Slashdot Mirror
Sneak Preview Of Vernor Vinge's Next Book
orac2 writes "The current issue of IEEE Spectrum Magazine is running a special report titled Sensor Nation, about the technology and social issues involved with the rising tide of ubiquitous surveillance and analysis. One of the articles is a short story by Vernor Vinge about what kind of future we could end up living in, titled Synthetic Serendipity. The story is actually adapted from the book Vinge is currently working on, called Rainbows End (and for the grammar nazis, that's right, there's no apostrophe at the end of 'Rainbows.') ObPlug: I'll be talking at The 5th HOPE in New York on Saturday at 4pm in Area B, and I'll bring along a few issues for any interested slashdotters."
Vinge is the author of two Hugo award winning novels: A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep, as well as numerous short stories including True Names, which envisioned an avatar-based Internet in 1981, years before Gibson's cyberspace or more appropriately, Stephenson's Street of Snowcrash. He's also a former computer science professor at San Diego State, and someone who both knows the details of the technology he writes about, including pervasive sensors, search tools, game design, and wearable computers, and has the writing chops to make you care about his characters.
Alastair Reynolds.
Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap.
All of them good, hard sci-fi. Reynolds is an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency, and so you get some reasonable science behind the ideas a lot of the time. (Although some of it is extremely hypothetical stuff.)
He's my absolute favourite science fiction author and I can't recommend him enough. I read "A Fire Upon the Deep" for the first time about a week ago and liked it, but Alastair Reynolds completely amazed me.
Read them. Trust me.