“Fast Times at Fairmont High” excited me even more than “The Blabber”. And A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the most amazing science fiction novels ever written. Frankly, when I first read “The Blabber” I didn’t think Vinge or anyone else could really deliver on that promise. In that story, Vinge gave us a glimpse - from the edge of the Slow Zone - of what an amazing place the near-Singularity of the Beyond would be like. Both of these latter stories are set in in Vinge’s Zone of Thoughts universe, and “The Blabber” was the first peek we had into that universe. An analogy could be drawn, I felt, between this relationship and the relationship between “The Blabber” and A Fire Upon the Deep. Rainbows End also saw Vinge returning to a fictional universe which had been the setting for two excellent short stories: “Fast Time at Fairmont High” and “Synthetic Serendipity”. If Rainbows End followed that pattern, it was going to be a tremendous book. It seemed to me that Rainbows Endwas the perfect storm:įor starters, Vernor Vinge was an author who could truly boast that every single novel he’d ever written was better than the one he’d written before: The Witling was better than Grimm’s World The Peace Warwas better than The Witling Marooned in Realtime was better than The Peace War A Fire Upon the Deep was better than Marooned in Realtime and A Deepness in the Sky was better than A Fire Upon the Deep.
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