Vernor Vinge died on Wednesday. One of the old school SF writers that ushered in the age of cyberpunk and all that Intartrons nonsense. And as a shitposter, I feel it is important to acknowledge the man who predicted our world so incredibly accurately.
The first Vinge I read was True Names. Let me just say right now, if you have not read it - stop reading anything else and track it down. It is amazing, and also - I am going to be spoiling it in this post. Now to be clear - as a story it is quite good, maybe even great (with a small g) - but it's not some transcendent work of narrative genius that will leave you weeping. It's a bit of a spy-thriller and the plot beats of it follow that template quite closely. Have their been Great Works (capital letters) that were spy-thrillers? Probably - it's not really my genre of choice - but I suspect that it's not all that many of them.
There are some more philosophical bits about the nature of the human condition, especially near the end - but end loading it like that made it feel kind of tacked on (even though you can tell it clearly isn't tacked on if you reread the story). Anyways - at its core function, as an SF-thriller novella - it is solid. A real page turner that actually engages the reader and makes you want to get to the end to see how it all turns out. But that's not why I think everyone should read it. There are loads of solid SF-thriller stories - and while True Names is good - I don't think of it as one of the Greats in terms of entertainment.
The reason it is one of the Greats (with a Capital G) is because of the other thing speculative fiction does - exploring the ideas contained within. And here, True Names is unsurpassed. Many of the core ideas of the story still seem like interesting takes on online culture. True Names was written in 1981 - a year before Burning Chrome, the predecessor to Neuromancer. Anyways, let's explore this a bit.
In 1981, there was a novella about the online space. Seventeen years before Google. Eight years before Tim Berners-Lee proposed the WorldWideWeb to CERN. Three years before William Gibson wrote about Henry Dorsett Case. This is a story about cyberspace that predates the word cyberspace. A story written when only a small fraction of people had ever heard the word "internet" - and even then, usually as "inter-networked".
The core conceit of the story is that in an online world, people with the ability to manipulate data and online systems are like wielders of powerful magic (called "warlocks" in the story) who have as their greatest weakness and liability their "True Names" - their names IRL. If one warlock has another's True Name, they have complete control over them. IOW, in 1981 there was an SF story where doxxing was a core feature in the world building.
Also too, the bad guy is an AI. One developed by the military for legitimate purposes (to protect government online assets from warlocks and enemy agents) that got out of hand because the folks in charge of it left it running without oversight. So the events of the story are prompted by someone using AI improperly.
In 1981.
It's been a while since I revisited his other works. I do recall them being fun reads also with interesting ideas - like how the Peace War and the bobbles worked. But True Names is the work of his that I remember best - and still surprises and shocks me how much of our world today he got bang on correct.
RIP in peace, Vernor Vinge.
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