Hacker Chronicles 2/HACKER2.BIN/451.SF018093.TXT

Text File | 1993-02-23 | 18KB | 408 lines

SF-LOVERS Digest          Wednesday, 10 Feb 1993       Volume 18 : Issue 93

Today's Topics:

                          Books - Vinge (14 msgs)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 21 Jan 93 17:47:18 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Dave Schweisguth)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book...

Lenore Levine ([e-mail]) wrote:
>[A Fire Upon the Deep] ... just came out in paperback; and I really
>enjoyed reading it. I liked the original scientific concepts and species
>design (which seem to be very rare in 90's SF).  I would like to know what
>people think of this book.

Just finished it. I particularly liked the Tines/Packfolk version of group
minds, and was sorry that none of them made it to the Beyond. The several
distinct side effects of the radio cloaks were well worked out. On the
other hand, Vinge is no Wolfe, and the aliens were altogether too human. I
was reminded of Hal Clement on a larger scale. Mind you, I do like Hal
Clement.

>Notice how well he's captured the flavor of the Net? I'm sure that "Death
>to Vermin" guy's posted here before :-) .

The "is-Vinge-on-Usenet?" business was discussed to death when the hardback
came out, and I can't see why. It's such an obvious steal, right down to
the cheesy headers. If 50,000 years and the computational advantages of the
Beyond don't improve network communications, I'll stick with the Slow Zone.
I only caught one glimmer of technological innovation, when a burning smell
on the Olvira turned out to be a _diagnostic_.

Dave Schweisguth
Yale MB&B & Chemistry
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 21 Jan 93 16:47:00 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Jan van 't Ent)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book...

[e-mail] (Lenore Levine) writes:
[ About _A Fire Upon the Deep_]
>...just came out in paperback; and I really enjoyed reading it.

Yes, me too. The setting is very promising for more stories, which need not
tie in very closely (so to speculate a little: for possible new books it
shouldn't be necessary to read all the previous stuff).  I also liked the
various mixing and non-mixing aliens, and the general mix of technical SF
versus good characters Vernor achieved.

>Notice how well he's captured the flavor of the Net? I'm sure that "Death
>to Vermin" guy's posted here before :-) .

Yeah, well, on the one hand I liked it ... it was easily recognizable
(although I wouldn't know how non-net-users think about those postings),
but on the other hand I found it all too simple-sounding for such a highly
developed civilisation ... so it was both nice to read, and irritating at
the same time :-)

Jan
Erasmus Universiteit
Rotterdam, Netherlands
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 22 Jan 93 00:44:33 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Dani Zweig)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book...

[e-mail] (Dave Schweisguth):
>>Notice how well he's captured the flavor of the Net? I'm sure that "Death
>>to Vermin" guy's posted here before :-) .
>
>If 50,000 years and the computational advantages of the Beyond don't
>improve network communications...

It was a direct steal from the net, and it worked rather well.  I thought
the similarities well motivated, though.  They didn't just stem from a lack
of imagination.  The main thing to remember is that, despite the
overwhelming number of messages, the main constraints on Vinge's net are a
narrow bandwidth - exceedingly narrow as you move to the lower Beyond - and
a very high cost.  Each of the participants is not an individual, as is the
case here, but a planetary system or equivalent, that is choosing to spend
a noticeable portion of its budget on these communications.

Dani Zweig
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 22 Jan 93 04:00:29 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book...

Speaking of _A Fire Upon the Deep...

(SPOILERS)

   What did yinz think of the the psychological theme? Kind of reminded me
of Dick's _Dr. Bloodmoney_. Vinge seems to be playing with characters with
severely compromised personalities. The Skroderiders discovering that they
are genetically/technologically programmed saboteurs, Phrom tortured by his
artificial, puppet nature, the Sjandra Kei refugees dealing with the
destruction of their culture, the unstable nature of the Tines pack-minds,
they all share a certain lack of mental integrity. Interesting that a 600pg
space opera plotted on the galactic scale is at its heart a psychological
novel.

Mitch Hagmaier

------------------------------

Date: 23 Jan 93 17:16:12 GMT
From: [e-mail] (David Dyer-bennet)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Vernor Vinge's New Book...

Lenore Levine wrote:
> I would like to know what people think of this book.

I enjoyed it immensely.  For some reason the scenes with the doggies didn't
properly engage my attention, but I can't see why; I can't analytically
find anything "wrong" with them.

>Notice how well he's captured the flavor of the Net? I'm sure that "Death
>to Vermin" guy's posted here before :-) .

I both greatly enjoyed, and was very bothered by, this aspect.  Given the
time-span involved, I think it's *wrong* for the net to be so completely
recognizable.  (I have this same problem with Card's net in the Ender
books.)

------------------------------

Date: 24 Jan 93 16:45:12 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Lenore Levine)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's New Book...

