Go read some Vernor Vinge

R.I.P. to my favorite science fiction author

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93960218

“If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.” — Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge, my favorite science fiction author, passed away yesterday, at the age of 79. Hexapodia, my podcast with Brad DeLong, takes it’s name from a Vinge novel; in fact, it was me seeing Brad make a Vinge reference that led to us becoming friends. David Brin, another of my favorite authors, and a close friend of Vinge’s, has written a moving tribute on his blog; if you want to read tributes to Vinge, I would definitely start there. But as a devoted fan who considers it a point of pride to have exchanged a few emails with Vinge over the years, I thought I should write my own as well.

Vinge is probably best known as the creator of the concept of the technological singularity — which we now simply call The Singularity. Vinge was not the first to imagine that the creation of AI might lead to a rapid intelligence explosion, as thinking machines quickly built better and better versions of themselves; that honor, somewhat predictably, goes to von Neumann. But Vinge coined the term, and it was his own extrapolations of the idea that form the basis of basically all of our thinking on the topic to this day. If you read Vinge’s famous essays on the Singularity — the first in 1983 and the second in 1993, you’ll see basically all of the concepts that AI engineers, effective altruists, “e/acc” folks, rationalists, etc. argue about to this very day.

But what really made Vinge the father of the Singularity was his fiction. His 1981 novella “True Names” created many of the tropes about artificial intelligence and virtual worlds that have now become standard. It’s such a tour de force that top computer scientists felt compelled to write a series of essays exploring its ideas, and it’s often considered the founding work of the entire cyberpunk genre.

Besides envisioning AIs as relentlessly self-improving machines, “True Names” also imagines that AIs will have the ability to hijack any computer system they’re allowed to talk to, unless prevented from doing so by another AI. The idea of AIs as general intelligences duking it out for control of computer systems in a sort of wizards’ duel quickly became somewhat of a cliche in cyberpunk fiction, but it would have seemed almost comically ignorant to a cybersecurity expert in the 2000s. No longer, perhaps; with LLMs responsible for co-writing ever more of the world’s software, reality may be coming around to Vinge’s vision. “True Names” also foresaw that computing power would be a fungible and ever-scarce resource that AIs would constantly hunger for.

Vinge’s future visions were always bedeviled by the Singularity. He thought about the idea constantly, but was always led to the inevitable conclusion that the Singularity will represent such a break point in human society that we simply can’t imagine what will come after it. After the AIs explode into godlike intelligence, they will presumably invent technologies beyond our comprehension, which in turn will change society in radical and unpredictable ways.

In other words, it’s almost not worth thinking about what comes after the Singularity. This has led other sci-fi authors to gently poke fun at the idea as quasi-religious — the so-called “rapture of the nerds” — even as they themselves incorporate it into their writing.

But Vinge believed in the Singularity, as a real and imminent thing. Which presented a problem for his science fiction — if the world is about to become incomprehensibly advanced and weird, how do you write about the future? His novels are often driven by clever solutions to this problem.

For example, in his “Zones of Thought” series, Vinge envisioned a large region of the galaxy where intelligence had an upper limit, and AIs or augmented humans could only get so smart. (It’s hinted that this prohibition is maintained by some sort of distant godlike power.) This “Slow Zone” serves as a kind of incubator for civilizations and intelligences; without a Singularity, they’re forced to progress slowly and evolve their own unique characteristics, before they eventually escape to the regions of space where godlike AI is possible. This allowed Vinge to write some more traditional space opera without feeling like a retrofuturist.

The Zones of Thought books are, in my opinion, some of the best space opera ever written. The classic is A Fire Upon the Deep, a wacky and rollicking adventure filled with bizarre aliens, enigmatic space gods, and a galaxy-destroying fascism virus. It dispenses with most of the classic 20th-century-derived spacefaring tropes, and puts in more realistic ones — space crews command their ships from virtual reality, combat is carried out with drone swarms and with hyperkinetic projectiles launched from far away, and so on. This is the book that Hexapodia gets its name from.

It also introduces Pham Nuwen, one of my favorite sci-fi space adventurers — a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon for the age of IT and AI. If TV producers are looking for sci-fi with an Asian protagonist, they should adapt the Zones of Thought books!

But anyway, as great as A Fire Upon the Deep is, I enjoy the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, even more. It’s set in the Slow Zone, so humans and aliens alike have to use old technologies like cryogenic suspension, laser guns, and old-fashioned computer programming. Pham Nuwen is also the hero of this book, though he’s joined by some very fun spider-aliens. The spiders live on a weird planet that requires them to hibernate for years at a time; only occasionally do they get the chance to emerge from slumber and rebuild their society, which forces them to be especially creative and smart. (If you recognize a similarity to the Trisolarans of Three Body or the spider world of Children of Time, well…yes, Vinge was very influential.)

