I don’t want to hear any more Democrats talking about the strategy they’re going to use to defeat the Republicans. I can sum that up in one sentence: We’re going to try to get more votes than them.

Beyond that, everything else about strategy – as far as the public is concerned – is a meaningless detail. Strategy is nothing more than the means by which you communicate your message. It is, ultimately, a communications device. It’s no different than a cell phone.

As a result, when it comes to strategy, it is impossible to draw any distinction between a Democrat and a Republican: If we find a successful strategy, they’ll copy it. If they find a successful strategy, we should copy it (assuming it isn’t immoral, unethical, illegal, or all three).

Reporter: “So, Mother’s Day is coming up… what are you planning to say when you call her?”

Democrat: “Well, I’m planning to use a Nokia.”

Republican: “Well, I’m planning to use a Samsung.”

Democrat: “We’re a little worried about the Republican use of Samsungs. We think it might make mom love them more. But we’re going to counter their Samsung tactics with some strategic Motorola dialing.”

Is it any wonder, after a week of talking heads all chattering about what cell phones they’re going to us, that large swaths of the American public can no longer distinguish any difference between Democrats and Republicans?

Contrary to popular belief, politics is not about image. Image is just another strategy for communicating the message. And it’s the message that wins elections. Politics is ideology. It’s about the ideas. And if you’re a Democrat, it’s because you believe our ideas are better than their ideas. And if you believe that, then you owe it to yourself, to your party, and to the American people to put those ideas before the American people.

There is one place where it is, of course, appropriate to talk strategy, and that’s the Strategy Room. And so, for a moment, I’m going to turn this into a Strategy Room and talk about the most successful and powerful strategy to be used in American politics in the last fifty years:

The Contract With America .

Whatever you may think of its actual content, the Contract With America was undeniably a brilliant political strategy. It quickly and succinctly, on a single sheet of paper, summed up the entire philosophy of the Republican party. Because of its simplicity it could be photocopied, e-mailed, faxed, televised, discussed, bullet-pointed, powerpointed, and virally disseminated in hundreds of different ways. In an era where the media only wants to talk about how a political party is going to say something and rarely about what is actually being said, the Contract With America brilliantly combined the medium with the message: Whenever a newspaper wanted to discuss the Contract With America, for example, it would inevitably reproduce its ten bullet points.

And here’s the most important point: The Contract With America made it perfectly clear exactly what the Republicans would do if they were given power. It served the same function once served by party platforms (which have, of course, become bloated documents completely dissociated from the party’s actual goals).

This was crucially important in 1994, when the American public was entirely unhappy with a Democratic congress which seemed incapable of accomplishing anything. In fact, it was entirely unclear what the Democrats were actually trying to accomplish. The Republicans, on the other hand, were clearly for something. And even if you didn’t agree with all of it, there was a good chance you agreed with some of it.

The result was the Republican Revolution.

A little over a decade later, we find ourselves in the same position: The public is completely disenchanted with a Republican congress and administration who seem to be either at odds with the public good or completely ineffectual or both.

But unlike the Republicans in 1994, the Democrats have failed to clearly communicate a message: What do they stand for? What will they do when elected?

They need something like the Contract With America.

…

Hey, here’s a thought: Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, why don’t the Democrats just use the most successful and powerful political strategy of the last fifty years?

Of course, we won’t call it a Contract with America . Instead, let’s call it An American Agenda.

What should it contain?

(1) I want wedge issues. I want the issues which will separate us from the Republicans. Those are the issues which define us.

(2) Not every Democrat in America needs to agree with every single article of the American Agenda. But they should be able to create a solid platform using a majority of it without being utterly compromised by the rest of it.

(3) It needs to be a positive document, not a reactionary one. It can’t be about what the Republicans should be stopped from doing, it needs to be about what the Democrats will be doing.

Roughly speaking, Vernor Vinge’s career as a novelist can be divided into three parts: His earliest novels, written pre-1983; the Across Realtime novels of the mid-1980s; and the award-winning Zones novels of the 1990s.

This reaction covers the first of these. I am planning additional reactions to cover his later novels.

TATJA GRIMM’S WORLD

The novel now known as Tatja Grimm’s World has something of a fractured history. In it’s earliest form, it was published as the short story “Grimm’s Story” in 1968. Damon Knight then asked Vinge to expand “Grimm’s Story” to novel-length, which he did by essentially writing another short story as a sequel to the first and then putting the two together as a patch-up.

