So many sci-fi authors exploring interstellar civilizations toss in some sort of faster-than-light travel or wormholes to facilitate the narrative. What I liked about Vinge was he considered how things might play out if you actually stuck to the laws of physics as we know them today.
He imagined a nomadic society which moves from star system to star system mostly trading knowledge. While they travel at sub-light speeds, they broadcast a galactic Internet’s worth of data at the speed of light. The catch is that much of it is encrypted and only they have the keys, so they have tremendous power wherever they go.
This is not to say he never considered FTL, but when he did, he went deep into its implications. It was not just a means of hopping quickly around the galaxy. He realized that it would enable outrageously powerful AI, as the speed of thought would be increased by orders of magnitude.
I really liked how he envisioned space travel and the culture that came with it. A small but rich detail was how all the time measurements where given using kiloseconds and mega seconds to describe months and years since a nomadic space tribe would have little use for calendars associated to orbits. It’s creative and thought out.
His books and short stories set in a sooner future where society and our education system is vastly different because of AR are a lot of fun as well.
Several people on Lemmy and other places recommended ‘A Fire Upon the Deep’ and ‘A Deepness in the Sky’ to me and I plowed through them. Really enjoyable reads with actually unique takes that I haven’t seen in other media even though it’s 30 years old. The aliens feel actually alien but follow a logic which I appreciate. The ‘zones of thought’ is now just forever in my head.
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