decide that
pulsars must be small objects.)
Through the entire book, I was expecting OnOff to be in the low Beyond.
It's still not clear whether it is or not. The effect that the Zones have
on computation seems to be gradual --- that is, your automation can
be more powerful in the Middle or High Beyond than in the Low, and the
only reason for drawing the Slow Zone boundary at a particular point is
that a certain quality of automation is necessary for FTL travel.
Other phenomena may have cut-off points at different depths. For example,
sentience can exist all the way down to the Unthinking Depths.
I don't think that _Deepness_ ever describes whether OnOff is on the
inbound or outbound leg of its, er, galactic-cometary orbit, but if
inbound this also explains the Spider legends of the star's oscillations
having been faster in the past; whatever process produces the effect is
gradually slowing down as the star returns to the Depths.
OnOff may well be a natural phenomenon *in the Beyond*. Perhaps the
sub-photosphere layer is acting as a natural, mostly unmodulated,
ultrawave transmitter. Or maybe Dr. Li is right, and it's some
Transcendant square-wave generator...
--
Wim Lewis * wi...@hhhh.org * Seattle, WA, USA
"I'd always [seen adults] as, I don't know, confused and (John Kensmark)
harried children with credit cards and driver's licenses." (in rasfw )
Jo Walton
erky...@netcom.com "Andrew Plotkin" writes:
> Kent Matthew Peterson (km...@node3.unix.Virginia.EDU) wrote:
>
> > This may be partially the result of expectations that were raised
> > too high (same thing that happened with Babylon 5).
>
> > I'm somewhat disappointed.
>
> I'm piling into this thread a little late (I didn't finish the book until
> last night.) So I'm responding not just to this post, but to a bunch of
> the discussion I've seen.
>
> I'm not disappointed at *all*.
I'm not disappointed at all either. In fact I'm blown away.
> > Spoilers below.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > It's a good story, that's for sure. A little slow in places - parts
> > of the narration with the Spiders, I found myself simply skipping over
> > a page or so at a time - just scanning it to make sure nothing unexpected
> > happened. Ok. This isn't big, I know some people had the same complaint
> > about the scenes with the Tines in _A Fire Upon the Deep_.
>
> I had that problem with the Tines, but not the Spiders.
I didn't have that problem with either. I think Vinge's good at aliens
I like.
> > And anyway, I
> > like the Spiders (though they're a bit too human for my tastes at times).
>
> True -- although Vinge goes to some pains to explain why. It's all
> Trixia's translation, remember, and she's explicitly putting in an
> anthropomorphized slant.
That explanation worked really well for me. I got it from the second
Ezr saw the paper with the first couple of lines of the first bit on,
and I knew she was really communicating with them.
> This isn't a complete excuse, because at the end, when the humans interact
> directly with the Spiders, they don't really feel any more alien. Except
> in the purely physical sense (which *does* come across well -- all those
> claustrophobic pits and steep ladders.)
They do, they feel creepy. The bit where Victory makes a speech and
the smile-gesture is seen untranslated is shuddersome.
> > I didn't like the wait-it-out part of the scenario - too long, too quiet.
> > Do human beings really have that much patience? And the 'counterlurk'
> > wasn't too plausible, IMO - there should have been *some* indication,
> > to the reader at least, that something of the sort was going on, far
> > earlier.
>
> My sense of time didn't really catch the long wait. Or the passage
> of Spider history either. I wound up *very* reminded of _Dragon's Egg_ --
> big swatches of history, too tightly and too neatly compressed. More POVs
> might have helped that a lot.
>
> I visualized Qiwi as an adolescent all the way through the book, for
> example.
She kept getting brainwiped, poor thing, so no wonder. I thought those
Watches worked but could have come over more clearly.
> > What bugs me - what REALLY bugs me - is the inconsistencies with
> > _A Fire Upon the Deep_.
>
> Quite the opposite for me. I thought it was perfect. They're how many
> thousands of years apart? And how much of that time did Pham spend as a
> incompetently-frozen corpsicle?
>
> *Sure* Pham is a different person. He spent hundreds of years of his first
> lifetime lying and lying and lying, and assembling the lies from pieces of
> truth. (It's everyone *else's* perception that "Trinli"'s grandiose
> stories are assembled from other people's adventures.) Rebuilt or copied
> by a Transcend power (and there's not much distinction between those
> verbs), everything went back into the pot.
>
> The great danger of prequels, and sequels too, is rendering some bit of
> background (or foreshadowing) flat by actually describing it. For example
> -- Julian May's Metapsychic Rebellion stories absolutely didn't hold up
> the sense of history that the Pliocene series gave them.
>
> Vinge avoided that problem. He managed to write a book which stands
> entirely on its own, but gains much added resonance if you've read _Dire
> Feep_ (and know about Zones, Beyonder civilization, etc.) He managed to
> write two self-contained stories about the same person. Which naturally
> means the person is changed, deeply, in each story. It wouldn't be a good
> story otherwise.
Absolutely. I entirely agree with this. It would have a happy hopeful
positive ending in the thought of going off towards the Deeps, if one
didn't already know.
As for Pham, I like him a lot more now, and I've always liked him. When
I finished :Deepness: I was thinking about him and I suddenly remembered
he was dead and felt terribly sad.
> > Anyway, I just think the Pham described in aFUtD is a far more
> > interesting person, and if *that* had been the character in aDitS, it
> > would have made the whole book far better. Not that it was bad - as
> > a stand-alone, it's quite good. But it could have been better.
>
> I never cared much about the Pham in aFUtD, honestly. He felt like a
> walking plot device -- Interzone Traveller with an Impressive Stack of
> Tourist Photos. Probably the reason I'm so enthusiastic about _Deepness_
> is that Vinge turned Pham into a real (and much more interesting) person.
I cared more about Ravna and the skroderiders, but I always liked Pham's
audacity.
> What else...
