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The Hugo Awards: Word From A Winner
mouthbeef writes: "The year 2000 Hugo Awards have been awarded. Cryptonomicon didn't win but A Deepness in the Sky did. And hey, so did I. AFAIK, this is the first first-person account of a Hugo win published on the Web, and I know for a fact that my acceptance speech was the only one to contain an URL."
[Doing this from memory, so my apologies if I don't get it right...]
I found myself struggling to finish Cryptonomicon, it left me uninvolved with the characters and didn't seem to introduce any new ideas. This is disappointing because the concept had great potential, but in the end it came down to rather blunt corporate manouvering (which I think was included to cover up the problems with the data warehouse concept), and a hunt for some war booty (and then it was only gold!). In the end it felt like the author ran out of steam midway and then thought "hey, didn't I read about X in Popular Mechanics?", and sticks a reference to it in the story.
On the other hand, Deepness stayed with me. For the first time I realised the immense power (both in the good and bad sense) inherent in 'pervasive computing'. I assume this may be old-news to those who read Cyberpunk genre, but i'd not encountered it before.
Also, I really liked the way Vinge envisaged layer upon layer of computer architectures accumulating over thousands of years. I seem to recall that he implied that down in the deep depths file names were 8.3...
However, everything isn't perfect, while Vinge's aliens (the arachnids) are interesting, they are not as alien as the SMP creatures from his first book. Vinges description of alien buildings was really clever - from the point of view of the aliens they were described the way we would describe a room, warm, cozy, but from the point of view of the humans the rooms were darkly alien.
Also, Vinge is an IT academic, and he treads the line between speculative and fantasy very well.
I enjoyed The Matrix alot the second time I saw it. That was after I had gotten over the hype and realized you shouldn't watch it for the plot. It's great eye candy, and a very well done translation of that anime feel to live action, but an original story it's not. Phillip Dick (to mention only one)was playing with those world-inverting ideas forty years ago. And in the list of nominations for this year's Hugos, The Thirteenth Floor did much more interesting things with the same idea.
I haven't seen Galaxy Quest, so I can't really say whether or not it deserved to win, but I'd be disappointed if The Matrix had. I'd like to think that the Hugos favour glossy special effects over story less often than the movie-going public usually does.
Of the four that made the ballot that I did see, Being John Malkovich was by far my favorite. It actually contained some original thought, and what it lacked in rigour was more than made up for in it's wonderfully playful approach.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
fm6 wrote:
He gives us a future in which the programming art has advanced less in the next 3,000 years than it has in the last 10.... And finally, he reguritates endless truisms about "what computers can't do"
Remember when Pham says, "Nanotech! The failed dream." A major plot device in Deepness is that technological progress came to a screeching halt in the beginning of the 21st century -- just on the verge of nanotech. The concept of why technology stopped is explained in A Fire Upon the Deep.
Interestingly, Vernor Vinge did speculate on what people's reactions would be to Deepness if they hadn't first read Fire.
Um, I'm afraid you don't understand Vinge very much. Ever heard the phrase "Vingean Singularity"? Vinge doesn't believe in limitations for computers -- he develops artificial limits for his fiction *because* he doesn't believe there are limits. He thinks that in a relatively short period of time, that the acceleration curve of technology will go asymptotic, rising so steeply, in such extreme change that we will be unable to understand the world on the other side. In particular, he thinks that when computers begin to be able to design their own improvements is when this is most likely to happen.
Because the post-Singularity world is impossible to write about, he writes either the people who for some reason or another are isolated from the Singularity (his Bobble future) or a universe where there has been artificial limits imposed on computing power in areas of the galaxy (the Zones of the Deepness/Fire universe.) He sees the Singularity arriving as soon as 30 years from now, so it's not surprising that in the Zones universe computers are not that much advanced beyond today's.
I'm not sure how much I agree with Vinge on the Singularity concept, but saying 'he has not kept up with computer science and technology' is foolish, nto the least because he's a professor of computer science (distributed and embedded computer systems.)
I think it's pretty clear why this happened.