[e-mail] (David Dyer-bennet)
writes:
[About A Fire Upon the Deep]
>I both greatly enjoyed, and was very bothered by, this aspect.  Given the
>time-span involved, I think it's *wrong* for the net to be so completely
>recognizable.  (I have this same problem with Card's net in the Ender
>books.)

But sometimes the far future has to be interpreted to make it familiar.
For example, Vinge's Beyond humans come from so far in the future that
they are not members of any current race (and there are hints that their
genes have been extensively edited). Is it reasonable that the language
they speak would so resemble Norwegian, or indeed, any Indo-European
language? And yet, having them use words from a real language, one related
to English, but one not many of us are familiar with, does give this world
a feeling of reality that names and words from an invented language would
not.

------------------------------

Date: 25 Jan 93 20:12:31 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Matt Austern)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book...

The Net messages were a bit too lifelike to seem realistic: it's hard to
imagine that level of immaturity when the participants are entire
civilizations, and when posting costs a noticeable fraction of one's
planetary wealth.  Still, even that isn't completely implausible; what
we're reading isn't the postings themselves, but the translations of the
translations of the translations of the postings.  We can imagine that the
postings seem more sensible to the alien civilizations that posted them
than they do to us, and that the sophomoric flavor of many of the postings
is just the way that the translation programs attempt to deal with what are
really incomprehensibly alien viewpoints.

Matthew Austern
[phone]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 29 Jan 93 17:56:50 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Fred Zimmerman)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book...

I am a heavy net user, and didn't find Vinge's use of the net analogue
distracting at all.  I took it for granted that there was a much larger and
much more incomprehensible volume of traffic on the "real" net in Vinge's
world, and that he was presenting us with representative excerpts to give
us an idea of plot developments in his galaxy.

------------------------------

Date: 29 Jan 93 20:08:13 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Jeff Brandenburg)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge's new book...

matt@physics2 (Matt Austern) writes:
>We can imagine that the postings seem more sensible to the alien
>civilizations that posted them than they do to us, and that the sophomoric
>flavor of many of the postings is just the way that the translation
>programs attempt to deal with what are really incomprehensibly alien
>viewpoints.

This is, after all, the whole point - the book has a target audience.
Perhaps the satire on Usenet could have been a little more subtle, the
Tines a little less humanoid.  But I don't think I was alone in recognizing
certain individuals or sites on Vinge's Known Net, or people I've known in
Scriber Jaqueramaphan.

There is *plenty* of subtlety in the book.  The games with Tines' names,
the ocean/shore theme, the bits of history, the depths of mystery - what
are the Zones?  What is the Blight, exactly?  Heck, what's a flamed
trellis?

Some things in the book are easy to recognize, and enjoyable.  Some things
seem utterly obscure, and are still enjoyable.  I think the book as a whole
is a lot more substantial than most of the SF I've read recently, and it's
certainly a lot of fun...

Jeff Brandenburg
Va. Tech CS

------------------------------

Date: 2 Feb 93 22:43:37 GMT
From: [e-mail] (David W. Levine)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Vernor Vinge (Fire upon the deep setting)

For those who are looking over the background to Fire Upon the Deep, you
should hunt up a copy of Vernor Vinge's story "The Blabber" I knew that the
setting was familiar and it took me a while to hunt down the reference.
It's in his collection "Threats ...and Other Promises", Baen, 1988. It is
post Fire Upon the Deep, and interlocks with a bunch of stuff in that
setting. I'm going to do the cross-matching and post some more, but I'd
file this as a must read if you're intrigued by the setting. No spoilers in
this post, but when I get the time...

On the same subject, the notes between the stories in "Threats ..." are
pretty intriguing. Does anyone know if Vinge has written any non-fiction on
the subject of his writing?

David W. Levine
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 2 Feb 93 04:55:30 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Joseph Brenner)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Vernor Vinge's "The Peace War"

Just re-read "The Peace War", the first novel in a volume issued by Baen
books as _Across Realtime_.  Vernor Vinge is okay, sometimes... doesn't
have the flash of a Gibson, but he does manage to provide enough novelistic
weight to carry his premises (character's are okay, plot is interesting,
imagery is decent, even striking in places)... but what about those
premises, huh?  You got this lone genius working at Livermore who comes up
with this boffo idea for generating these weird little semi-permanent,
impenetrable force fields they call "bobbles".  Some idealistic/power
hungry forces in the bureaucracy at Livermore decide to try and save the
world (bobbling nuclear weapons, and so on) and end up (a) taking over the
world (b) crushing all heavy industry for fear it could be used to make
weapons.  The "Tinkers" (read "Hackers") in the outback continue making
technical advances in secret, until they outstrip the capabilities of the
stultified bureacracy of "The Peace Authority".  Ultimately, the same lone
genius (now in hiding) with the help of an apprentice genius make some
advances in bobble technology.  They learn to project bobbles using
radically less energy, though their techniques are slower, and the size of
the bobbles limited, and so on.