>
> Did I already say that I'm pleased with the Zones *not* being mentioned in
> _Deepness_? I believe I did. I'll say it again. If you know the big
> picture, there's a wonderful sense of tragedy to the Qeng Ho and that
> human civilization. But the story loses nothing without that. And the
> irony wouldn't work nearly as well if Vinge let anyone _Deepness_ have a
> clue about the Zones.
Yes. I'm glad about that too.
> I had no expectations at all about _Deepness_, by the way. I had
> studiously avoided all previews, prognostications, and spoilers. The only
> thing I knew was that it was "about Pham Nuwen".
I heard him talk about it at Evolution a few years ago. I thought it
sounded really good, but it's better than it sounded.
It sounded like a sort of modern Poul Anderson book, which I suppose it
actually is, it's just also so well written. I think it's wonderful that
there are books like this in the world now.
> As to the antigravity, well, I figure it's a Transcend technology. The
> antigravity in AFUTD, which didn't work well even in Middle Beyond, was
> High Beyond tech. Vinge isn't changing the rules; the ruleset is *really
> big*, and AFUTD gave us only the tiniest slice of it.
It's clearly some sort of artifact and that "cavorite" is part of it. I
wonder how much there is?
> Nobody has mentioned the interesting implication: if Slow civilization can
> only be stable with "loving slaves", what does that mean about Beyonder
> civilizations that use AI and Beyond-level automation?
"The omniscient view. Not self-aware really. Self-awareness is much
overrated. Most automation works far better as part of a whole, and even if
human-powerful, it does not need to self-know." AFUtD, p.2
That goes on to say the lab had Transcended and was aware, but as far as
the Beyond goes I think that answers your question.
My definition of "conscious" is "has an agenda" and "human-level conscious"
is "has an agenda of human level complexity". Taking away someone's
agenda - focus - is clearly wrong. Building something so it has complexity
but no agenda isn't.
(Though just before I woke up I had a dream in which my son's lunchbox
in the Transcend had woken up and I was trying to work out what I could
do with a conscious entity that consisted of a pile of books and half
a sausage roll and was remaking itself on a nanolevel but wanted me to
keep give it annoying high pitched bleeps every few seconds to power
itself and its transformation. I was horribly worried about the other
half of the sausage roll transcending too.)
> Also: I really hope that Vinge's view of "mature programming environment"
> looks as dated in ten years as AFUTD's Usenet does today.
I think discovering that usenet was real the year after reading ADUtD
is the most SFnal experience I've ever had.
--
Jo - - I kissed a kif at Kefk - - J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk
First NorAm Public Appearance: Imperiums to Order, Kitchener, March 20th
Freshly UPDATED web-page http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk - Interstichia;
RASFW FAQ, Reviews, Fanzine, Momentum Guidelines, Blood of Kings Poetry
Sea Wasp
> I think discovering that usenet was real the year after reading ADUtD
> is the most SFnal experience I've ever had.
>
THAT is the most SFnal thing I've heard this week. Oh, I know lots n'
lots of people must have been in that position, but for me it was so
obviously well known that it never occured to me that anyone wouldn't
have realized that Vinge was copying the Net. Of course, I've been
online since '76, so imagining people not knowing about the Net was like
imagining people who'd never heard of Star Wars. Not LIKING Star Wars,
sure, not HEARING of it, no.
--
Sea Wasp http://www.wizvax.net/seawasp/index.html
/^\
;;; _Morgantown: The Jason Wood Chronicles_, at
http://www.hyperbooks.com/catalog/20040.html
Andrew Plotkin
> (Spoilers, etc.)
> It turns on in a way which almost cannot be natural in the Slow Zone:
> # "Wave front to arrive in ten seconds."
> #
> # *Still* no change in the view from the microsat. [....]
> #
> # "Relight."
> #
> # In the full-disk view, a point of brilliance burned in the exact center
> # of the disk, spread outward, and in less than two seconds filled the disk.
> # The low-altitude view has vanished sometime during that spread. [....]
> "Less than two seconds", eh? Sol is a bit under two light-seconds in radius,
> and OnOff is basically Sunlike. The obvious interpretation of this passage
> is that OnOff ignited *simultaneously* all over.
Yes, that's what I decided. (Pretty obvious if you've read Egan's
_Quarantine_. :-)
> There are two ways this
> can happen --- closely synchronized clocks at many points on the
> surface (that is, automation), or some FTL effect propagating from the
> initiator point. (IIRC, similar reasoning was used in RL to decide that
> pulsars must be small objects.)
Nitpick: It could also be a STL effect propagating from an initiation
point at the star's center.
> Through the entire book, I was expecting OnOff to be in the low Beyond.
> It's still not clear whether it is or not. The effect that the Zones have
> on computation seems to be gradual --- that is, your automation can
> be more powerful in the Middle or High Beyond than in the Low, and the
> only reason for drawing the Slow Zone boundary at a particular point is
> that a certain quality of automation is necessary for FTL travel.
> Other phenomena may have cut-off points at different depths. For example,
> sentience can exist all the way down to the Unthinking Depths.
I'm still remembering that OnOff is 50 ly from Earth (although I haven't
gone back to check that figure -- it's in the prologue.) And if I recall
correctly, the greater-Qeng-Ho civilization is described as being "a
thousand ly" from the approximate Beyond boundary. Yes, it's fractal, but
it's not that fractal; if there were Beyonder effects anywhere that close
to Earth, humans would have caught on.
> I don't think that _Deepness_ ever describes whether OnOff is on the
> inbound or outbound leg of its, er, galactic-cometary orbit, but if
> inbound this also explains the Spider legends of the star's oscillations
> having been faster in the past; whatever process produces the effect is
> gradually slowing down as the star returns to the Depths.