The novel, published in 1969 as Grimm’s World, apparently made very little splash and eventually went out of print. In 1986, however, Jim Baen asked Vernor Vinge to expand and revise the novel for a reprint edition. This time Vinge wrote a prequel, which was published separately as “The Barbarian Princess” in Analog and then published as part of the new Tatja Grimm’s World in 1987.

Attempting to read Tatja Grimm’s World as a novel is an unrewarding experience: It’s poorly paced and completely disjointed. There are gaping holes in the individual character arcs and point of view characters disappear mysteriously between the chapter breaks.

Read correctly as a collection of three connected short stories, however, it makes a much stronger impression. I would also say that the addition of “The Barbarian Princess” in 1987 makes a big difference, allowing Vinge to more clearly establish his themes and primary character arc.

That being said, there’s still some awkwardness to be found here. You can tell that the core of this collection/novel is still the work of a young author early in his career.

But that’s not to say that the book doesn’t have a lot of offer, as well:

Tatja Grimm’s World takes place on a world at the cusp of the scientific revolution. But this world lacks metals, has a unique geography, and is possessed of distinctly different cultures. The result is a very different sort of scientific revolution, which Vinge works out in fascinating detail.

As his main character, Vinge chooses the editor of a fantasy and contrivance fiction magazine. (For “contrivance fiction” you can read “science fiction”.) This gives him a rather unique view of the gradual scientific revolution taking root on this alien world, but all of this takes a backseat to the character at the center of this drama: Tatja Grimm. It’s her mystery which forms the backbone of the novel’s plot.

Where this novel succeeds is in its hard SF extrapolation of an alien world in a parallel time of technological change, mixed with a story in which those elements are frequently expressed using the tropes of fantasy. (A mixture which is nicely mirrored in the main character’s fantasy and contrivance fiction magazine.)

Where the novel fails, however, is when it can’t quite make me believe the extrapolation. For example, Vinge posits a sea-based society more technologically and socially advanced than the island-based societies they trade with. This society also endures for at least a millennia with not only seemingly little change, but with a continuity of individual vessels (which are impractically huge). I can’t quite make those pieces, or some of the subsidiary technologies described, really fit together in my mind.

But if you can grab your bootstraps every so often and haul your suspension of disbelief back up where it belongs, I think you’ll find Tatja Grimm’s World to be a pleasant little read… particularly in the context of Vinge’s later writing.

THE WITLING

The Witling, published in 1976, is a deeply flawed novel.

The primary problem here is that the characters come across as flat and lifeless – their actions seemingly forced by authorial fiat. With a little imagination you can see how these character arcs could have been very, very compelling… but they aren’t. Emotions, for example, don’t seem to emerge organically from the characters. Instead they just seem to happen, with the only seeming cause being that the author’s outline said that they should.

This core problem also cascades to certain extent. At first glance, for example, the plots appears to have been padded out from a more proper novella length. But, upon reflection, it would appear that this is simply an aggravated symptom of the character dramas falling with such resounding thuds.

Where the novel succeeds, however, is in its analysis of its central conceit: Teleportation which observes the conservation of momentum. Vinge takes this idea and extrapolates it to at least four levels of depth. To borrow John Campbell’s saying again: Not just the car, but the traffic jam, the interstate system, the oil crisis of the ‘70s, and the search for alternative fuels.

I suspect The Witling’s biggest problem is that it’s narrative structure and tapioca characters would be primarily appealing to the hard SF aficionados who like things like Niven’s Ringworld– where the central conceit and speculation of the story takes center stage and holds your attention and fascination. But the conceit in this case takes the form of psychic teleportation – so those same hard SF aficionados are probably turned off by how “improbable” it is (as opposed to scrith, I suppose).

That being said, Vinge’s detailed extrapolation of the teleportation is, in fact, interesting, rigorous, and detailed enough that The Witling makes for a worthwhile read.

TRUE NAMES

True Names is a little difficult to classify. It’s short enough to technically classify as a novella. However, it’s long enough that it has been published as a stand-alone novel in its own right.

At the moment, the story is only available as part of the volume True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier – which collects the story itself along with a dozen or so essays by other authors discussing the story and its predictions. So, for the sake of argument, I’m going to classify True Names as a novel and discuss it here. (It should be noted, however, that I don’t own the current collection and have not read the essays. So this is a reaction only to True Names itself.)

True Names is probably the specific point at which Vinge went from being “a pretty decent SF author” to “hot shit”. There were a few false steps still to be taken, and it took awhile for the rest of the world to notice, but with True Names Vinge basically arrived. He pulled the lever and he delivered.