The Sixth Sense was one of the most popular movies last year. Even if it wasn't looked on very kindly by many genre folk, it had a decent story, high production values, and some great acting by Willis, as well as yon precocious kid. So it was bound to get some of the more conventional votes here, as well as stand in for the fantasy crowd.
The Matrix was clearly the favorite going in, especially among young people. There would be a very strong vote for this movie no matter what. At the same time, a number of people just didn't like it (some of them are here). I, for one, thought it was the odds-on favorite, even though it was my personal 2nd choice.
The Iron Giant was a quirky entry that appealed to a certain minority. I thought a lot of people in this kind of literate forum might support it, but didn't expect it to win. It was my first choice.
Anyway, I forget what the other nom was -- Blair Witch? The Haunting?
With such a crowded field of worthy candidates, but all somewhat appealing to different crowds, the middle-of-the-road crowd-pleaser is a slam dunk -- nothin' but net. And GQ was actually better than that -- it was smart and funny.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Vinge has been dealing with the issue of what he calls the Singularity: transhumanity once we hit the near-vertical portion of the curve of knowledge within the next 60-120 years if no major die-back or war set us back on our asses.
What is fascinating is how in the 1992 Hugo winner "A Fire Upon The Deep" and in its 1999 prequel, now also a Hugo winner, "A Deepness In The Sky", Vinge is able to study both sides of the Singularity in the *same universe*, and indeed with one very human character in common, despite the one book's events occurring about 30,000 years and about three fifths of the galaxy's diameter apart.
In "Deepness", Vinge deals with the Era of Failed Dreams: no faster than light drives, no human-plus computing, no Singularity.
The irony (and poignancy) for those who have first read "Fire" is that the events of "Deepness" occur deep in the Slow Zone, where FTL, human-plus computing and the Singularity are impossible due to the division of our galaxy (and apparently other galaxies) into distinct regions following lines of mean density (the core is the Unthinking Depths, Sol is in the Slow Zone, FTL is first available further out in the Beyond and Transcendence (the Singularity) and human-plus computers are possible only in the Transcend out at the edge and between galaxies), while "Fire" starts in the Low Transcend, switches to the High Beyond, drops to the Bottom of the Beyond and finishes in the Slow Zone.
Many of the desires of the characters in "Deepness" are impossible to fulfill in the Slow Zone, and they are not even aware of the existence of the Zones, which appear to be possibly artificial measures to protect the birth and development of infant civilizations from otherwise being overwhelmed by any single expansive species (This is one of the more original answers to Fermi's paradox concerning the apparent absence of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations).
Once the Zones are discovered, most societies attempt to colonize the Beyond in order to use FTL to travel, trade and (rarely) conquer, rather than stay mired in the Slow Zone.
Rarely, some elements of a civilization will colonize the Transcend, leading to short-lived transcendent entities. But it's risky to trade with Gods - just read your mythology. In fact, the topic of communicating with Transcendents is called Computing and Applied Theology. Remember that Vinge teaches Computer Science.
Vinge did a similar study of both sides of the Singularity on Earth in his two earlier novels from 1986 and 1988 respectively, the Peace War (setting us back from the Singularity for two generations or more) and its much richer sequel Marooned In Realtime. A novella, "The Ungoverned", is set in the same history not long before the Singularity.
It is not possible that the two sets of stories (Peacers and Zones of Thought) occur in the same universe: the former Peacer Della Lu made a trip to the Lesser Megellanic Cloud, and hence would have made it out of the Slow Zone with a resulting improvement in both her own intelligence and that of her devices.
Vinge in his universe of "Fire" and "Deepness" is adept at showing truly alien societies, the effect of technology on thinking beings for whom we come to care deeply, and using principles of computer science and networking in genuinely original ways for science fiction, although not, I suspect, for network gurus.
Even his choice of low bandwidth for ultrawave allows for a Usenet-like galactic culture in the Beyond and the Low Transcend in "Fire", with much effect for rueful recognition. I suspect that "Fire" was one of the books that influenced the second and third seasons of television scripts by J.M. Stracynski for his series "Babylon 5".
But that is another post.
My opinion here:
I thought it was interesting. I thought it was fun. I thought the effects were good. I was pleased to see SF getting that sort of attention.
