Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge (October 2, 1944 – March 20, 2024) was a computer scientist and science fiction author, as well as a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics.

Vernor Vinge in 2006

Quotes

The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)

Presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, 30–31 March 1993.[1] Also retrievable from the NASA technical reports server as part of NASA CP-10129. A slightly changed version appeared in Whole Earth Review, Winter 1993.

• Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

• The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century.

• We can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

• I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is...

• The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.

Short fiction

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001)

Page numbers from the trade paperback edition, published by Orb Books, ISBN 978-0-312-87584-8, 6th printing

See Vernor Vinge's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details

Italics as in the book

• Quit crossing your fingers, Wim; the only thing that’ll ever save you from is the respect of educated men.
  • The Peddler’s Apprentice (p. 73)

• Wil wondered fleetingly if she might be psychopathic, and not merely young and naive.
  • The Ungoverned (p. 100)

• There may have been some time in the past when a group calling themselves astrologers could produce results. I don’t know, and the matter doesn’t interest me, for I live in the present. In our time the men working in the name of astrology are incapable of producing results, are conscious frauds.
  • Apartness (p. 145)

• Even as my conscious mind concluded that we were under fire, I threw myself on the ground and flatten into the lowest profile possible. You’ve heard the bromide about combat making life more real. I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly true that when you are flat against the ground with your face in the dirt, the whole universe looks different.
  • Conquest by Default (pp. 160-161)

• Our system is founded on the Concept of Chaos. The universe is basically a dark and Unhappy place—a place where evil and injustice and randomness rule. The ironic thing is that the very act of organization creates the potential for even greater ruin. Social organizations have a natural tendency to become monopolistic and inflexible. When they finally break down, it is a catastrophic debacle. So, we must except a great deal of disorder and violence in our lives if we are to avoid a complete blow up later.
  • Conquest by Default (p. 170)

• The closer a Citizen came to the centers of power, the more of a madhouse the universe became.
  • The Whirligig of Time (p. 191)

• She was obviously an idealist: that is, someone who can twist his every vice into self-righteous morality.
  • Original Sin (p. 296)

• Some dreams take a long time in dying. Some get a last minute reprieve…and that can be even worse.
  • The Blabber (p. 313)

• One of his many mottos was, “If you didn’t figure it out yourself, you don’t understand it.”
  • The Blabber (p. 321)

• Every state religion he’d ever seen had a core of hypocrisy. That was why he’d been against bringing “Hrala” ashore—he knew the priests would never accept their theology suddenly incarnate.
  • The Barbarian Princess (p. 400)

• Principal Alcalde was into a long speech, about the fast-changing world and the need for Fairmont to revolutionize itself from semester to semester. At the same time they must never forget the central role of modern education, which was to teach the kids how to learn, how to pose questions, how to be adaptable—all without losing their moral compass.
  • Fast Times at Fairmont High (pp. 409-410)

• Over the last twenty years, the worldwide net had come to be a midden of bogus sites and recursive fraudulence…telling truth from fantasy was often the hardest thing about using the web.
  • Fast Times at Fairmont High (p. 430; ellipsis represents the elision of an example)

• That was the old saying: Once your secret is outed anywhere, however briefly, it is outed forever. “Oh, I don’t know,” said Juan. “The way to cover a slip is to embellish it, hide it in all sorts of fake secrets.”
  • Fast Times at Fairmont High (p. 437)

• Did you ever think? Old-fashioned writing is the ultimate in context tagging. It’s passive, informative, and present exactly where you need it.
  • Fast Times at Fairmont High (p. 450)

A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)

All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Tor Books in February 1993, ISBN 0-812-51528-5, 8th printing

Italics as in the book; bold face added for emphasis

• How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
  • Prologue (p. 1; opening words)

• "Poor humans; they will all die."
  "Poor us; we will not."
  • Prologue (p. 2)

• The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as long as all the time before.
  • Prologue (p. 4)

• Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 18)

• The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.
  • Chapter 5 (p. 51)

• Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
  • Chapter 7 (p. 68) (motto of the Qeng Ho trading group)

• He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
  • Chapter 11 (p. 109)

• Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.
  • Chapter 12 (p. 119)

• I say, let’s learn more and then speculate.
  • Chapter 12 (p. 122)

• Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and least expensive manipulation of all.
  • Chapter 14 (p. 145)

• If during the last thousand seconds you have received any High-Beyond-protocol packets from "Arbitration Arts," discard them at once. If they have been processed, then the processing site and all locally netted sites must be physically destroyed at once. We realize that this means the destruction of solar systems, but consider the alternative. You are under Transcendent attack.
  • Chapter 14 (p. 161)

• Hexapodia as the key insight...
  I haven’t had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs?
  • Chapter 18 (p. 226)

• It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
  • Chapter 18 (p. 228)

• We've watched the Homo Sapiens interest group since the first appearance of the Blight. Where is this "Earth" the humans claim to be from? "Half way around the galaxy," they say, and deep in the Slow Zone. Even their proximate origin, Nyjora, is conveniently in the Slowness. We see an alternative theory: Sometime, maybe further back than the last consistent archives, there was a battle between Powers. The blueprint for this "human race" was written, complete with communication interfaces. Long after the original contestants and their stories had vanished, this race happened to get in position where it could Transcend. And that Transcending was tailor-made, too, re-establishing the Power that had set the trap to begin with.

