13 thoughts on “Vernor Vinge”

  1. Crap! Ours my turn out to be the penultimate generation prior to upload. But he wrote about it first. And who knows? He might still have. Many adventures ahead Mr. Slip….
    I hope he got to upload first.

    1. Twenty thousand years later, thanks to COUNTERMEASURE we’re stuck in the slow zone peninsula. So no FTL travel for us!

  3. One of the best. By coincidence, I’m in the last chapter of The Children of the Sky, just wrapping up another read of the Zones of Thought books.

    One of the best at the classic “what if. . .” of good scifi, and one of the most inventive world-builders. It’s a loss, of course, but I’m mostly just grateful we’ve got his writing still to read.

    Seems like we’ve had a rash of these: Michael Flynn, Gene Wolfe, Ursula Le Guin in these last few years. Maybe I’m just getting older.

  4. What a great picture, got to love Greg Bear grinning ear-to-ear. RIP Mr. Vinge, you will be greatly missed and remembered.

  6. How sad. He was a tremendous writer, and I’d be curious about the percentage of sci-fi fans who’ve read A Fire Upon the Deep.

    In retrospect, the communications in the book are like looking back at Usenet. If it had been written today, I wonder if the gas bag creatures on the gas giant planet would’ve been posting TikTok videos or something. Anyway, I’d always hoped he’d tell us what happened when the Blighter fleet arrived.

    1. If the Blight survived. It wasn’t clear the Blight could function in the Slow Zone. COUNTERMEASURE after all did not survive.

      In any case it wasn’t much of a mystery what the Blight did. Brain operation by remote control. I wonder in the most sophisticated version whether one could immediately tell if someone was under remote control. After all physiology would remain the same. People would need to eat and sleep. Discussing love, sex and politics however, might get monotonous….

        1. I always assumed that but wasn’t sure if I was projecting. I watched closely to see if jayembee showed up in any guise, but if so I missed him.

  7. Looking at some of the big sci-fi authors from the 1960’s through the 1980’s, here’s some of the losses over the last 20 years.

    Harry Harrison died in 2005.
    Arthur C. Clarke and Thomas M. Disch died in 2008.
    J.G. Ballard died in 2009.
    James P. Hogan died in 2010.
    Anne McCaffrey died in 2011.
    Ray Bradbury died in 2012.
    Frederik Pohl, Iain M. Banks, and Jack Vance died in 2013.
    Jerry Pournelle died in 2017
    Ursula K. Le Guin died in 2018.
    Gene Wolfe died in 2019.
    Ben Bova died in 2020.

  8. RE: Ursula Le Guin

    I met her several times. She was a volunteer member of our short-lived Planetarium advisory committee.

    She was a lovely person. Personable (to be redundant).

    I couldn’t invest enough time to read most of her prose. She just never seemed able to get to the point before I lost interest.

    Did I say she was a lovely person? It’s because she was.

    Never met Vernor. I don’t get around much.

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