I didn't think it was at all deep. In fact, on a particularly objectionable day, I might go so far as to say I thought it was shallow. They had some good ideas and a good story, but didn't want to go for that extra edge in the storytelling. A mistake, IMO - Mission: Impossible and the first two Batman films would seem a fair indication that its target audience will still enjoy a (relatively) complex film and that they can make good money. Heck, wasn't Batman breaking records at the time?
I'll be interested to see what they do with the sequels but I'm not expecting works of genius.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
...for her novella, The Winds of Marble Arch (online at Asimov's).
... and she's still in the prime of her career.
If the count is up to date, this makes her fourteenth major award -- six Nebulas, and eight Hugos. That's more than any other sf author, even some of the big names
Frankly, I had a hard time with The Doomsday Book, for various reasons including the fact that major characters playing with dangerous technology acted like idiots, but in the end it was very worthwhile. I'm just surprised it took me so many years to discover her. (Easy to do when you quit reading new sf, like I did.)
But I've now read more of her "Dunsworthy time machine" stories, the collection Fire Watch, which is top-notch, and I've jsut begun last year's Hugo winner for novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog. Not to be missed. If you've been off the SF beat for a while, pick up some Willis, you'll be glad you did.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
OK, just in case you didn't see Zoyd's response, here's the relevant Vinge quote about your cs point:
(from this interview)
EH_Rob
Vernor, tell me a little about the Qeng Ho background, their software for example. How much of your idea there comes from software development issues we're already facing?
Vernor_Vinge
Almost all of it. The scenario in Deepness is that we can't solve software complexity problems and so things begin to level out in the 21st cetnury. By the time of this story, there are literally millennia of legacy software out there. These guys are incrementally a lot better than we, but they still suffer from the same kinds of software and system gotchas.
So maybe you would consider that kind of answer a cop-out, but at least he has an explanation (and since you apparently did read A Fire Upon the Deep I assume you know why his explanation makes sense in that universe). And BTW, I happen to think that the award for the best sf novel should be based on the highest quality writing not the most accurate extrapolation of computer science technology. But hey, I like to read, so maybe that's just me
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"It was people! People soiled our green!"
One of the central (traditional) approaches of good hard science fiction is to take one or two main "what if" ideas and then just explore their consequences. Cryptonomicon does this, but the "what if" doesn't really involve any stunningly new concepts -- it just takes the current situation a few tiny paces further and examines social aspects. (Having said all that, I'd like to say that it kicks ass.)
Deepness takes a number of really big "what if" ideas and starts playing with them. (Including an awesome take on "distributed computing." :-) Vinge also does some really cruel things to his characters. Made me squirm to read it. (You know a novel is good when it makes you shudder involuntarily.)
Haven't read Fire yet, so I don't know anything about the universe that Deepness is a prequel to.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I for one get really bored whenever someone starts reminding us that most of the things in Matrix were in fact thought up by writers decades ago.
Some points:
1. Hardly any thought is original. Most of what you read in books or see in the cinema are reprocessed ideas from the past. Sometimes just a few years back, sometimes centuries -- in new clothes. You could dissect almost any movie this way and point to earlier work that contributed to it -- inadvertedly or otherwise.
2. A movie is not a book. Just because a movie uses some of the ideas from the book does not make it a blockbuster movie. Or even interesting one. Most of Stephen King's books turned out to be boring when translated to screen (with arguable exceptions of "Shining" and "Misery"). The fact that Dick (and others, centuries(!) ago), came up with some ideas that found their way into "Matrix" by no means makes it _lesser_ movie. To the contrary -- it's probably the first movie that managed to introduce some quite complex ways of thinking about our world to unwashed masses. And how beautifully at that.
3. I could argue here, that teologians from centuries ago were tacking ideas that Dick later picked up. Is it a valid point? Does it diminish the quality of Dick's works? Judge by yourself.
Milek
--
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
Loved 'em both, but Cryptonomicon is less traditionally science-fictionish so I guess I can see the point, even though I loved it. Has anybody noticed that it's harder to tell what science fiction is when things like "terminator" and "jurassic park" count as mainstream even though they involve robots, time travel, and genetic engineering?