  We're not sure of the details, but a scenario such as this is inevitable. What we must do is also clear. Straumli Realm is at the heart of the Blight, obviously beyond all attack. But there are other human colonies. We ask the Net to help in identifying all of them. We ourselves are not a large civilization, but we would be happy to coordinate the information gathering, and the military action that is required to prevent the Blight's spread in the Middle Beyond. For nearly seventeen weeks, we've been calling for action. Had you listened in the beginning, a concerted strike might have been sufficient to destroy the Straumli Realm. Isn't the Fall of Relay enough to wake you up? Friends, if we act together we still have a chance.

  Death to vermin.
  • Chapter 20 (p. 245)

• "Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots."
  • Chapter 26 (p. 318)

• He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind—but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 373)

• Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
  • Chapter 32 (p. 397)

• All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge....And now revenge was all that life had left for him.
  • Chapter 33 (p. 428)

• Sometimes the biggest disasters aren’t noticed at all—no one’s around to write horror stories.
  • Chapter 33 (p. 443)

• Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such—and those living more peaceably around them—we say look out on the universe. It does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.
  • Chapter 35 (pp. 483-484)

• The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
  • Chapter 37 (p. 519)

• “I have come to kill you.”
  The death’s heads shrugged. “You have come to try.”
  • Chapter 39 (p. 555)

• If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
  • Chapter 41 (p. 580)

• Peregrine Wickwrackscar was flying. A pilgrim with legends that went back almost a thousand years—and not one of them could come near to this!
  • Epilogs (p. 595)

A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Tor Books in January 2000, ISBN 0-812-53635-5, 1st printing

• They’re very good at reaching nonsense conclusions from insufficient information.
  • Prologue (p. 3)

• Technical people don’t make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
  • Chapter 1 (p. 26)

• So high, so low, so many things to know.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 63; repeated as the last line of the book)

• Interesting problem, pain. So helpful, so obnoxious.
  • Chapter 8 (p. 90)

• The old truths still hold: without a sustaining civilization, no isolated collection of ships and humans can rebuild the core of technology.
  • Chapter 13 (p. 146)

• So even in hell, there are clowns.
  • Chapter 13 (p. 158)

• Politics may come and go, but trade goes on forever.
  • Chapter 17 (p. 222)

• Being alone was something he was very good at. There was so much to learn.
  • Chapter 17 (p. 227)

• The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for. From this era on, I think invention will be the parent of necessity—and not the other way around.
  • Chapter 19 (p. 252)

• Didn’t Underhill understand? All decent societies agreed on basic issues, things that meant the healthy survival of their people. Things might be changing, but it was self-serving nonsense to throw the rules overboard.
  • Chapter 19 (p. 260)

• Funny how the least attempt at deception always seems to make life more complicated.
  • Chapter 21 (p. 282)

• Yet, even with the greatest care, a technological civilization carried the seeds of its own destruction. Sooner or later, it ossified and politics carried it into a fall.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 310)

• Civilizations rise and fall, but all technical civilizations know the greatest secrets now. They know which social mechanisms normally work, and which ones quickly fail. They know the means to postpone disaster and evade the most foolish catastrophes. They know that even so, each civilization must inevitably fall.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 319)

• Pham was overwhelmed by the other things that Gunnar Larson had to say, the advice that might be worthless but that had the stench of wisdom.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 324)

• There had been an era of ubiquitous law enforcement, and some kind of distributed terror.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 324)

• There was an old Qeng Ho saying, “You know you’ve stayed too long when you start using the locals’ calendar.”
  • Chapter 23 (p. 327)

• “Do you think she really believes what she’s saying?”
  “Sure she believes it. That’s what makes her so funny.”
  • Chapter 24 (p. 343)

• There is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever.
  • Chapter 24 (p. 353)

• This was the sort of desperate hallucination he must guard against. If you raise your desires high enough, certainty can grow out of the background noise.
  • Chapter 26 (p. 380)

• Viki was awed by all the incredible quackery. Daddy thought such things were amusing—“like religion but not so deadly.”
  • Chapter 28 (p. 394)

• “We think the governance has opted for ubiquitous law enforcement.”
  Pham whistled softly. Now every embedded computing system, down to a child’s rattle, was a governance utility. It was the most extreme form of social control ever invented. “So now they have to run everything.” The notion was terribly seductive to the authoritarian mind.
  • Chapter 38 (p. 491)

• What do you do when your dream dies?
  • Chapter 43 (p. 556)

• What do you do when your dream dies?
  Dreams die in every life. Everyone gets old. There is promise in the beginning when life seems so bright. The promise fades when the years get short.
  • Chapter 43 (p. 556)

• So what do you do when your dream dies?
  When your dream dies, you give it up.
  • Chapter 43 (p. 557)

• The hard facts are extraordinary, without adding superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
  • Chapter 44 (p. 568)

• Yes, we did quite well. But then, telling people what they want to believe is an easy job.
  • Chapter 44 (p. 573)

• The more you realized what the stars really were, the more you realized what the universe must really be.
  • Chapter 49 (p. 620)

• “But see, your theory ‘explains’ all sorts of things without helping to do anything, much less providing tests for itself.”
  • Epilogue (p. 770)

Rainbows End (2006)

• So much technology, so little talent.

See also

• John W. Campbell

External links

• Vernor Vinge on the Singularity
• Vernor Vinge at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database