Vernor Vinge

A definitive compilation of short fiction by the two time Hugo Award winner ranges from his earliest works to his longer takes from the 1970s and 1980s and includes such classics as "The Ungoverned" and "THe Blabber." Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

Gavin

More playful and miscellaneous than I was expecting. As always with him, there are grand gears turning in the background of his stories: there's more to his worlds than we see, and reasons beyond what the characters reason. But overall not as stunning as his novels, even accounting for scale. This is not surprising when you realise that the earliest of these was written when he was a teenager. He really hits his stride halfway through this, 1980.

The main intellectual success is his depiction of anarchism, as stable, unstable, predatory, kind, natural, or requiring unnatural underpinning.

I loved his forewords to each story:

  "The quality of the writing is about average for what I could manage in the 1960s... And the ideas? Ah, there's the problem. To date, "The Accomplice" is the most irritating combination of embarrassing gaffes and neat insights that I have ever created."


Great fun but not as mind-bending as Egan or Chiang or Borges or Vinge. 

Ranked:
1. 'The Ungoverned'. How could anarchism resist invasion?: By being too expensive to conquer.
2. The Peddlar's Apprentice'. Neat post-post-apocalypse. The control group are the good guys.
3. 'Long Shot'.
4. 'The Blabber'.
5. 'Fast Times at Fairmont High'.
6. 'Just Peace'.
7. 'Conquest by Default'. Yet another anarchism, but with true aliens this time. Patches the gap in nonaggression with religious dogma: all obey the anti-monopoly priests. Colonialist anarchists!!
8. 'Original Sin'.
9. 'Bomb Scare'.
10. 'Apartness'.
11. 'The Whirligig of Time'. Tries too hard to be lyrical about nuclear holocaust. Rare depiction of winners of a nuclear war! Monarchy returns to post-apocalypse Russia, and then somehow they get to super advanced tech despite authoritarian thought control. You can feel the actual physical model straining underneath the prose and morals.
12. 'Win a Nobel Prize!'.
13. 'Run, Bookworm!'.
14. 'The Science Fair'.
15. 'Gemstone'.
16. 'The Accomplice'.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

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