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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.
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.
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
Its really bad form to link to Stephenson's book but not to Vinge's. Interesting review here.