50bookchallenge #24/50: Collected Stories, Vernor Vinge

I’m quick­ly becom­ing a Ver­nor Vinge fan. One author has sin­gle­hand­ed­ly brought me back to read­ing sci­ence fic­tion. This is great stuff.

This col­lec­tion of short sto­ries is a mixed bag. Some of Vinge’s ear­ly work is a bit forced and awk­ward, but on the whole the sto­ries here were thought-pro­vok­ing, smart, and entertaining.

In par­tic­u­lar, two sto­ries each would have made it worth the pur­chase price: The Blab­ber, and Fast Times at Fair­mont High. The Blab­ber takes place in the Slow Zone/Beyond uni­verse of A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deep­ness in The Sky. While it was writ­ten years ear­li­er than either of the books I men­tioned, it is most­ly con­sis­tent with them and has a cou­ple of sur­pris­ing winks to the lat­er novels.

Fast Times at Fair­mont High is the sto­ry of a school project that must take place where net­work access is not allowed, a test that seems bar­bar­ic and prim­i­tive to the peo­ple of the time. It inte­grates vir­tu­al real­i­ty con­cepts into day-by-day usage more seam­less­ly than I’ve seen sci­ence fic­tion do, and Vinge writes an excit­ing, mys­te­ri­ous sto­ry about well-devel­oped char­ac­ters, some of whom remain mys­te­ri­ous although I sus­pect Vinge knows all the answers I haven’t fig­ured out yet and pos­si­bly has left some bread­crumbs that a sec­ond read­ing would reveal.

Good stuff, rec­om­mend­ed, but not as high­ly as his nov­els. Vinge just does­n’t have the time in a short sto­ry to weave togeth­er every­thing he does in a mul­ti-hun­dred page novel.