True. Although it's nearly as easy to invent the explanation the opposite
way. :)
> OnOff may well be a natural phenomenon *in the Beyond*. Perhaps the
> sub-photosphere layer is acting as a natural, mostly unmodulated,
> ultrawave transmitter. Or maybe Dr. Li is right, and it's some
> Transcendant square-wave generator...
If it's a natural phenomenon, it's a rare one. Remember that we can see
into all the Zones from Earth telescopes. One of Vinge's constraints is
that stars have to behave pretty much the same in all Zones, or those
"Dawn Age astronomers" would have noticed.
cd skogsberg
>[Is OnOff in the Beyond?]
>I'm still remembering that OnOff is 50 ly from Earth (although I haven't
>gone back to check that figure -- it's in the prologue.)
"It's only fifty lightyears away, Sammy. The nearest astrophysical
enigma to Human Space[...]" - I interpreted that as OnOff being fifty
light years from the point where Pham and Sammy had their conversa-
tion, namely *Triland*, which is itself some (for me) unknown distance
from Earth.
/cd
--
"Always question authority. Hot pokers and electrodes are optional, but
generally preferred for this."
-- The Red Salamander Zaruga <wal...@chatlink.com>
Laura Burchard
>> And anyway, I
>> like the Spiders (though they're a bit too human for my tastes at times).
>True -- although Vinge goes to some pains to explain why. It's all
>Trixia's translation, remember, and she's explicitly putting in an
>anthropomorphized slant.
Oooh, but this was one of the things I liked. I liked it first because it
was neat having them portrayed as they see themselves -- normal. Human.
Instead of an attempt to provide exoticness by funky names and
untranslated phrases, an attempt to map them to ordinariness by using
plain familiar names. Giving only the smallest of hints -- Starkaner
throwing himself off his perch in the valley sequence, things like that.
Then it was even neater as you realize that you are reading Trixia's
translation of this. And *then* you realize at the very end that the
human-quality was all part of Trixia's plan, to make sure that everyone
Qang Ho and Emergent, hated the idea of killing them.
Boxes inside boxes. A truly cool book.
Laura
Laura Burchard -- l...@radix.net -- http://www.radix.net/~lhb
X-Review: http://traveller.simplenet.com/xfiles/episode.htm
"Good design is clear thinking made visible." -- Edward Tufte
Steve Coltrin
> In article <erkyrathF...@netcom.com>, Andrew Plotkin
> <erky...@netcom.com> wrote:
> >Wim Lewis (wi...@netcom.com) wrote:
> (Spoilers, etc.)
>
> >[Is OnOff in the Beyond?]
> >I'm still remembering that OnOff is 50 ly from Earth (although I haven't
> >gone back to check that figure -- it's in the prologue.)
>
> "It's only fifty lightyears away, Sammy. The nearest astrophysical
> enigma to Human Space[...]" - I interpreted that as OnOff being fifty
> light years from the point where Pham and Sammy had their conversa-
> tion, namely *Triland*, which is itself some (for me) unknown distance
> from Earth.
And Triland is stated to be in the corewardmost region of Human Space,
so it's firmly in the Slow Zone.
-spc
Vincent Archer
> We have a star that is indistinguishable from an ordinary G star,
> which then suddenly *turns off*, but which doesn't collapse. As
Nitpick: It *apparently* turns off. You don't have a way to distinguish
between the star's fusion shutting down entirely, and the star's fusion
being still there, but diverted for a more useful purpose than radiating
in empty space...
In fact, the sudden and immediate on/off effect favors the latter hypothesis.
Even if the entire fusion process of the Sun were to shut down right now,
we wouldn't be aware of anything for a looong period, as most of the energy
and heat generated inside the star takes hundreds to thousands of year to
escape out of the internals to the photosphere...
Now, we are already aware of a whole class of devices (from the ansible to
countermeasure) that require a significant diverting of a star's energy
output. On/Off powers another one...
--
Vincent ARCHER Email: arc...@frmug.org
Laura Burchard
Jo Walton <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <erkyrathF...@netcom.com>
> erky...@netcom.com "Andrew Plotkin" writes:
>> The great danger of prequels, and sequels too, is rendering some bit of
>> background (or foreshadowing) flat by actually describing it. For example
>> -- Julian May's Metapsychic Rebellion stories absolutely didn't hold up
>> the sense of history that the Pliocene series gave them.
Yes! I so looked forward to the Rebellion books for years, because the
snips and snaps from the Pliocene were so wonderfully resonant. And
well... they were mediocre and almost entirely devoid of that wonderful
sense of history.
>Absolutely. I entirely agree with this. It would have a happy hopeful
>positive ending in the thought of going off towards the Deeps, if one
>didn't already know.
Strange. I *did* take it as a happy hopeful positive ending. Because I
already knew the bad part -- that he had died on that journey -- and now I
knew the good part: that the fact that he had survived to make that
journey meant that he and Anne had won. The Frenkish Orc destroyed the
Emergency at last.
Lydia Nickerson
>Strange. I *did* take it as a happy hopeful positive ending. Because I
>already knew the bad part -- that he had died on that journey -- and now I
>knew the good part: that the fact that he had survived to make that
>journey meant that he and Anne had won. The Frenkish Orc destroyed the
>Emergency at last.
My own response was a shudder. Pham Nuwen has red hair in AFUtd -- most
likely Anne's hair.
Coyu
>My own response was a shudder. Pham Nuwen has red hair in AFUtd -- most
>likely Anne's hair.
You too?
Ethan A Merritt
Laura Burchard <l...@Radix.Net> wrote:
>In article <erkyrathF...@netcom.com>,
>Andrew Plotkin <erky...@netcom.com> wrote:
>>> And anyway, I
>>> like the Spiders (though they're a bit too human for my tastes at times).
>
>>True -- although Vinge goes to some pains to explain why. It's all
>>Trixia's translation, remember, and she's explicitly putting in an
>>anthropomorphized slant.
>
>was neat having them portrayed as they see themselves -- normal. Human.
