I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wrote. A Deepness in the Sky is a worthy sequel.
He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy exposition, but by expert omission.
VV is up there with Stephenson and Gibson as the top 3. I don't put Asimov, etc in there since Asimov was hard sci-fi to the max and couldn't write a character to save his life, much like later Stephenson.
I wish I could find something else like VV's work that's sort of under-the-radar. I do have to mention that things like The Three Body Problem get hype, but are several tiers below VVs work.
Vinge is certainly one of the greats but so is David Brin. I would not consider him under the radar though. Some of his best are Earth, The Heart of The Comet, Glory Season.
"The Heart of the Comet" was co-authored with Gregory Benford. It is one of my favorite books, and I wish they would collaborate again.
Incidentally, Brin and Benford along with Greg Bear, are collectively known as the "Killer Bs". Practically everything written by any of the three is likely to be a great read.
I'd put Banks in the Asimov/Stephenson tier at best. His ideas were brilliant enough to sustain a long series - but not one book in it actually makes for a good read. Neal Asher doesn't have anything like the same ambition, but Hilldiggers is a better Culture novel than any of the actual Culture novels if you actually want to read and enjoy it.
I am glad someone else has the same view point: Asimov and Stephenson are great hard sci-fi, but they can't write characters. Except Stephenson COULD, and did in Snow Crash and Diamong Age to some degree, but then stopped being interested in it. While VV had good characters in his books, even though I would argue he wasn't "excellent" at it either, and maybe Stephenson even surpassed VV in characters/story in Snow Crash.
I can't really judge Asimov - so many people stole from him that he just reads like War & Peace to me in the sense that it was probably awesome and novel at some point, but at this point it's just a little stale, even though Foundation was still cool...at least the first few books.
With that said, I don't put VV above Stephenson. Maybe above Gibson because I really appreciate the technical details, but not quite sure. To me VV, Stephenson, and Gibson are all the absolute top tier, at least in the sci fi realm. No one even comes close, as cool as some one offs by other authors, like Forever War, are.
I've so far only read Consider Phlebas, and while it's an interesting dystopia where humans have no purpose, and machines could do everything (if allowed), it's not an actual interesting story.
It's like he had the idea for the dystopia, with the main character fighting against the machines. And then tried to write a story around it. The central idea is interesting I guess, but the story built around it is not.
It doesn't help that the fight is futile, the machines as described are so powerful humanity doesn't stand a chance, so what kind of story can you make?
it's an interesting dystopia where humans have no purpose
Unfortunately every single one of his books has this problem. It's like all of his novels are written from the perspective of the protagonist's housecat.
Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed. If you go in with a more open mind then you may find that there’s actually an interesting philosophical point to be examined and a decent story built around it.
Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed.
Except half of Fire Upon the Deep was characters on the same planet but it was actually cool. The first two books are definitely among my favorite sci-fi of all time, the third one was a dud.
My main gripe is that these three books all share the same trope that underpins one of the major subplots: glib, charming politician type is scheming, eeeeevil. In the first two books, there's enough novelty (how the Tines and Spiders work, programming as archaeology, localizer mania) to make up for that. But I don't really think the third book adds much in the same way, and it is also very clearly building to a confrontation that will happen in a future book. So the staleness is much more noticeable
It's not bad. It looks to be what would have become the first of a trilogy. It's just slow and sets the stage for something that culminates in another Fire Upon the Deep tier finale.
People wanted to read how Pham Nuwen defeated the Emergents, learn more about the Zones of Thought or see the Blight finally destroyed once and for all.
I think WoT is worth pushing through, you got stuck in the same spot a number of people do. There is definitely a lull there.
Many times I've considered re-cutting the books/audio-books for WoT to remove what I find to a be drudgery but it would be a massive task that I'm not up to. I just skip over the parts in my re-reads of the series.
I'll be the first to say that WoT has /many/ flaws but it will forever hold a special place in my heart. You just have to get past the way women are written in the series (and I understand if you can't). That's something else I'd be happy to prune out or ideally fix but that's well beyond my skill set. Elaine and Egwene especially are horribly written in the last few books (and it's not all Brandon Sanderson's fault I assume, they aren't great in the prior books either).
Book eight may have been about when I gave up and sold the set. The dull bit in the middle of each book is when I would practice my speed reading.
About once a season I contemplate the idea of approaching either Sanderson or the Jordan estate and ask that they consider an abridged edition edited by Sanderson. You could easily knock 1500 pages out of this series and not change a single thing.
Meanwhile Rosamund Pike is doing new audio books for the series and the samples sound much better than the old one. But the first one is about forty hours. As much as I might like to claim that I would listen to her read a phone book, I don’t think I can listen to 600 hours of audiobooks for one series.
Yes, the self indulgence reached record heights by timing death before completion. Just so we could have infinite fields of boring politics.
In the paperbacks, each chapter with the “bad guys” had a special symbol on it, so I just skipped through the middle books reading only those. Fortunately the Dark One was still trying to progress the plot, and I don’t think I missed much.
I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wrote. A Deepness in the Sky is a worthy sequel.
He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy exposition, but by expert omission.
A true name in sci-fi.