A Deepness in the Sky is much slower-paced than its predecessor, but I like it better, because it doesn’t take technological progress for granted — it shows how institutions and individual actors interact to drive innovation. As such, it’s more of a novel about the post-1970s technological slowdown than it is about the Singularity — the spiders’ hibernation feels like a metaphor for the temporary slumber of the early 20th century’s rapid progress, waiting to be reignited. Deepness also has some of the very best villains I’ve ever encountered in any book, and the plotting is just genius.

Vinge’s other books are less well-known, but equally worth reading. In The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime, he solves the Singularity problem by splitting the world up in time rather than in space. The basic plot is that some dastardly university administrators invent temporal stasis bubbles called “bobbles”, and use this technology to take over the world — until they’re stopped by a plucky group of independent inventors. (You can really tell that this plot was written by a professor; Vinge taught computer science and math at San Diego State University.) Eventually the world is freed, but becomes very weird and hauntingly lonely, as different people use the bobbles to project themselves forward for different amounts of time.

The Peace War series is too unique to really describe, but it’s definitely worth reading; in many ways, the second book has the best characterization and storytelling of any Vinge novel. It also has a ton of wildly creative little technological touches — for example, the idea that everyone in the future will be surrounded by a cloud of autonomous AI-equipped servitor drones.

The other interesting thing about The Peace War — especially the first book — is its view of how technology progresses. Despite the huffy bureaucrats’ best attempts at stifling innovation, new technology simply arrives on its own, propelled by talented tinkerers working in their garage. It’s a very 1980s vision of progress — I once joked that The Peace War was “Real Business Cycles: The Novel” (a joke that only economists will get). In the era of Jobs and Wozniak, that notion of invention resonated deeply.

But over the years, Vinge evolved toward a more complex, nuanced view of what drives progress. The brilliant inventors are still there in A Deepness in the Sky (published 16 years after The Peace War), but they depend crucially on funding and support from the military. It’s Endogenous Growth Theory: The Novel.

That shift parallels a larger evolution in Vinge’s thinking about society. In the 80s, he’s a staunch libertarian; his 1985 short story “The Ungoverned” among the purest expressions of late-20th-century anarcho-capitalist thinking you’ll ever read in science fiction. (Minor spoiler: It also predicts that governments will be made obsolete when regular people are able to build nuclear weapons in their houses. This sounds ridiculous, but Vinge’s future visions have an uncomfortable habit of seeming silly for a few decades after they’re written, only to suddenly become obvious and inevitable.) Vinge’s villains are often meddling bureaucrats and administrators, overbearing governmental authorities, etc. His ultimate antagonist is the Blight from A Fire Upon the Deep, a viral pseudo-AI that represents authoritarianism in its elemental form.

By the 2000s, though, Vinge had a more nuanced view of the need for robust governmental institutions. In Deepness, he posits a cycle where societies alternate between poles of anarchy and totalitarianism, prospering only when they’re somewhere in the middle of the two. In his 2006 novel Rainbows End (note the lack of apostrophe in the title), the military takes center stage as the essential guardian of peaceful progress against tech-enabled terrorists. And so on.

Rainbows End, in fact, is quite possibly Vinge’s most intriguing future vision of all. Emergent AI is there — in fact, it emerges from the internet itself, an interesting anticipation of how LLMs would eventually develop. But the key technology of Rainbows End is augmented reality, which Vinge envisions us accessing through contact lenses. AR allows everyone to walk around in their own personalized world, even though they coexist in physical space. Producing content for these AR worlds becomes the most important human industry, and this is done via independent collaborations across vast distances — perhaps an anticipation of DAOs.

This also upends the world of education. With traditional skills no longer in demand, traditional corporations no longer effective, and mental and artistic flexibility at a premium, continuing education becomes universal, old people go back to high school, and teenagers have the economic advantage. Vinge explores this idea further in a related short story, “Fast Times at Fairmont High”.

Rainbows End isn’t as popular as Vinge’s earlier novels, but in many ways it’s just as influential. A quarter century after Vinge defined our future vision of AI and the Singularity, he came back and defined our vision of AR. That’s an impressive feat.

Vinge was perhaps the most technologically visionary sci-fi writer of the past 50 years — a worthy successor to H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov. And yet in some ways he excelled even those august predecessors. Vinge imbues his characters with an emotional depth that very few sci-fi authors can match, and his plots are consistently complex and engaging. He’s the rare writer who really could do it all.

Oh, and also, the AI in Rainbows End is a rabbit, which I like.

So anyway, go read some Vernor Vinge. Personally, I recommend starting with “True Names”, then A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, then The Peace War and Marooned in Real Time, and then Rainbows End. And if you need more Vinge after that, move on to the rest of his short stories, and also read The Children of the Sky, the third book in the Zones of Thought series. Unfortunately, Vinge was not a very prolific author, but he made up for it with quality.

He will be greatly missed. But many of his visions have yet to be born. Hold on to your goggles.

---