Vernor Vinge

[Jakub]

Has anyone read his books? More importantly, does anyone know if he's working on anything new? A Deepness in the Sky was such a fantastic novel, I'm unable to pick up any other science fiction (and the majority of regular fiction) without a sigh of disappointment.

[DennyA]

Jakub,

Yep, I really dig Vinge's writing. It's rare that anyone can do "far future" stuff that's still believable, but he pulls it off.

Alas, his books don't come often, but perhaps that's one reason the quality's high. He did retire from SDSU, where he was a computer science teacher, a couple of years ago, so perhaps we'll see more frequent releases going forward.

Here's his old SDSU faculty page:
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/

Have you read his older stuff, like Across Realtime?

A web search turns up some interesting Vinge scientific essays, too, such as http://www.alumni.engin.umich.edu/~jxm/singlar.html

It's pretty amazing to realize that True Names and A Fire Upon the Deep were written before the Internet was significant, back when online traffic was mostly on BBSs and CI$/GEnie/etc.

[Greenie]

"True Names" was just re-relased not too long ago as "True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier". This new edition has about a dozen accompanying essays on related topics like cryptography, online gaming, etc.

I didn't know he had retired from teaching - here's hoping we will see more stories from him soon! I'd love to read another novel set in the "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "Deepness in the Sky" universe.

[gnmarsh]

he just put out a book of short stories that was good, even revisits some characters from earlier books