News has sadly broken that science fiction author Vernor Vinge has passed away at the age of 79. Vinge was best-known for popularising the idea of the AI Singularity, and writing two of the best-regarded SF novels of all time, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.
Vinge was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 1944, and attended the University of California, San Diego, where he later returned to teach mathematics. Vinge published his first science fiction story, "Apartness," in 1965 in New Worlds. He became a prolific short story writer in the 1960s and through the 1970s, and published his first novel, Grimm's World, in 1969.
His early work was interesting and reviewed promisingly but did not generate significant amounts of buzz. This changed with his 1981 novella, True Names. This book was notable for being the first depiction of cyberspace in an American SF novel. It was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and saw a change in Vinge's profile; he next two novels, the duology of The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986), were both nominated for the Hugo Award.
Vinge's next novel was A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and immediately saw him become an SF author of prominence; the novel won the Hugo Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Set in a distant future, the novel postulates a galaxy divided into "Zones of Thought," areas close to the galactic centre where human intelligence and FTL cannot exist and areas towards the galactic rim where superintelligence and near-instant travel systems exist; Earth is caught in the "slow zone" between. The novel operates on a massive scale, involving human, posthuman and nonhuman intelligences dealing with the threat of a superintelligent AI which is inadvertently released from an ancient date archive. The novel combined brash space opera with hard SF thinking about ideas, including artificial intelligence.
The following year, Vinge drew on some ideas from the novel to write the essay "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" (1993). The essay postulates the arrival of true artificial intelligence which is able to create new versions of itself and better itself exponentially in a very short timeframe, effectively ending the world as we know it, and creating a new world or reality which is as fundamentally unknowable to us as what lies beyond the singularity at the heart of a black hole. Ray Kurzweil drew on Vinge's work for his own writings on the Singularity, most notably in 2005's The Singularity is Near. Vinge postulated that the Singularity would take place by 2030, but Kurzweil allowed for a later date of 2045.
Vinge returned to the Zones of Thought universe to write a prequel, A Deepness in the Sky (1999), set tens of thousands of years earlier. The novel won the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Prometheus Award. A sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, The Children of the Sky, was released in 2011 but did not attract the praise of the earlier books.
Vinge's last standalone novel was Rainbows End, set in a near-future San Diego, released in 2006. The novel also won a Hugo Award, making him one of the more successful authors at the awards, with three wins from five nominations.
Vinge was married to fellow science fiction writer Joan D. Vinge from 1972 to 1979. After their separation, they remained on good terms and Joan wrote several works set in the Zones of Thought universe, with his approval. Vinge was good friends with fellow SF author David Brin, who made him an honorary member of the "Killer Bs," a trio of hard SF authors active from the 1970s to 2010s; Brin himself, Greg Bear and Gregory Benford. Brin judged his work superior enough to overcome the lamentable deficit of not having a surname starting with "B."
Vinge wrote hard science fiction, sometimes dealing with quite complex ideas, but did so in a clear manner, and always remembered to incorporate interesting characters with recognisable motivations. In this manner he exemplified one of the strong spirits of good science fiction, thought-provoking ideas made accessible.
Vinge was not the most prolific of SF authors, but his small body of work is notable for how almost every part of it is interesting, influential and, at least three times, quietly revolutionary. He will be missed.
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