>Instead of an attempt to provide exoticness by funky names and
>untranslated phrases, an attempt to map them to ordinariness by using
>plain familiar names. Giving only the smallest of hints -- Starkaner
>throwing himself off his perch in the valley sequence, things like that.
I particularly liked it because I've been working my way through
Douglas Hofstadter's _Le Ton Beau de Marot_, which is essentially
a set of musings on the nature of translation. One line of musing
is that the most faithful translation must substitute equivalent
connotational phrases so that the reader of the translation has
an equivalent emotional response to that of a native reader of the
untranslated work. The paradox, if it is one, is that if you take
this to extremes you end up concluding that the best "translation"
of a work in one language is an "equivalent" work in a second
language which produces the same emotional response even though
little if anything is left of the original words, themes, names,
etc. It seems to me that Trixia was well along this path in
translating from spider to human. Names, facial expressions, etc,
were all substituted with human "equivalents". But of course the
nature of "equivalency" is set by a mapping chosen by the interpreter.
Trixia (perhaps with the guidance of Sherkaner?) chose a mapping
that gave the emotional response she wanted on the part of her
human listeners.
Ethan A Merritt
mer...@u.washington.edu
David Dyer-Bennet
>Andrea Leistra (alei...@kitts.u.arizona.edu) wrote:
>> We have a star that is indistinguishable from an ordinary G star,
>> which then suddenly *turns off*, but which doesn't collapse. As
>Nitpick: It *apparently* turns off. You don't have a way to distinguish
>between the star's fusion shutting down entirely, and the star's fusion
>being still there, but diverted for a more useful purpose than radiating
>in empty space...
Neutrino production?
--
David Dyer-Bennet d...@ddb.com
http://www.ddb.com/~ddb (photos, sf) Minicon: http://www.mnstf.org/minicon
http://ouroboros.demesne.com/ The Ouroboros Bookworms
Join the 20th century before it's too late!
Matt Austern
> >Nitpick: It *apparently* turns off. You don't have a way to distinguish
> >between the star's fusion shutting down entirely, and the star's fusion
> >being still there, but diverted for a more useful purpose than radiating
> >in empty space...
>
> Neutrino production?
The humans and spiders could easily detect that. No, maybe something
like a status report sent as a high power, low bandwidth (one bit per
year?) hyperspatial transmission.
Andrea Leistra
>arc...@hsc.fr (Vincent Archer) writes:
>
>>Andrea Leistra (alei...@kitts.u.arizona.edu) wrote:
>>> We have a star that is indistinguishable from an ordinary G star,
>>> which then suddenly *turns off*, but which doesn't collapse. As
>
>>between the star's fusion shutting down entirely, and the star's fusion
>>being still there, but diverted for a more useful purpose than radiating
>>in empty space...
>
>Neutrino production?
My guess is that the Off part of the OnOff star is designed for purposes
other than using the power; beings with the abilities to engineer
something to periodically harness the bulk of the energy output of a star
*from within the star itself* probably wouldn't send that star off many
light-years away, or bother to turn it back on and lose that power. So
neutrinos are my guess, and that the OnOff star is, perhaps, the
equivalent of <BLINK> for the Transcendent beings that made it, and it was
thrown away once it got annoying.
Aaron protested that the neutrino flux would be detectable, but I don't
think that's a problem; they're hard to detect at astrophysical distances,
and so it wouldn't be feasible to look for them until they reached the
OnOff system, at which point they had more things to worry about and
didn't have huge tanks of water handy with which to detect them at any
rate.
--
Andrea Leistra
Aaron Bergman
>
>Aaron protested that the neutrino flux would be detectable, but I don't
>think that's a problem; they're hard to detect at astrophysical distances,
>and so it wouldn't be feasible to look for them until they reached the
>OnOff system, at which point they had more things to worry about and
>didn't have huge tanks of water handy with which to detect them at any
>rate.
I'm guessing that if you took the whole solar output and
converted it into neutrinos, the flux wouldn't need giant water
tanks to be detected. That's a shitload of energy, after all. You
get enough energies and they can become lethal. The cross section
increases with energy, for one, IIRC.
ObCaveat: I haven't calculated a single number here and couldn't quote
the standard predicted solar neutrino flux off the top of my head
if you asked me to.
Aaron
--
Aaron Bergman
<http://www.princeton.edu/~abergman/>
Andrea Leistra
Aaron Bergman <aber...@princeton.edu> wrote:
>In article <7c1b4d$n2m$1...@news.ccit.arizona.edu>, Andrea Leistra wrote:
>>
>>Aaron protested that the neutrino flux would be detectable, but I don't
>>think that's a problem; they're hard to detect at astrophysical distances,
>>and so it wouldn't be feasible to look for them until they reached the
>>OnOff system, at which point they had more things to worry about and
>>didn't have huge tanks of water handy with which to detect them at any
>>rate.
>I'm guessing that if you took the whole solar output and
>converted it into neutrinos, the flux wouldn't need giant water
>tanks to be detected. That's a shitload of energy, after all. You
>get enough energies and they can become lethal. The cross section
>increases with energy, for one, IIRC.
This is the calculation I wanted to do, but couldn't find any numbers
for neutrino detections or predicted fluxes to do the calculation with,
and I really don't want to start from the neutrino cross-section and an
energy distribution, so I'll continue to wave hands furiously and
avoid finding any numbers.
(Lethal neutrinos, though? Hadn't heard that one before.)
--
Andrea Leistra
Matt Austern
> This is the calculation I wanted to do, but couldn't find any numbers
> for neutrino detections or predicted fluxes to do the calculation with,
> and I really don't want to start from the neutrino cross-section and an
> energy distribution, so I'll continue to wave hands furiously and
> avoid finding any numbers.
>
> (Lethal neutrinos, though? Hadn't heard that one before.)
Sure. Remember, there's very little difference between a high-energy
neutrino and a high-energy electron.
