Although Vernor Vinge began his writing career in
the 1960s and has always produced work of good to
excellent quality, he wrote only two novels and a
handful of short stories during the next two
decades and was considered a fairly minor figure,
gaining some stature during the 1980s, but receiving major acclaim only after publication of A Fire in
the Deep (1992). Such stories as “Bookworm Run”
(1966) and “The Peddler’s Apprentice” (1975)
demonstrated that he could mix intelligent humor
and hard science fiction successfully, but no single
story stood out significantly. His first novel was
Grimm’s World (1969, expanded in 1987 as Tatja
Grimm’s World), an elaborate planetary adventure
story told from the viewpoint of an unusually welldrawn protagonist. The ruler of a primitive lost
colony world is convinced that life exists in the outside universe, but the results of renewed contact
are not what she had hoped for. Slavers prey on her
population; as usual, it is the common people who
suffer while those in authority battle for positions of
greater power.
Vinge’s second novel, The Witling (1976), has
a fascinating premise. The setting is a planet where
nearly everyone has the ability to teleport from one
place to another. Secretive human visitors explore
this civilization, where psi powers have made the
development of certain forms of technology unnecessary. The plot involves one individual who is
handicapped by an inability to teleport and by an
unbalanced love affair; but despite the interesting
speculation about the form such a society might
take, there is little narrative tension. Nearly five
years passed before Vinge’s next story appeared,
the novella True Names (1981), which might be
called a cyberpunk story. A network of highly sophisticated computers has the capacity to create a
consistent virtual reality world, but the efforts by a
group of technogeeks to refine this alternate reality
are hampered by the intervention of an aberrant
personality with possible psi powers.
His next two novels, The Peace War (1984)
and Marooned in Realtime (1986), were related.
Both explore the implications of the invention of
the status field, an enclosed space that exists independent of outside events or the passage of time.
Vinge uses the concept as the springboard for considerable speculation about the future of the
human race, much of which he kills off in the process, including a haunting visit to a distant future
where Earth has become essentially a deserted
relic. The two novels and a related short story
were reprinted in a single volume as Across Realtime (1986).
Vinge achieved major prominence with A
Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and the related A
Deepness in the Sky (1999), both of which won
Hugo Awards. The setting for both novels is a
vast, heavily populated universe in which the
human race is only a minor player. The former
book involves the quest by various factions to obtain possession of a superweapon, the product of a
lost technology, and possibly the only defense
against an ancient but now active menace. The
mix of space opera settings and situations with
the detail and sometimes the tone of cyberpunk
fiction seems at first an unlikely marriage, but
Vinge rises to the occasion. The second title is
slightly more traditional, as rival groups compete
to study and exploit a dormant alien civilization
that recently has shown signs of renewed activity;
the factions underestimate the implications of
their observations.
All of Vinge’s short fiction up to that point
has been assembled in The Collected Stories of
Vernor Vinge (2001). His novels appear after such
long intervals that the publication of each new one
seems to take his devoted readers by surprise, but
even his weakest material is thought-provoking
and entertaining. At his best, Vinge is one of the
most innovative and exciting writers in the field.