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
But how about Slashdot starts an sf competition of its own (or make it a horror competition, and call 'em the "Slashies" :-), maybe for the best short story published online?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
A *lot* of y'all here read sf, but appear to know very little about fandom (I won't mention the little snots), so...
SF existed before the 1920s, but it came into existance as a genre with Hugo Gernsback's creation of Amazing Stories in '26. That's why they're called the Hugos.
Fandom began shortly after, in the late 20s and early 30s, when folks writing to the lettercols realized that that some of the other letter writers lived in their own town.
The first con was in Philly, in '36 (when half-a-dozen guys from NYC came down to Philly, to meet half a dozen guys from Philly). The first Worldcon was in 1939, with over 200 folks. It's down now, slightly, from the high point of the 80's, but Chicon, the 58th Worldcon, was over 6000 attendees, and we ate both towers of the downtown Hyatt Regency, the Fairmont, and the Swissotel.
Unlike Oscars, etc, there is no self-appointed elite, who decide what is the One True Right. Anyone who ponies up their money to join Worldcon can nominate anything (nominations close around the beginning of spring), and you can vote after that. All you have to be, is a member. So, those of us who read it the most, and who care the most, are the ones who nominate and vote.
Someone mentioned the SF-Lovers list, but I didn't see mention of the rec.arts.sf heirarchy (that was *real* busy, and had a good number of newsgroups already, when I got on the 'Net in late 91). Also, the culture of the newsgroups was *real* familiar to me...it looked and sounded just like a party at a con, or an APA (think of a snail-mail newsgroup).
We were here first, guys. Who did you think you invented a lot of this? Wassamatter, you so afraid of the Big Blue Room that you can't deal with us in person?
For more about fandom, try
http://www.enteract.com/~whitroth/silverdragon/sf
Oh...and for only about the third time I can remember, someone actually involved with a film was there to get their Hugo, when it was announced who won - both the writer *and* the director, and I don't think there was a doubt in anyone's mind that the Hugo meant to the writer what it meant to us...not when he got up there, and went incoherent!
mark
So, Cryptonomicon was great, and this makes we want to read A Deepness in the Sky, but this all pales the shock of seeing Galaxy Quest beat The Matrix. Unless that category was, "Best Science Fiction Comedy", I can't imagine how a spoof of trekkies could win out over one of the most awesome visualizations of a science fiction concept on the silver screen, ever.
but this all pales the shock of seeing Galaxy Quest beat The Matrix
The Muppet Movie almost won a Hugo in 1980.
It says a lot of negative things about the state of science fiction that A Deepness in the Sky is considered the year's best SF novel -- and thus, by implication, the best novel about computers. I used to enjoy Vinge's fiction a long time ago, when SF did more hand-waving than it does now, and he wrote light-hearted stories about star-hopping librarians. But he has simply not kept up with computer science and technology, despite his pretensions to the contrary. He gives us a future in which the programming art has advanced less in the next 3,000 years than it has in the last 10. He tells us that in the future, all calenders will be measured in the number of seconds since 00:00:00 1-Jan-1970 GMT (a system that wouldn't work even if everybody had an embedded Unix box, never mind an epoch where many people spend years at high-tau). And finally, he reguritates endless truisms about "what computers can't do" -- and applies them in situations where they are extremely dubious, even if you buy into all that Dreyfus mystical nonsense.
I should know better. Last time I raised even the tiniest doubts about somebody's favorite SF author, I actually got death threats. Oh well, bring em on.
Just finished reading (and rereading) it a few weeks ago. The quality of story-telling is superb. The plot twisters, and there were quite a few, were foreshadowed, but well-hidden or dismissed on first reading. Most SF writers (hard or otherwise) don't capture that feeling of the vastness of time and space as well as Vinge did on this and it's sequel (A Fire Upon the Deep, which also won a Hugo). The ending is particularly... romantic, hopeful and sad, esp. to those who have read AFOTD and knew what will happen, by inferance.
He's my favourite SF writer now, ahead of Stephenson (slightly), Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, etc. YMMV, of course, but this books is a MUST read.
Offtopic: He uses emacs (somewhere near bottom of page) to write the story!