Even if the humans don't have any better neutrino detectors than we do
today, though, it's very unlikely that the spiders' neutrino detectors
wouldn't notice an enormous increase in the neutrino flux. They know
as much physics towards the end of the book as we do today.
Matt Austern
> In article <fxtg17f...@isolde.engr.sgi.com>,
> Matt Austern <aus...@sgi.com> wrote:
>
> >Sure. Remember, there's very little difference between a high-energy
> >neutrino and a high-energy electron.
>
> Except that neutrinos are much less likely to *interact* with anything
> than electrons.
Not at high energies. The coupling constants for "weak" and
"electromagnetic" interactions are just about the same. The only
reason that low-energy neutrino interactions appear weak is that
they're suppressed by the mass of the W or Z.
William H. Stoddard
>
> THAT is the most SFnal thing I've heard this week. Oh, I know lots n'
> lots of people must have been in that position, but for me it was so
> obviously well known that it never occured to me that anyone wouldn't
> have realized that Vinge was copying the Net. Of course, I've been
> online since '76, so imagining people not knowing about the Net was like
> imagining people who'd never heard of Star Wars. Not LIKING Star Wars,
> sure, not HEARING of it, no.
>
out, if I recall correctly, I had heard about newsgroups but never seen
one; I got very limited access at work some time later (via Netscape
Navigator accessing AltaVista) and subsequently decided to buy suitable
programs for my home computer, a couple of years back. I figured out when
I thought about it that this must have been a simulation of that computer
net discussion I'd heard rumors of, but it wasn't instantly obvious.
--
William H. Stoddard whs...@primenet.net
You'll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs,
Or engaged in doing complicated long division sums.
(T. S. Eliot, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats")
Andrea Leistra
>Sure. Remember, there's very little difference between a high-energy
>neutrino and a high-energy electron.
Except that neutrinos are much less likely to *interact* with anything
than electrons.
>Even if the humans don't have any better neutrino detectors than we do
>today, though, it's very unlikely that the spiders' neutrino detectors
>wouldn't notice an enormous increase in the neutrino flux. They know
>as much physics towards the end of the book as we do today.
Good point. Okay, the Spiders should be able to detect the increased
neutrino flux if that's what OnOff is really doing.
--
Andrea Leistra
yello...@my-dejanews.com
erky...@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin) wrote:
[snippage]
[in regard to OnOff's peculiar behavior]
>
> If it's a natural phenomenon, it's a rare one. Remember that we can see
> into all the Zones from Earth telescopes. One of Vinge's constraints is
> that stars have to behave pretty much the same in all Zones, or those
> "Dawn Age astronomers" would have noticed.
Alternatively, it could be that the slow zone "filters out" any Beyond-induced
stellar behavior (analgous to the way glass filters UV light). Or perhaps
Beyond-induced stellar effects "decay" when entering a slow zone, and thus no
longer appears unusual (analagous to the way radioactives decay to elements
lower on the periodic table).
-y
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
l...@radix.net
ly...@ddb.com (Lydia Nickerson) wrote:
> l...@Radix.Net (Laura Burchard) writes:
> >Strange. I *did* take it as a happy hopeful positive ending. Because I
> >already knew the bad part -- that he had died on that journey -- and now I
> >knew the good part: that the fact that he had survived to make that
> >journey meant that he and Anne had won. The Frenkish Orc destroyed the
> >Emergency at last.
> My own response was a shudder. Pham Nuwen has red hair in AFUtd -- most
> likely Anne's hair.
Yes, but why is that so terrible? Everything dies, the question is what you do
before you die. And we already knew Pham was dead; but now we know that three
planets were freed from a terrible kind of dictatorship and slavery.
Semi-unrelated question: anyone else speculate what the POD in podmaster stood
for? Could have been living pods, I suspose, but I have a feeling it was
originally Plague something something.
Laura
David M. Jones
erky...@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin) writes:
> Wim Lewis (wi...@netcom.com) wrote:
> > (Spoilers, etc.)
> > It turns on in a way which almost cannot be natural in the Slow Zone:
>
> > # "Wave front to arrive in ten seconds."
> > #
> > # *Still* no change in the view from the microsat. [....]
> > #
> > # "Relight."
> > #
> > # In the full-disk view, a point of brilliance burned in the exact center
> > # of the disk, spread outward, and in less than two seconds filled the disk.
> > # The low-altitude view has vanished sometime during that spread. [....]
>
> > "Less than two seconds", eh? Sol is a bit under two light-seconds in radius,
> > and OnOff is basically Sunlike. The obvious interpretation of this passage
> > is that OnOff ignited *simultaneously* all over.
[...]
> Nitpick: It could also be a STL effect propagating from an initiation
> point at the star's center.
This passage in the book puzzles me mightily. Andrew's interpretation
seems correct to me, especially since, as far as I can remember,
there's no reason to think that FTL can exist in the Slowness.
But having the ignition seem to start in the "exact center of the
disk" and spreading outward bothers me. If ignition was set off by an
event in the core, why didn't it hit the entire surface
simultaneously? And if it started at a point on the surface, are we
to assume the observers just happened to have a camera situated so
that the point of ignition was at the center of their point of view?
Not entirely impossible, but it seems a little fishy to me.
David M. Jones "Gravity is a harsh mistress."
dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu
Laura Burchard
>>> # of the disk, spread outward, and in less than two seconds filled the disk.
>>> "Less than two seconds", eh? Sol is a bit under two light-seconds in radius,
>>> and OnOff is basically Sunlike. The obvious interpretation of this passage
> But having the ignition seem to start in the "exact center of the
> disk" and spreading outward bothers me. If ignition was set off by an
> event in the core, why didn't it hit the entire surface
> simultaneously? And if it started at a point on the surface, are we
> to assume the observers just happened to have a camera situated so
> that the point of ignition was at the center of their point of view?
> Not entirely impossible, but it seems a little fishy to me.
