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Vernor Vinge's The Collected Stories picks stories like the Hugo-winning Fast Times at Fairmont High from sources as diverse as New Worlds, Orbit and Analog.
Vernor Vinge's debut story Apartness first appeared in New Worlds in 1965. It was an atypical story for the magazine, with its solid construction and straightforward narrative -- in direct contrast to the pyrotechnics commonly associated with Moorcock's regime -- but it was good enough to be picked for Terry Carr and Don Wollheim's Year's Best SF. Vinge wrote approximately a story a year for the next decade. The most well-known were 'Long Shot,' picked for two Year's Best anthologies, about a sentient space-probe on a mission of survival for all humanity, and his stories for Damon Knight's Orbit series of ground-breaking original paperback anthologies, 'The Science Fair,' and 'Grimm's Story,' a wonderful, baroque novellette that harkened back to Golden Age SF with it's vast floating palaces on a planet chronically short of metals. That story became the first part of Vinge's debut novel, Grimm's World, But after publication of his second novel The Witling in 1976, Vinge's output all but stopped for the best part of a decade. Only 'True Names,' his groundbreaking cyberspace novella -- sadly omitted from this collection -- and 'Gemstone,' a lovely novelette set in New Zealand, graced the pages of the magazines. But in 1984 his Hugo nominated novel The Peace War, and its 1986 sequel Marooned in Real-Time (Collected in the omnibus edition Across Real-Time) showed that Vinge was not finished with SF. More and more since Vinge has concentrated on epic novels such as the Zones of Thought novels, the Hugo winning A Fire Upon The Deep (1992) and its prequel A Deepness in The Sky (1999), but occasionally he produced a shorter work, such as 'Win a Nobel Prize!' for Nature magazine in 2000. Most of the stories in The Collected Stories -- eleven of the seventeen -- date from that first decade of Vinge's career, while three of the four from the 1980s are amongst the longest in the book. As well as 'Gemstone,' there is 'The Blabber,' a long novella set on a distant colony world, which Vinge himself describes as "a test flight into the universe of my Zones of Tought novels." Many of the stories deal with approaching The Singularity, that point in time at which artificial intelligence becomes so advanced that it becomes incomprehensible to human minds. Many are test runs, or companions to Vinge's seven novels; "The Barbarian Princess," was a return to Grimm's World, and would eventually become the opening to the revision, Tatja Grimm's World. The connection between "The Blabber," and the Zones of Thought novels has already been remarked upon, while "The Ungoverned" is a companion to the Across Realtime stories. Most recently, Vinge wrote the Hugo winning novella "Fast Times at Fairmont High." The story of a pair of students investigating an isolated park in Southern California, it is dense with information and a window on to the ever-faster world of our children. It was also a dry run for Vinge's latest novel, the wonderful Rainbow's End, and should be viewed as an alternate future to the novel; the same names crop up, but their ages and relationship are different. The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge is a big, hefty book, full of big, hefty ideas. Seek it out and read it.
The copyright of the article Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge in Modern American Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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