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| "This colossal anthology covers the return of sf to themes based in the hard sciences. . . . A very satisfactory overview of a major portion of contemporary sf and a sterling achievement by Tor and the Hartwell-Cramer team."
Booklist
From Paul McAuley's tale of runaway technology ("Gene Wars") to Gregory Benford's story of evolution and murder ("Immersion"), the 41 stories in this annotated anthology provide a strong argument for the revival of hard sf as a major force in the genre in the 1990s. Library Journal |
Vernor Vinge: Fast Times at Fairmont High
Vernor Vinge (1944- ) is a masters of hard science fiction who has moved to the forefront of the field in recent years. Vinge is a mathematician living in California who has been writing hard SF for thirty years and slowly gaining a reputation as one of the significant talents in the field. Virtually unnoticed in the 1960s and '70s, his novels and stories have sometime been spaced years apart, so that although he entered the field at nearly the same time as Larry Niven, his work was known for years only to a comparatively small circle of specialists. He is also, of all hard SF writers, the one who has been often concerned over the years with computers and advances in computer technology. In contrast to William Gibson, who invented an image so popular and potent that it has been imposed on the real world of computers, Vinge is the writer who understands the technology and most accurately forecast and described in his SF the implications of computers and personal computer communication. He is as radical an hard sf writer as anyone in this book, but the politics in his fiction in the early 1980s was Libertarian, and Sterling named him in Cheap Truth as one of the figures in opposition to Radical Hard SF/ the Movement.
He became famous far outside the SF field in the 1990s for essay, originally published in The Whole Earth Quarterly, in which he introduced the idea of the Singularity: "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era"(1993). His abstract:" Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented."
Competition is one of Vinge's themes. In "Nature, Bloody in Tooth and Claw?" (1996 address to UK Eastercon), he says:
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. . . other paradigms for competition and evolution will be much more appropriate in the Post-Human era. Imagine a worldwide, distributed reasoning system in which there are thousands of millions of nodes, many of superhuman power. Some will have knowable identity -- say the ones that are currently separated by low bandwidth links from the rest -- but these separations are constantly changing, as are the identities themselves. With lower thresholds between Self and Others, the bacterial paradigm returns. Competition is not for life and death, but is more a sharing in which the losers continue to participate. And as with the corporate paradigm, this new situation is one in which very large organisms can come into existence, can work for a time at some extremely complex problem -- and then may find it more efficient to break down into smaller souls (perhaps of merely human size) to work on tasks involving greater mobility or more restricted communication resources. |
The last fifteen years have been his most productive period, featuring his collection True Names (2001), The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001), and his best novels to date, Marooned in Realtime (1986); A Fire Upon the Deep (1992); A Deepness in the Sky (1999). The last two each won the Hugo Award. He is now widely popular, has recently retired to write full time, and seems likely to be one of the major hard SF writers of the next decade.
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High" is a story about computers and education in a very competitive near future. The teenage characters know what they have to do to survive in this dangerous environment, and that sometimes whoever cheats best, wins -- but that you lose if you are caught. This is a scary story, especially for some parents. And the atmosphere is so sunny, except at night when most of this happens.