Screenshot: "A Fire Upon the Deep" sequel (2011)

If you're a Vinge fan, the annotated version of A Fire Upon the Deep is a great find (available on Kindle); it has his emacs notes (linked in-text) and you can watch the characters develop, his editor suggest improvements, etc. Looks like his system hasn't changed all that much, either.

I haven't interacted with him much, but Vinge was a speaker at this year's main North American AI conference (AAAI), and was impressively engaged. Unlike many famous speakers he didn't just fly in for his 2 hours and fly out again, but attended a whole bunch of sessions for several days, and he was asking pretty intelligent questions. Mostly normal questions about the specific research at hand, too, not singularity-related questions or "how will this research help the robot revolution". ;-) Seemed like a very down-to-earth guy; I don't think most of the researchers who got asked a question by him realized that he was a famous sci-fi author at the time.

A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favourite books ever. It successfully combines hard sf and space opera and doesn't get bogged down in either. It is large like many of its space opera kin but the plotting is such you never feel like you are slogging through fluff. And the technologies and physics are well thought out and their effects on the universe at large are well presented. The aliens in it are probably the most interesting since Niven's Puppeteers.

I'm a huge Vinge fan, but I was really underwhelmed by Rainbow's End. (Was it aimed at the YA market and I didn't notice?) Hope CotS is better.

Wooooo! I've always thought of the proper title for this hypothetical book as "Sky fire" (to bring it full circle, you see). "Sky children" makes me think it's a stealth quadrilogy. Sooner or later it's <i>got</i> to cycle. "Children of Fire?"

Does anyone know what text editor that is? Emacs?

Now, the title is just mean: I assumed they are making a movie now!<p>But, oh well, the fact that Vinge uses Emacs is interesting although not surprising given he was a CS teacher.

Interesting that he reads Slashdot, and not one of the more modern news sites.<p>Also, ugh eugh Papyrus in the site header, argh.

New Vinge, new Richard Morgan and maybe new Neal Stephenson (depending on how you count The Mongoloid) all in 2011.<p>The Morgan &#38; Stephenson books might be fantasy and historical fiction (?), but if everything lives up to its promise this could be the best year for SciFi/Fantasy since 2000, when Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" beat Stephenson "Cryptonomicon" for the Hugo Award.

What formatting system is that?

Initial Reaction to the site: "Ahhhhhh! The Papyrus!"

I'm really excited about the sequel. I read "A Fire Upon the Deep" only a year or two ago. Amazing book. Not sure where he'll go from the end of it but should be interesting.

love the insight of all the notes and use of emacs!

This blog post is nearly a year old. Why is it coming up now?