The late great Vernor Vinge: A major SF writer worth remembering (and reading) on his birthday


By Michael Grossberg

Today, Oct. 2, is Vernor Vinge’s birthday.

Acclaimed SF writer Vernor Vinge (Creative Commons license)

If he had lived, Vinge would have been 80 years old.

Born Oct. 2, 1944, Vinge died in March, 2024 after struggling for several years with progressive Parkinsons disease.

Yet, Vinge is worth remembering (and likely to be well-remembered) for his consistently brilliant and often prescient science fiction – several works of which have been recognized with Prometheus Awards over the decades.

While Vinge has passed, his legacy remains.

In particular, Vinge wrote an astonishing range of excellent, award-winning science fiction that often was prescient about exploring trends and technologies that most others hadn’t begun thinking about yet.

LFS President William H. Stoddard giving novelist Vernor Vinge his 2014 Prometheus Special Award for Lifetime Achievement at ConDor in San Diego Photo courtesy of Stoddard

“A titan in the literary genre that explores a limitless range of potential destinies, Vernor enthralled millions with tales of plausible tomorrows, made all the more vivid by his polymath masteries of language, drama, characters and the implications of science,” wrote his friend and fellow SF author David Brin in tribute to Vinge after his passing.

“Accused by some of a grievous sin – that of ‘optimism’ – Vernor gave us peerless legends that often depicted human success at overcoming problems… those right in front of us… while posing new ones! New dilemmas that may lie just ahead of our myopic gaze. He would often ask: “What if we succeed? Do you think that will be the end of it?”

READING VINGE: WHERE TO BEGIN?

While Vinge, who popularized the concept of the “singularity,” often considered the end of things, LFS members and other SF fans ought to consider a more relevant question after his passing: Where to begin?

Vinge’s novels are so multi-leveled, brilliant, intriguing, insightful and rewarding that they reward rereading. For Vinge fans but especially those who have not yet discovered the many pleasures and insights of his fiction, here’s a guide to which Vinge works may be best to start reading.

A good place to begin is with Vinge’s short fiction.

That includes his seminal stories “True Names” and “The Ungoverned,” both inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, and his Hugo-winning novellas, “Fast Times at Fairmont High” and “The Cookie Monster.”

But which to read first?

“TRUE NAMES”

I’d recommend “True Names,” inducted in 2004 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, because it’s often cited as the first work of science fiction to depict cyberspace.

A landmark when published in 1981, Vernor Vinge’s now-classic story showed how the struggle for control might penetrate the new medium.

Depicting the U.S. government as the central adversary, the story follows a group of computer hackers who keep their true identities secret while being among the first to adopt a new full-immersion virtual-reality technology.

As the Prometheus Blog Appreciation notes, “They do so out of curiosity or an entrepreneurial desire to profit – both respectable and even laudable motivations from the libertarian perspective that appreciates the crucial role of innovation and free markets in advancing human progress, prosperity, well-being and knowledge.”

For more about this story, read the full Appreciation of “True Names.”

“THE UNGOVERNED”

Libertarian SF fans might also enjoy reading “The Ungoverned,” the 2004 Hall of Fame winner and one of the rare SF stories to portray a plausible and fully libertarian society.

Set in the ungoverned lands of a recovering future Kansas after a social collapse, Vinge’s 1985 novella focuses on what happens when New Mexico’s statist government tries to invade anarchist-libertarian Kansas with unexpected results.

The story is of special interest to libertarians because it portrays a stateless social order along the lines envisioned by economist-historian Murray Rothbard, economist David Friedman and other leading anarcho-capitalist libertarian theorists.

For more about “The Ungoverned,” read the blog’s review-essay Appreciation.

MAROONED IN REAL TIME

After reading one or more of Vinge’s stories, and “The Ungoverned” in particular, a good novel to read next is Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime, the 1987 Prometheus Best Novel winner.

Set after the events in “The Ungoverned,” Marooned in Realtime looks back to an era in which libertarian values had triumphed, with the central character admired for his pivotal role in ending one of the Earth’s last states.

Taking the same concept as Vinge’s earlier Prometheus-finalist novel The Peace War of the “bobble,” a spherical impenetrable force field that agelessly traps whatever it encloses, Marooned in Realtime jumps forward over thousands or millions of years in a story of cosmic vision.

For more about Marooned in Realtime, read the Prometheus Blog’s review-essay Appreciation.

VINGE’S NEW SPACE OPERA

Arguably the centerpiece of Vinge’s work is the interconnected but separately readable novels in his future-history series that helped define the New Space Opera, beginning in the 1990s.

Both A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky won Hugo Awards for best novel, with the latter also winning the 2000 Prometheus Award for Best Novel.

A Deepness in the Sky probably is most rewarding to read first, since its events precede A Fire Upon the Deep. However, each novel was written to be independent, with its own story that can be appreciated on its own.

Published in 1999, Deepness is both a sequel and something of a prequel to Fire, published in 1992.

Set 30,000 years before Fire, Deepness revolves around contact and conflict between the Qeng Ho, a decentralized group of interstellar trading families, and the Emergent fleet of the more bureaucratic and hierarchical Spider civilization.

Set in the inner Milky Way galaxy with fully realized characters, both alien and human, the story highlights the threats to civilization from centralized power while illuminating the civilizing dynamics of free-trade networks.

As the Prometheus Blog appreciation notes, Vinge’s epic novel imagines a complex future with many human-inhabited planets that have developed over several thousand years through slower-than-light interstellar travel, terraforming, life-extension techniques, and advanced computer networks.

Yet many of these advanced societies repeatedly have collapsed into barbarism and decay through the failed dream of collectivism, statism, or subtle computational failures.

A trading fleet based on the interurban mercantile networks of the overseas Chinese and other Asian communities, the Qeng Ho turns out to be the actual sustaining force for development and civilization.

For more about A Deepness in the Sky, read the full Prometheus Blog Appreciation.

Note: Vernor Vinge was one of only four SF writers to receive a Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Such recognition was well-deserved.

F YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS:

* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.

* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.

* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies (including the recent 2023 ceremony with inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freer and Sarah Hoyt), Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.

* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.

* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction,  join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.

Published by

Michael Grossberg

Michael Grossberg, who founded the LFS in 1982 to help sustain the Prometheus Awards, has been an arts critic, speaker and award-winning journalist for five decades. Michael has won Ohio SPJ awards for Best Critic in Ohio and Best Arts Reporting (seven times). He's written for Reason, Libertarian Review and Backstage weekly; helped lead the American Theatre Critics Association for two decades; and has contributed to six books, including critical essays for the annual Best Plays Theatre Yearbook and an afterword for J. Neil Schulman's novel The Rainbow Cadenza. Among books he recommends from a libertarian-futurist perspective: Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist & How Innovation Works, David Boaz's The Libertarian Mind and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress.

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