No, that's what Wim meant about it happening simultaneously all over; the
center of the observed disk is the part of the sun that is closest to us,
while the rim is a radius away -- 2 light seconds. So if something happened
all over the sun at once, we'd expect to observe it as an effect spreading
from a dot in the center, taking about 2 seconds to reach the edges.
Laura Burchard <l...@radix.net>
http://www.radix.net/~lhb * ICQ: 6854921 * IRC: dctrav
X-Review: http://traveller.simplenet.com/xfiles/episode.htm
Ethan A Merritt
David M. Jones <dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>erky...@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin) writes:
>
>> Wim Lewis (wi...@netcom.com) wrote:
>> > (Spoilers, etc.)
>
>
>> > It turns on in a way which almost cannot be natural in the Slow Zone:
>>
>> > # "Wave front to arrive in ten seconds."
>> > #
>> > # *Still* no change in the view from the microsat. [....]
>> > #
>> > # "Relight."
>> > #
>> > # of the disk, spread outward, and in less than two seconds filled the disk.
>>
>> > and OnOff is basically Sunlike. The obvious interpretation of this passage
>
>[...]
>
>> Nitpick: It could also be a STL effect propagating from an initiation
>> point at the star's center.
>
>This passage in the book puzzles me mightily. Andrew's interpretation
>seems correct to me, especially since, as far as I can remember,
>there's no reason to think that FTL can exist in the Slowness.
>
>disk" and spreading outward bothers me. If ignition was set off by an
>event in the core, why didn't it hit the entire surface
>simultaneously? And if it started at a point on the surface, are we
>to assume the observers just happened to have a camera situated so
>that the point of ignition was at the center of their point of view?
>Not entirely impossible, but it seems a little fishy to me.
No, I think you miss the point of the FTL suggestion. The simplest
explaination for observers at a random viewpoint seeing the ignition
start at the center of the disk is that it truly starts at all points
of the surface simultaneously.
Since the center of the disk is closer to the observer, that wave
front arrives first, followed symmetrically by wavefronts from
surface points further away. So the center is observed to light
up first no matter what angle you are viewing from.
Ethan A Merritt
mer...@u.washington.edu
Coyu
>But having the ignition seem to start in the "exact center of the
>disk" and spreading outward bothers me. If ignition was set off by an
>event in the core, why didn't it hit the entire surface
>simultaneously? And if it started at a point on the surface, are we
>to assume the observers just happened to have a camera situated so
>that the point of ignition was at the center of their point of view?
>Not entirely impossible, but it seems a little fishy to me.
Hunh? The OnOff star approximates to a sphere; the closest point
on a sphere to an outside PoV will be on a line that passes from that
PoV through the center of the sphere.
Now consider the spherical wavefront of ignition. It'll _always_
appear that the center ignites first, because the closest point to you
is in front of the center of the sphere. Speed of light, you know.
Douglas Muir
> > point at the star's center.
Sure. That would work. Or near the star's center, anyhow.
> This passage in the book puzzles me mightily. Andrew's interpretation
> seems correct to me, especially since, as far as I can remember,
> there's no reason to think that FTL can exist in the Slowness.
>
> But having the ignition seem to start in the "exact center of the
> disk" and spreading outward bothers me. If ignition was set off by an
> event in the core, why didn't it hit the entire surface
> simultaneously? And if it started at a point on the surface, are we
> to assume the observers just happened to have a camera situated so
> that the point of ignition was at the center of their point of view?
Ah, no. That's an illusion caused by speed-of-light.
Think about it. Mr. Sun is roughly two light-seconds across, right? So
if you have a sat-cam hovering in a close orbit, and the whole sun
lights up at once, it will take about a second for the light from the
edge to reach the cam. From the cam's POV, the sun will seem to light
up first directly under it, with the illumination expanding out to the
"horizon" in a second or so.
Doug M.
Andrew Plotkin
> erky...@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin) writes:
> > Wim Lewis (wi...@netcom.com) wrote:
> > > (Spoilers, etc.)
> > > # "Relight."
> > > #
> > > # In the full-disk view, a point of brilliance burned in the exact center
> > > # of the disk, spread outward, and in less than two seconds filled the disk.
> > > # The low-altitude view has vanished sometime during that spread. [....]
> >
> > > "Less than two seconds", eh? Sol is a bit under two light-seconds in radius,
> > > and OnOff is basically Sunlike. The obvious interpretation of this passage
> > > is that OnOff ignited *simultaneously* all over.
> [...]
> > Nitpick: It could also be a STL effect propagating from an initiation
> > point at the star's center.
> This passage in the book puzzles me mightily. Andrew's interpretation
> seems correct to me, especially since, as far as I can remember,
> there's no reason to think that FTL can exist in the Slowness.
> But having the ignition seem to start in the "exact center of the
> disk" and spreading outward bothers me. If ignition was set off by an
> event in the core, why didn't it hit the entire surface
> simultaneously?
It *did*, that's the point.
The center of the solar disc is the closest point to the observer. Since
the star is convex, the edge of the disc is about two light-seconds
farther away; so you don't see the light emanating from those points until
two seconds later.
As I said, there's a similar geometric constraint puzzle in Egan's
_Quarantine_. I didn't figure out the answer then, but after Egan
explained it, I was able to recognize it here. Got a giggle from me, if
nothing else.
David M. Jones
> David M. Jones (dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu) wrote:
> > But having the ignition seem to start in the "exact center of the
> > disk" and spreading outward bothers me. If ignition was set off by an
> > event in the core, why didn't it hit the entire surface
> > simultaneously?
>
> It *did*, that's the point.
>
> The center of the solar disc is the closest point to the
> observer. [etc]
Duh. Right. Of course. My thanks to you and to Douglas Muir, who
made the same point via email.
I wish I could blame this on the extended bout with cold/flu that I've
been having, but unfortunately that won't work. So, I'll just sit
here and whimper softly and wait for the rest of the net to get around
to correcting me.