Posted to the MIT announcement system, that inspired the creation of the original huge mailing list, sf-lovers. By the time it made it out to Parc, it was about 6th generation forwarded, and took about a week from original posting to make it to them. It inspired a mail admin named Brodie to create a mail reflector, so such news could get around faster. SF@parc-maxc
It quickly became very successful, and to a bureaucrats attention, prompting its move back to MIT, the name changed to SF-Lovers@mit-ai, where it puttered along still readable by a mostly 300 baud community, until Star Trek the motionless picture came out, otherwise known as the day the mailer died. The MIT mail engine got more than 6 hours behind. Digests happened. Unix mailers that at the time reqired a separate copy per recipient got re-written. We even saw semi-official header forgery -- kicked off MIT's machines due to overloading, its new host (another major university, on the left coast) forged headers to make it look like it still originated at MIT, so its own administration wouldn't know that the mail originated on their system.
As to first time by a hugo winner: One year later, saw the first "@-sign" party. two (past) hugo winners, and one nominee were in attendance (niven, pournelle, and forward. Went thru more irish whiskey than SFWA did that night). So was a suitcase sized portable printing terminal with thermal paper, and an acoustic coupler on the back. Ran at a whopping 300 baud. Results of the voting were posted to the list within hours of live announcement, a comment was added by one of the winners (who got an instant invite to the party when the result got announced) and with the digest maker in attendance at the party to launch a "special edition" of the digest.
So in less than a years time, we went from no list and more than one week from live announcement to first posting, to near real-time coverage, with comments by a winner. (the very first online announcement was delayed, because in 1979 the Worldcon was in Brighton, UK. Still fairly broke at the time, we went to the NASFIC in Loisville, held the following weekend instead, heard the results from some fen that had done both conventions. I posted the announcement when we got back home, slightly suprised that someone hadn't beaten me to it.)
One small comment about the "@-sign" parties. At the time, the arpanet was "our little secret", and we were particularly circumspect about "unofficial" uses of it. We really did worry that Proxmire (who was in office at the time) would find out about recreational use of the net, award a "Golden Fleece" award, and manage to divert the funding to a milk price support program. So it was a harder party to get into than the usual legends of tightly controlled doors, the SFWA and Balantine Books parties. It also made for a very funny panel discussion 6 months later at the 81 Boskone, where the 5 of us siting up at the table in front discussed how such a future system could work, carefully avoiding any use of the present tense, not telling them that "our tax dollars" were paying for one as we sat there.
-dp-
Organizer:New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society;The NERDS,first US team in the UK Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars
It's kinda hard to explain how Vinge acts & sounds like as a professor (it has been a year since I've taken a class with him), but I'll give it a shot. He has a deep voice, and he doesn't change the pitch of it much. Occasionally, he shows a hint of a studder, but it has never become annoying (IMHO)
The course I took from him was a systems programming class. He was a standard (at least at SDSU) lecture style professor, but he did encourage student feedback. He also liked to interact with his students via office hours & email (I had sent him several emails at 2AM, and received a reply by 3AM) He was always very prepared for class, and it was well known that he spent hours preparing for each of his classes beforehand.
He was an open source advocate, and encouraged the students to copyleft their assignments (see assignment #1 toward bottom of the page) Also, when the class was discussing compilers, a student raised a question (I don't exactly remember what it was) and Vinge gave an answer to the question. Vinge could tell that the student wasn't totally satisfied with his answer, so during the next class session, he brought in a segment of the gcc code & showed the class how the GNU people tackled the issue. He then went on to explain how that was one of the benefits of open source software.
Doh!
Its really bad form to link to Stephenson's book but not to Vinge's. Interesting review here.
I loved A Deepness in the Sky, but A Fire upon the Deep was probably one of the best and most innovative SF books I've ever read. Vinge's Across Realtime is another great book (actually a collection of three shorter stories).
'Hard' SF has dominated the Hugo's in the past and will probably continue to do so. Cryptonomicon was just too real. How long after the book was published did we hear about Sealand and their data haven?
For fatbrain fans, try:
A Deepness in the Sky
A Fire upon the Sky
For out of print books try alibris.com
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