So what do you make of all this stuff?  I mean, first of all, bobbles are
bullshit.  There's no physics behind this stuff, no speculative physics
even, just a magical effect the author has come up with, and back-filled
with a small amount of technical gobbldygook.  So this is science fiction,
as opposed to fantasy?

Well maybe.  Fantasy tends to focus on things like "What if you had three
wishes."  Even bad Science Fiction tends to focus on questions like "What
if *everyone* had three wishes?  What if you could buy three wishes?"  So,
SF gets closer to reality than F, even if there isn't much S in it.

And I give Vinge some points for picking a fairly creative piece of
fantastic technology to write about, rather than sticking to the usual
cliched things like faster-than-light travel.

Okay then, how about this business of a conspiracy within a government lab
to take over the world?  A bit much?  Well, maybe not...  If you start
taking the nanotech scenarios seriously, this sort of thing starts looking
really tempting.  If you hit on a really big technical advance, what should
you do with it?  Would you tell your bosses how to make the next atom bomb,
and hope they did the right thing with it?  Maybe the way to preserving
world stability is to get to the next break through first, and use it
before the "bad guys" do, whoever you think the bad guys might be.  (This
probably isn't a *good* way to go, but it might be the *only* way...).  So
the villains are believable to me.

And the heroes?  Is it really possible to beat the big, slow, government
labs, with clever, cheap experiments performed by small groups of
individuals on their own?  I dunno.  Maybe it's worth thinking about
though... before you decide to try and get rich quick by writing yet
another piece of video game software.

So Vernor Vinge gets a "thumbs-up" without reluctance from me, even if his
stuff isn't perfect... (like, check out the stories in Poul Anderson's
MAURI & KITH.  Isn't Vinge covering a lot of the same ground?).

------------------------------

Date: 3 Feb 93 19:09:01 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Christopher Marshall)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Vernor Vinge's imitation internet

There has been some discussion about Vernor Vinge and his imitation of the
Internet newsgroups in A Fire Upon the Deep.

I would like to add my two cents.

I liked it.  I don't think he was being unsophisticated in portraying a
galaxy wide internet as having the familiar text interface that we all know
and love.  It does not matter how advanced your technology is, if you have
limited bandwidth channel (say limited to roughly what we are used to on
the internet) then you can't have a mind blowing full sensory spectrum kick
ass interface. Text messages might be as good as you can do.  Who's to say
what factors would limit your bandwidth on a super-luminal communications
link stretching from one section of the galaxy to the other?  The resources
of an entire solar system might barely be able to sustain a 1Mb/s link
across a thousand light years with a round trip delay of two hours.

In fact, there was an incident in which a full sensory spectrum broadcast
over galatic distances took place which was referred to as 'The most
incredible waste of bandwidth ever seen,' or words to that effect.

Chris Marshall
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 3 Feb 93 23:50:46 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Dani Zweig)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge (Fire upon the deep setting)

[e-mail] :
>For those who are looking over the background to Fire Upon the Deep, you
>should hunt up a copy of Vernor Vinge's story "The Blabber"...

"The Blabber" takes place about one thousand years after AFutD.  To be more
precise, AFutD, which was written later, was placed about a thousand years
before Blabber.  The author realized that there were some inconsistencies
between the two, but wasn't willing to ruthlessly mold the novel to be
completely consistent with the story.  The story, btw, is (among things) a
relatively unabashed homage to "The Star Beast".

Dani Zweig
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 3 Feb 93 21:41:33 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Matt Austern)
Reply-to: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Vernor Vinge (Fire upon the deep setting)

[e-mail] (Dani Zweig) writes:
> "The Blabber" takes place about one thousand years after AFutD.  To be
> more precise, AFutD, which was written later, was placed about a thousand
> years before Blabber.  The author realized that there were some
> inconsistencies between the two, but wasn't willing to ruthlessly mold
> the novel to be completely consistent with the story.  The story, btw, is
> (among things) a relatively unabashed homage to "The Star Beast".

A thousand, eh?  It's clear from "The Blabber" that it has to take place at
least 500 years after A Fire Upon the Deep, but I didn't see any obvious
way to date it more precisely than that.

(Actually, I was a trifle puzzled whether a character in "The Blabber" was
supposed to be the same person as the character in A Fire Upon the Deep who
had the same name: a lot of time has passed between the two stories, after
all!  It's also noteworthy that this character doesn't refer, in "The
Blabber," to any of the events in A Fire Upon the Deep, but does refer to a
completely different struggle.  How many galaxy-shaking fights can one
person reasonably expect to engage in?)

Matthew Austern
[e-mail]

------------------------------

End of SF-LOVERS Digest
***********************