
Screenshot: "A Fire Upon the Deep" sequel (2011) - 10ren
http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview.htm
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mikeyk
If you're a Vinge fan, the annotated version of A Fire Upon the Deep is a
great find (available on Kindle); it has his emacs notes (linked in-text) and
you can watch the characters develop, his editor suggest improvements, etc.
Looks like his system hasn't changed all that much, either.

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phr
Emacs is suggesting improvements? I want that extension!

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robin_reala
Clippy for Emacs?

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_delirium
I haven't interacted with him much, but Vinge was a speaker at this year's
main North American AI conference (AAAI), and was impressively engaged. Unlike
many famous speakers he didn't just fly in for his 2 hours and fly out again,
but attended a whole bunch of sessions for several days, and he was asking
pretty intelligent questions. Mostly normal questions about the specific
research at hand, too, not singularity-related questions or "how will this
research help the robot revolution". ;-) Seemed like a very down-to-earth guy;
I don't think most of the researchers who got asked a question by him realized
that he was a famous sci-fi author at the time.

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cema
Well, he was a professor of computer science (San Diego State University:
<http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/>) No surprise he asked smart
questions!

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hartror
A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favourite books ever. It successfully
combines hard sf and space opera and doesn't get bogged down in either. It is
large like many of its space opera kin but the plotting is such you never feel
like you are slogging through fluff. And the technologies and physics are well
thought out and their effects on the universe at large are well presented. The
aliens in it are probably the most interesting since Niven's Puppeteers.

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jbellis
I'm a huge Vinge fan, but I was really underwhelmed by Rainbow's End. (Was it
aimed at the YA market and I didn't notice?) Hope CotS is better.

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another
I understand the sentiment... but completely disagree.

_Rainbows End_ is less fun than his other novels, but it deals directly with
near-future issues in a way that only a few other SF authors are doing well
(Stross, Stephenson, recent Gibson, and who else?). It changed how I think---
much more than did, eg, _A Deepness in the Sky_. In terms of relevance to the
times, I'd rank it next to _True Names_.

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nl
_True Names_ is perhaps the most underrated SciFi story of all time. From
1981, and hasn't aged at all.

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Vivtek
Wooooo! I've always thought of the proper title for this hypothetical book as
"Sky fire" (to bring it full circle, you see). "Sky children" makes me think
it's a stealth quadrilogy. Sooner or later it's _got_ to cycle. "Children of
Fire?"

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w1ntermute
Does anyone know what text editor that is? Emacs?

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ptomato
Yes.

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fierarul
Now, the title is just mean: I assumed they are making a movie now!

But, oh well, the fact that Vinge uses Emacs is interesting although not
surprising given he was a CS teacher.

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sbierwagen
Interesting that he reads Slashdot, and not one of the more modern news sites.

Also, ugh eugh Papyrus in the site header, argh.

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petercooper
He only says "places like slashdot". Though in my experience there are plenty
of smart geeks and "hackers" who haven't even heard of sites like HN or
Reddit. It always surprises me, but sites like HN certainly seem to primarily
attract the progressive "eye on the ball" types who are into trying out new
sites. The traffic to some of the older, staid, more conservative sites
indicates there's still a hardcore of people enjoying them.

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_delirium
Slashdot has a much bigger population of "normal" developers and engineers, I
think, especially from big corporate places that aren't Google, and areas of
engineering that aren't software engineering. That's sometimes useful in the
comments area; there's plenty of junk, but there are also sometimes good
comments from people who work at places like IBM/HP/Boeing/Motorola/Exxon,
which is less common here. I think there's probably also more scientists of
the non-computer variety.

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nl
New Vinge, new Richard Morgan and maybe new Neal Stephenson (depending on how
you count The Mongoloid) all in 2011.

The Morgan & Stephenson books might be fantasy and historical fiction (?), but
if everything lives up to its promise this could be the best year for
SciFi/Fantasy since 2000, when Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" beat Stephenson
"Cryptonomicon" for the Hugo Award.

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henning
What formatting system is that?

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makeramen
Initial Reaction to the site: "Ahhhhhh! The Papyrus!"

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cletus
I'm really excited about the sequel. I read "A Fire Upon the Deep" only a year
or two ago. Amazing book. Not sure where he'll go from the end of it but
should be interesting.

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bgrins
Make sure to read "A Deepness in the Sky" first. It's a prequel to "A Fire
Upon the Deep", and also a Hugo award winner.

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joeyh
love the insight of all the notes and use of emacs!

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WingForward
This blog post is nearly a year old. Why is it coming up now?

