Subject: Vinge on A Fire Upon the Deep

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: 20 Aug 92 18:48:08 GMT

I sat in on a talk in which Vernor Vinge gave some background on his book
"A Fire Upon the Deep", and explained some material that hadn't been clear
to me from reading the book itself.

Central to this background, as it was to the background of his earlier
book, "Marooned in Realtime", is the notion of the Singularity.  Vinge
believes that the exponential advance of technology will continue in the
future, until the point at which superhuman intelligence (AI or computer-
enchanced human) can be realized.  At this point, which shouldn't be that
far in our future, human society becomes as impossible for us to understand
as our society is for a goldfish to understand.  Vinge believes science
fiction which ignores the potential of such a Singularity to be dishonest.
The problem is that accepting it severely limits the potential for writing
science fiction.  So he deliberately set out to create a milieu in which
interesting stories (the current book and possibly future ones) could be
placed. 

The galaxy, as he has constructed it, has several concentric zones.
Closest to the core are the Unthinking Depths, in which human-level
intelligence is impossible.  Then comes the Slow Zone.  We live near the
outer edge of the Slow Zone.  Intelligence in this zone is limited to the
human level:  Super-intelligent computers or beings cannot function here,
and neither can faster-than-light travel.  (To avoid multiplying hypotheses
unnecessarily, he posits that the *mechanics* of ftl travel may be
possible, but that they are useless without impossibly intensive computational
support.)  After the Slow Zone comes the Beyond, where ftl travel is possible,
but the achievement of the last increments of super-intelligence are not,
and finally the Transcend, where no limitations are imposed.  The inhabitants
of the Transcend, species that have merged into a single race-mind, for
instance, are incomprehensible to those who live in the lower zones, and
generally indifferent to them.

Nobody knows what causes the zones.  (One of the more amusing aspects of
"A Fire Upon the Deep" is the anarchic galaxy-wide computer communications
network whose tone will be familiar to anyone on this network.  Its traffic
naturally includes endless and fruitless debate and speculation on the
origin of the zones.)  There is speculation that they are artifacts,
possibly possessed of an intelligence of their own.  (Would any simple
mechanism prevent *any* approach to super-intelligence from succeeding?)
There is speculation that they exist to protect developing species from the 
casual interference of the Transcendent Powers, which cannot function or 
exist in the lower reaches. 

I'd gotten the impression from the book that beings at the bottom of the
Slow Zone had lower intelligence than those at the top, but this was
incorrect.  The effects of the zones are uniform, except for the
transistion zones, which are only a few light-years wide.  At one point it
becomes important to the plot that a fleet of ships at the edge of the
Beyond is losing speed as it flies inward.  What is happening here is that
as it flies through the transition zone, it is taking longer and longer
for the computers to plot each micro-jump, giving a slower effective speed.
(There are some obvious problems with this, and he admits that he hasn't
bothered to fix them.)

What Vernor Vinge has done here is to create a milieu in which he can have
his cake and eat it too.  The Singularity exists, and the result is a
strange and interesting galaxy.  But it can't happen here, so it's still
possible to tell meaningful stories.

A final note:  Vinge's earlier short story, "Blabber", takes place in this
same milieu, a couple of thousand years later.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   The inability of snakes to count is actually a refusal, on their part,
    to appreciate the Cardinal Number system. -- "Actual Facts"