David M. Jones "I'd suggest some kind of
dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu organizing field, but a lot of
the time I really don't know
what I'm talking about."
Aaron Bergman
>
>
>But having the ignition seem to start in the "exact center of the
>disk" and spreading outward bothers me. If ignition was set off by an
>event in the core, why didn't it hit the entire surface
>to assume the observers just happened to have a camera situated so
>that the point of ignition was at the center of their point of view?
The sun's radius is about two light seconds, I think, so one would
expect something starting at the middle and reaching the outer edge
somewhere on the order of that time for a simultaneous ignition. It
should start out quickly and slow down as it gets closer to the edge.
Andrea Leistra
David M. Jones <dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>But having the ignition seem to start in the "exact center of the
>disk" and spreading outward bothers me. If ignition was set off by an
>event in the core, why didn't it hit the entire surface
>simultaneously? And if it started at a point on the surface, are we
>to assume the observers just happened to have a camera situated so
>that the point of ignition was at the center of their point of view?
The original interpretation, that the event (I hesitate to call it an
ignition; the fusion has got to be taking place with the radiation
intercepted or changed into something else right before it reaches the
photosphere, or the star would collapse) hit the surface everywhere
simultaneously, is the only one that makes sense; the "center" is
closer to the observers by about one stellar radius, and so any event
would appear to take place there first, simply since the light from the
"outer edge" as viewed by any observer hasn't reached them yet.
--
Andrea Leistra
Douglas Muir
> here and whimper softly and wait for the rest of the net to get around
> to correcting me.
Seven so far, and counting.
ObVinge: imagine a Net stretching over light years, with trillions of
participants. Post one mistake and the corrections crash your system
and kill you.
> David M. Jones "I'd suggest some kind of
> dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu organizing field, but a lot of
> the time I really don't know
> what I'm talking about."
Hmmm... Doom Patrol?
Doug M.
Wim Lewis
[...]
>I'm still remembering that OnOff is 50 ly from Earth (although I haven't
>gone back to check that figure -- it's in the prologue.) And if I recall
>correctly, the greater-Qeng-Ho civilization is described as being "a
>thousand ly" from the approximate Beyond boundary. Yes, it's fractal, but
>it's not that fractal; if there were Beyonder effects anywhere that close
>to Earth, humans would have caught on.
And the other day I found a passage (in aFUtD, I think) implying that
the Qeng Ho volume is coreward of Earth. So I guess it's pretty unlikely
that OnOff is in the low Beyond.
Which makes me *really* curious about how reignition works. I think
I'm coming around to the position that OnOff powers some Transcendant
or High Beyonder artifact, or cyst, or maintains a zone bubble, or
something.
But it seems obvious that some disaster befell OnOff; it's covered
by a stratum of agrav machinery. I'd expect Relay to look like this,
for example...
--
Wim Lewis * wi...@hhhh.org * Seattle, WA, USA
"I'd always [seen adults] as, I don't know, confused and (John Kensmark)
harried children with credit cards and driver's licenses." (in rasfw )
Tony Zbaraschuk
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>> So, I'll just sit
>> here and whimper softly and wait for the rest of the net to get around
>> to correcting me.
>
>Seven so far, and counting.
>
>ObVinge: imagine a Net stretching over light years, with trillions of
>participants. Post one mistake and the corrections crash your system
>and kill you.
Except, of course, that your AI pre-processes and discards all the
corrections well upstream from you.
Of course, in _Fire_ there's the morbidly funny moment when the
mysterious Hanse (any ideas who/what/where _he_ is?) announces,
"Aplogies for my earlier speculation that Sjandra Kei had not been
destroyed. That was based on a catalog error. I agree with the
corrections (13124 as of some seconds ago)..."
Tony Z
--
"The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
His fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stays will die for naught, and home there's no returning."
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.--A.E. Housman
Douglas Muir
> >> background (or foreshadowing) flat by actually describing it. For example
> >> -- Julian May's Metapsychic Rebellion stories absolutely didn't hold up
> >> the sense of history that the Pliocene series gave them.
>
> Yes! I so looked forward to the Rebellion books for years, because the
> snips and snaps from the Pliocene were so wonderfully resonant. And
> well... they were mediocre and almost entirely devoid of that wonderful
> sense of history.
Firm agreement. The glimpses that we got of the Rebellion in the
Pliocene books were far, far better than the solid look that we finally
got in _Magnificat_.
Overall I found the Milieu tetralogy disappointing... so much so that I
had trouble finishing it. Which startled the heck out of me, because
the Pliocene Exile books were once my all-time favorite SF series. In
15 years they've fallen a bit from that peak for me (partly 'cause I've
read more and better stuff, partly from looking at them more critically
with time), but they're still very good.
I also felt that there was an absolute decline in quality from the first
series to the second. In fact, frankly, I wish she'd never written it.
It had some good bits (the early appearances of Fury and Hydra, Unifex)
but not worth ruining the earlier work for.
> >Absolutely. I entirely agree with this. It would have a happy hopeful
> >positive ending in the thought of going off towards the Deeps, if one
> >didn't already know.
>
> Strange. I *did* take it as a happy hopeful positive ending. Because I
> already knew the bad part -- that he had died on that journey -- and now I
> knew the good part: that the fact that he had survived to make that
> journey meant that he and Anne had won. The Frenkish Orc destroyed the
> Emergency at last.
I agree. After all, we _know_ he dies... but he gets to do one more
great good thing first.
Doug M.
Jens Kilian
> ObVinge: imagine a Net stretching over light years, with trillions of
> participants. Post one mistake and the corrections crash your system
> and kill you.
Spam! The Blight is just a pyramid scheme... I'll have to go and reread
the part about the Blighter Video now.
Jens.
