Vernor Vinge

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Vernor Vinge bigraphy, stories - Mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction author

Vernor Vinge : biography

02 October 1944 –

Vernor Steffen Vinge ( born October 2, 1944) is a retired San Diego State University (SDSU) Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels and novellas A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), Rainbows End (2006), Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004), as well as for his 1984 novel The Peace War and his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argues that the creation of superhuman artificial intelligence will mark the point at which "the human era will be ended," such that no current models of reality are sufficient to predict beyond it.

References in other works

In Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus (published in 1972, before Vinge had written his best-known work), the narrator finds a collection of Vernor Vinge stories on a top shelf of a far-future library on a distant world, though the cover has been so worn down that he thinks a librarian must have mistaken the "V. Vinge" on the spine as "Winge".

In David Brin’s Kiln People, there is a reference to the main character experiencing something like "Vingeian focus," a quick reference to A Deepness in the Sky. Vinge’s review of the book is featured on the back cover.

The "Vinge catastrophe" is mentioned in chapter 8 of Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando.

In the sleeve notes for Harmonic 313’s album When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence, Mark Pritchard refers to his "good friend Vernor Vinge", crediting him for naming the "technological singularity".

In Robert J. Sawyer’s WWW:Watch, a novel featuring an emerging artificial intelligence, a character quotes from Vinge’s 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity in reference to what is happening. (The listener is surprised to hear that the author’s name is pronounced "Vinjee" instead of rhyming with "hinge".)

The ‘Tine’ race, introduced in A Fire Upon the Deep, is an example of a gestalt-sentient species: a race that is only sentient in a grouping of individually non-sentient members (distinct from the more common group consciousness in that individual members of such are still themselves sentient or a hive mind in that there is no single sentient entity controlling large groups of non-sentients). This type of alien race is rarely used in science fiction, as it has no Earthly analogue and is thus hard for readers to understand. Anvil of Stars, by Greg Bear, also makes use of this type of alien with its ‘Cord’ race, although as both books were released in 1992, it is unlikely that one references the other.

In the webcomic Questionable Content, a fictional speech on A.I. rights is quoted. The full speech, available on the artist’s website , names the speaker as "V. Vinge" in homage to Vinge.

Life and work

Vinge published his first short story, "Bookworm, Run!", in the March 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction, then edited by John W. Campbell. The story explores the theme of artificially augmented intelligence by connecting the brain directly to computerised data sources. He became a moderately prolific contributor to SF magazines in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969, he expanded the story "Grimm’s Story" (Orbit 4, 1968) into his first novel, Grimm’s World. His second novel, The Witling, was published in 1975.

Vinge came to prominence in 1981 with his novella True Names, perhaps the first story to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others.

His next two novels, The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986), explore the spread of a future libertarian society, and deal with the impact of a technology which can create impenetrable force fields called ‘bobbles’. These books built Vinge’s reputation as an author who would explore ideas to their logical conclusions in particularly inventive ways. Both books were nominated for the Hugo Award, but lost to novels by William Gibson and Orson Scott Card.