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Longtime fans might be in for a bit of a surprise, however, when they read Vinge's new offering, "A Deepness in the Sky." There is no Internet analog in this entertaining, intricately plotted space opera, nor is there any sign of another Vinge standby -- the ever-popular artificially intelligent superbeing. Instead, "A Deepness in the Sky" (set in the same future as "A Fire Upon the Deep," only about 30,000 years earlier) takes place in a time when computers have yet to break through to sentience. It's a dramatic change of pace for Vinge -- forced on him, he confesses, by the accelerating pace of events in his own, real-time life.

Science fiction writers used to have it easy, says Vinge.

"When I was first writing science fiction in the early '60s, it was easy to have ideas that it turned out didn't happen for 20 or 30 years," says Vinge. "But now it is very hard to keep up -- in part because the people who are making things happen have absorbed science fiction's mind-set of scenario building and technological brainstorming. They are driving ahead of their headlights too, now, and things are going very, very fast."

Vinge should know. He enjoys recounting how a friend of his read "True Names" just after it came out and told him that the story -- in which human computer jockeys donning alternate online personae battled with a malign artificial intelligence for mastery of a world-spanning computer network -- was "too far out." But four years later, she read it again and told Vinge it was "really too conventional."

"True Names" today reads more like a piece of reportage than speculative science fiction. William Gibson may get all the glory for defining the word "cyberspace," but Vinge actually nailed the details. "True Names" includes online gathering places identical to the MUDs (multi-user domains) that became the online rage in the late '80s. Its protagonists guard their real names from the National Security Agency and other hackers with cryptographic safeguards, just like today's cryptopunks. And they live solely to log on -- the pathology of today's Internet addiction is all-too-familiar in "True Names." So maybe we don't yet have marauding artificial intelligences or the ability to upload our consciousness into the Net; given Vinge's track record, it should only be a matter of time.

What do you do for an encore? How do you keep on keeping up? In "A Fire Upon the Deep," Vinge jumped forward 40,000 years to tell a vastly entertaining tale of intergalactic skulduggery, but still fell victim to the perils of anachronism. What the heck was Usenet doing in the unimaginably distant future?

It wasn't an accident, says Vinge. "It was dictated by certain technical constraints. My excuse was that the situation was one in which the latency -- the delays per communication link -- and the bandwidth were probably about the same as the 1980s-era Internet. I could justify that because we were talking about faster-than-light communication -- no one knows if that can ever be done, much less at what bit rate."

Next page | Will self-programming computers take over the world?