Vernor Vinge

Vernor Steffen Vinge (October 2, 1944 – March 20, 2024) was an American science fiction author and professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He was the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and among the first authors to present a fictional "cyberspace". He won the Hugo Award for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), and Rainbows End (2006), and novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2001) and The Cookie Monster (2004).

Writing career
Vinge published his first short story, "Apartness", in the June 1965 issue of the British magazine New Worlds. His second, "Bookworm, Run!", was in the March 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction, then edited by John W. Campbell. The story explores the theme of artificially augmented intelligence by connecting the brain directly to computerised data sources. He became a moderately prolific contributor to SF magazines in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969, he expanded the story "Grimm's Story" (Orbit 4, 1968) into his first novel, Grimm's World. In 1971, Vinge received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego, under the supervision of Stefan E. Warschawski. His second novel, The Witling, was published in 1976.

Vinge came to prominence in 1981 with his novella True Names, perhaps the first story to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others. His next two novels, The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986), explore the spread of a future libertarian society, and deal with the impact of a technology which can create impenetrable force fields called 'bobbles'. These books built Vinge's reputation as an author who would explore ideas to their logical conclusions in particularly inventive ways. Both books were nominated for the Hugo Award, but lost to novels by William Gibson and Orson Scott Card.

Vinge won the Hugo Award (tying for Best Novel with Doomsday Book by Connie Willis) with his 1992 novel, A Fire Upon the Deep. A Deepness in the Sky (1999) was a prequel to Fire, following competing groups of humans in The Slow Zone as they struggle over who has the rights to exploit a technologically emerging alien culture. Deepness won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2000.

His novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High and The Cookie Monster also won Hugo Awards in 2002 and 2004, respectively.

Vinge's 2006 novel Rainbows End, set in the same universe and featuring some of the same characters as Fast Times at Fairmont High, won the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel. In 2011, he released The Children of the Sky, a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep set approximately 10 years following the end of A Fire Upon the Deep.

Vinge retired in 2000 from teaching at San Diego State University, in order to write full-time. He was Writer Guest of Honor at ConJosé, the 60th World Science Fiction Convention in 2002. Additionally, Vinge served on the Free Software Foundation's selection committee for their Award for the Advancement of Free Software for most of the years between 1999 and his death in 2024.

Personal life
His former wife, Joan D. Vinge, is also a science fiction author. They were married from 1972 to 1979.

Vernor Vinge died in La Jolla, California on March 20, 2024, at the age of 79. He had Parkinson's disease.

Realtime/Bobble series

 * The Peace War (1984) ISBN 0-312-94342-3
 * Marooned in Realtime (1986) ISBN 0-312-94295-8

Zones of Thought series

 * A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)
 * A Deepness in the Sky (1999)—Hugo, Campbell, and Prometheus Awards winner, 2000; Nebula Award nominee, 1999; Clarke and Locus SF Awards nominee, 2000
 * The Children of the Sky (2011)

Standalone novels

 * Grimm's World (1969), expanded as Tatja Grimm's World (1987)
 * The Witling (1976)
 * Rainbows End (2006) ISBN 0-312-85684-9—Hugo and Locus SF Awards winner, 2007; Campbell Award nominee, 2007

Collections

 * Across Realtime (1986) ISBN 0-671-72098-8
 * The Peace War
 * "The Ungoverned" (added in 1991 edition)
 * Marooned in Realtime
 * True Names ... and Other Dangers (1987) ISBN 0-671-65363-6
 * "Bookworm, Run!"
 * "True Names" (1981, winner 2007 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award)
 * "The Peddler's Apprentice" (with Joan D. Vinge)
 * "The Ungoverned" (occurs in the same milieu as The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime)
 * "Long Shot"
 * Threats... and Other Promises (1988) ISBN 0-671-69790-0 (These two volumes collect Vinge's short fiction through the late 1980s.)
 * "Apartness"
 * "Conquest by Default" (occurs in the same milieu as "Apartness")
 * "The Whirligig of Time"
 * "Gemstone"
 * "Just Peace" (with William Rupp)
 * "Original Sin"
 * "The Blabber" (occurs in the same milieu as A Fire Upon the Deep)
 * True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (2001) ISBN 0-312-86207-5 (contains "True Names" plus essays by others)
 * The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001) ISBN 0-312-87373-5 (hardcover) or ISBN 0-312-87584-3 (paperback) (This volume collects Vinge's short fiction through 2001 (except "True Names"), including Vinge's comments from the earlier two volumes.)
 * "Bookworm, Run!"
 * "The Accomplice"
 * "The Peddler's Apprentice" (with Joan D. Vinge)
 * "The Ungoverned"
 * "Long Shot"
 * "Apartness"
 * "Conquest by Default"
 * "The Whirligig of Time"
 * "Bomb Scare"
 * "The Science Fair"
 * "Gemstone"
 * "Just Peace" (with William Rupp)
 * "Original Sin"
 * "The Blabber"
 * "Win a Nobel Prize!" (originally published in Nature, Vol. 407 No. 6805 "Futures")
 * "The Barbarian Princess" (this is also the first section of "Tatja Grimm's World")
 * "Fast Times at Fairmont High" (occurs in the same milieu as Rainbows End; winner 2002 Hugo Award for Best Novella )

Essays

 * "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" (1993), Whole Earth Review
 * "2020 Computing: The creativity machine" (2006), Nature
 * "The Disaster Stack" (2017) Chasing Shadows

Uncollected short fiction

 * "A Dry Martini" (The 60th World Science Fiction Convention ConJosé Restaurant Guide, page 60)
 * "The Cookie Monster" (Analog Science Fiction, October 2003) (winner 2004 Hugo Award for Best Novella)
 * "Synthetic Serendipity", IEEE Spectrum Online, June 30, 2004
 * "A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memoirs of Star Captain Y.-T. Lee" (2010) (Gateways: Original New Stories Inspired by Frederik Pohl, 2010)
 * "BFF's first adventure", (originally published in Nature, Vol 518 No 7540 "Futures")
 * "Legale", (originally published in Nature, Vol 548 No 7666 "Futures")

About Vinge

 * Vernor Vinge, at Worlds Without End
 * Vernor Vinge, at Worlds Without End

Essays and speeches

 * The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era, 1993
 * Accelerating Change 2005: Vernor Vinge Keynote Address (64 kbit/s MP3 audio recording, 40 minutes long)
 * Seminars About Long-term Thinking: Vernor Vinge (Summary and MP3 audio recording of a 2007 speech, 91 minutes long)
 * "2020 Computing: The creativity machine", from Nature magazine, March 23, 2006.
 * Vernor Vinge's keynote address at the 2006 Austin Games Conference.
 * The Disaster Stack (an early version)

Interviews

 * Interview on Fresh Air, 2000 (audio)
 * Interviews on the podcast series The Future and You: April 8, 2006, May 1, 2006 (audio)
 * Interview by Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith, April 26, 2006 (podcast)
 * Interview by Reason, 2007
 * Interview for the singularity symposium, 2011 (podcast)