--
mailto:j...@acm.org phone:+49-7031-14-7698 (HP TELNET 778-7698)
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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]
Sea Wasp
> Of course, in _Fire_ there's the morbidly funny moment when the
> mysterious Hanse (any ideas who/what/where _he_ is?) announces,
> "Aplogies for my earlier speculation that Sjandra Kei had not been
> destroyed. That was based on a catalog error. I agree with the
> corrections (13124 as of some seconds ago)..."
I thought he, or possibly SRI, was Carl Lydick.
--
Sea Wasp http://www.wizvax.net/seawasp/index.html
/^\
;;; _Morgantown: The Jason Wood Chronicles_, at
http://www.hyperbooks.com/catalog/20040.html
Mike Andersson
>
>ObVinge: imagine a Net stretching over light years, with trillions of
>participants. Post one mistake and the corrections crash your system
>and kill you.
Yeah, but how many postings would be *relevant* out-of-system. Frex, this
discussion wouldn't have much relevance outside of human space, since we're
the only ones reading Vinge.
--Mike Andersson
<and...@u.washington.edu>
Lydia Nickerson
>In article <lydy.92...@gw.ddb.com>,
> ly...@ddb.com (Lydia Nickerson) wrote:
>> l...@Radix.Net (Laura Burchard) writes:
>> >Strange. I *did* take it as a happy hopeful positive ending. Because I
>> >already knew the bad part -- that he had died on that journey -- and now I
>> >knew the good part: that the fact that he had survived to make that
>> >journey meant that he and Anne had won. The Frenkish Orc destroyed the
>> >Emergency at last.
>> My own response was a shudder. Pham Nuwen has red hair in AFUtd -- most
>> likely Anne's hair.
>Yes, but why is that so terrible? Everything dies, the question is what you do
>before you die. And we already knew Pham was dead; but now we know that three
>planets were freed from a terrible kind of dictatorship and slavery.
It's not terrible, it's merely shuddersome, like getting a kidney you
desperately needed because your twin was just run over by a bus. I mean,
you'd take it, you'd be grateful, but most people would have twinges of
horror and guilt associated with it, too. There's a poignancy to Pham
having hair that belonged to his last love, a sorrow to know what happened
to their partnership. It's a vivid image.
--
----
Lydia Nickerson ly...@ddb.com
Nancy Lebovitz
The general discussion about sentience and Focus would be of pretty
wide interest, and we'd probably get more varied points of view.
Furthermore, the Net would tend to produce a market (of some sort) for
art--I'm sure there'd be interest in out-of-solar-system novels.
Rob Ellwood
>
> ...it seems obvious that some disaster befell OnOff; it's covered
> by a stratum of agrav machinery.
Nice observation.
Some other posters have suggested that the on/off cycle
is to entice intelligent races to colonize the system. "We need
specimens!" However, from the known attitude of the Transcendent
intelligences towards normal intelligences ("wildlife"), I can't
see this.
"We're only a stage 1 Transcendence. In a few years,
we will be stage 2, and have no further interest in such things.
Still, when our probe returns, it will tell _some_ stage 1 civi-
lization if Powers Beyond the Powers reside in the Core! Oh,
yes: tell Engineering to make the star blink on and off. Our
distant successors might want to build an ant farm."
More of a concern would be: how do you keep the local
insects from crawling all over your Core probe when it hits the
Beyond? Recall that Low Beyonders can smash planets, and High
Beyonders can stellify them. This is a risk both coming and
going.
And no ants now in the system has been hit with bug spray,
even when they chew on stuff.
"...it's covered by a stratum of agrav machinery...", you
say? That doesn't sound much like the leavings of a Low Beyond
civilization. Especially since the inhabitants would not instantly
vanish when the system hit the Slow Zone.
Tentative conclusions:
- The entire system got to the Slow Zone from the Transcend
using ultradrive. (Alternative explanation: it was built at the
Bottom of the Beyond. I don't think that this is the case. The
probe has to rise from the Bottom of the Beyond eventually, anyway,
and construction would be more convenient in the Transcend.)
- The real machinery is in the sun. (This suggestion was
originally made by another poster.)
- The Transcend optimize their designs, OK? Even if most of
the construction took place inside the sun, I can see it being worth
while to put a few minor factories and whatnot out on the planets.
Once the probe hits the Slow Zone, all that is unused surplus, and
you don't care that it just turned into a hundred cubic miles of junk.
Logical flaw: why take the planet along when ultradriving
down from the Transcend? Best guess: the planet serves as one of
the ultradrive spines for the sun. There must still be some machin-
ery in the planet(s), far enough down to be safe from insects with
planet busters. Of course, there would be no external evidence of
the machinery, right?
And the last word is: volcanoes.
--
Rob Ellwood
To reply, delete the anti-spam stuff in the address.
Samael
Mike Andersson wrote in message <7c6e66$vge$1...@nntp3.u.washington.edu>...
>Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>>
>>ObVinge: imagine a Net stretching over light years, with trillions of
>>participants. Post one mistake and the corrections crash your system
>>and kill you.
>
>
>Yeah, but how many postings would be *relevant* out-of-system. Frex, this
>discussion wouldn't have much relevance outside of human space, since we're
>the only ones reading Vinge.
I believe that his books are considered amusing juvenile humour out in the
high beyond.
Samael
Laura Burchard
rob.ellwoodD...@home.com wrote:
>There must still be some machin-
> ery in the planet(s), far enough down to be safe from insects with
> planet busters. Of course, there would be no external evidence of
> the machinery, right?
>
> And the last word is: volcanoes.
Ah, yes. Someone else who thought it was suspicious that there were *exactly*
three volcanos. In a world without plate tectonics and with a solid core.
Remember the bit with the Spiders speculating that the reason the volcano
crater was newly blasted out every Relight was because the heat caused lava
to flow easily? I can think of other things that might be happening at
Relight. A pity that none of the Qeng Ho/Emergency were watching the
volcanoes instead of the sun at Relight.