he Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge includes all but two of the short science-fiction stories of one of the field's most innovative hard SF authors. The collection features 17 stories from the beginning of Vinge's career in the mid-1960s to date, including one original story.
Vinge is a computer scientist, and many of these stories show his interest in computers and the machine-mind interface. "The Accomplice" may be the earliest story involving computer-generated animated movies, and "Bookworm, Run!" involves a chimpanzee with a high-speed mental link to a massive computer database. The artifact in "Gemstone" is able to interface with human minds as well, and "Win a Nobel Prize" is a vignette about a newly developed mind-machine interface. "The Long Shot" has a bio-computer-controlled seed-ship sent on a 10,000-year voyage to colonize another planet. The new story, "Fast Times at Fairmont High," involves eighth-graders doing their school projects in a near future where everyone lives in a wireless-direct-mind-link, networked, sensory-enhanced world.
Other stories take in post-holocaust settings. "The Peddler's Apprentice" is about a man who spends most of his time in suspended animation on a technologically challenged future world. "The Ungoverned" takes place in a strange postwar libertarian anarchy version of Kansas where police forces are totally privatized. "Apartness" (his first published story) is also set in a postwar future where only the Southern Hemisphere is habitable, and involves a mysterious human settlement discovered in Antarctica. "The Whirligig of Time" involves a degenerate postwar future ruled by cruel, all-powerful aristocrats.
"The Barbarian Princess" is the origin story of Tatja Grimm, set on an alien world whose slowly developing technological societies are held together by a universally read pulp fiction magazine. "The Blabber" is set in the same future as his award-winning "Zones of Thought" novels, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.
Complex backgrounds abound
Vernor Vinge has not been a prolific writer, but his stories are stocked with more neat and original ideas than most novels. Vinge is one of the field's innovative thinkers, and one of the themes hiding within his SF involves the "singularity," that point in our cultural and technological evolution where artificial and enhanced intelligence increases so exponentially fast that the world becomes incomprehensible to normal humans.
The backgrounds in Vinge's fiction are deep and complex, often giving the feeling that the author knows much more about the world than is included in the story. Many of his stories could form the basis for fascinating novels, as Vinge has actually done with "The Barbarian Princess" (expanded into Tatja Grimm's World) and "The Blabber," which introduces the Tines, strange doglike aliens with group minds that are featured in his more recent novels. The fascinatingly original world in "The Peddler's Apprentice" would support novel-length expansion, as would the aggressive, short-lived aliens in "Original Sin," who are born as highly-intelligent, cannibalistic predators.
If Vinge has a weakness as a writer, it's that his prose and narrative style could be more clear and transparent. His stories unfortunately require some extra effort to read. Vinge has developed significantly over his 35-year career, however, and although the earlier stories feel a bit dated, the quality is high throughout this volume. (The only exception may be "Bomb Scare," a story with a promising setup about aggressive aliens ready to destroy a planet when even more vicious aliens appear, wasted with a silly shaggy-dog ending.)
The best Vinge stories, especially those from recent years, are brilliant indeed. One can only wish that Vernor Vinge could find more time to increase his output of stories of this quality.