It’s probably not coincidental that True Names is also basically the first time that Vinge puts the Singularity firmly in his sights and pulls the trigger. He comes at it from multiple directions, trying to hem it in and define its outlines… and then he plunges into it, penetrating perhaps as deeply as one can into the fundamentally incomprehensible. Then he pulls back and lets the foundations of his story rest firmly on a human drama.

But, in truth, that’s not the primary focus of the story.

Nor is the primary focus of the story to be found in Vinge’s casual introduction of a fully-realized cyberspace, a trope which has been masticated endlessly in the two and a half decades since.

No, the primary focus of this story lies in the subtle, interwoven theme suggested by the title: The power and meaning of true names. Vinge allows this theme to play itself simultaneously on planes transcendental, digital, and mortal.

True Names is a complicated and subtly worked narrative. Vinge isn’t afraid to keep adding one big idea after another to his pot until it’s almost overflowing, stirring in multi-layered character dramas, spicing the whole thing lightly with thematic elegance, and then bringing the whole thing to a slow boil over a plot of high-stakes thrills.

But what makes True Names even more impressive is that, in the act of reading, you’re scarcely aware of the complexity of the material you’re reading. Somehow Vinge manages to present it all with smooth prose and fast-placed plotting, keeping you fully engaged in his story and turning the pages as if you were reading nothing more substantial than a piece of light adventure fiction. It’s only when you’ve breathlessly flipped the last page and have a moment to reflect that you realize the truth:

This is the reason you read science fiction.

GRADES:

TATJA GRIMM’S WORLD: B
THE WITLING: C+
TRUE NAMES: A+

Vernor Vinge
Published: 1968 / 1976 / 1981
Publisher: Tor
Cover Price: $14.95
ISBNs: 0-76-530885-1 / 0-671-65634-1 / 0-31-286207-5
Buy Now!

Vernor Vinge’s output as an author can be described as almost tepid. Over the span of four decades (from 1965 through 2005), his total output consists of only 25 works: 19 short stories and 6 novels.

That’s a slim opus, indeed, but it’s an opus which has completely transformed the entire genre.

Usually when you say stuff like that you’re speaking hyperbolistically. But not in the case of Vinge: At least half of the significant science fiction authors of the last two decades owe Vinge either a direct or indirect debt of enormous proportions. And, as a result, pretty much everyone else in the field has been influenced by his ideas to one degree or another.

A lot of this importance can be credited to Vinge’s conceptualization of the Singularity, which I’ll discuss at more length as it comes up in his work. But he’s also responsible for the modern vision of cyberspace. That, combined with his anarcho-capitalistic social thought experiments, puts him solidly behind the nascent origins of the cyberpunk movement in the 1980s. He is also arguably responsible for the Neo Space Opera Renaissance of the past decade and his most recent work (represented by “Fast Times at Fairmont High”, “Synthetic Serendipity”, and the forthcoming Rainbows End) would seem tantalizingly poised to shape major genre trends for the decade to come in ways we can perhaps scarcely imagine.

But until recently, I, like many others, had read only Vinge’s two most recent, Hugo Award-winning novels: A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. I had been previously turned away from his earlier works partly because they were frustratingly unavailable and partly because I’d heard that his earlier novels just weren’t of the same quality as his more recent work.

Then, a few weeks ago, I finally cracked open The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. Over the course of the following month I proceeded to devour (or re-devour) every word Vernor Vinge has ever published.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF VERNOR VINGE

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge is a very strong testament to the quality and nature of Vinge’s career. At the time it was published in 2001, this was arguably a complete collection of Vinge’s short fiction. It contains less than two dozen stories spread thing across four decades of work, but almost every single story is a masterpiece. The collection contains every word of short fiction published by Vinge, but it reads like another author’s “Best of” collection.

I have to assume that Vinge is essentially a methodical craftsman: Each story painstakingly fashioned like a jewel, with each facet carefully cut to reveal its inner strength and beauty to the utmost. This can create seemingly agonizing waits between the appearance of each work, but it also means that the wait is always worthwhile.

The highlights of this collection include:

“Bookworm, Run!” – This is basically the story of someone who gets Google plugged straight into their brain. A version of Google fully stocked with the mainframes of the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI all rolled into one. The result is the ability to instantaneously access an essentially infinite library of networked information in a fashion almost, but not quite, as if it existed in your own memory.

Lots of science fiction authors have been known to let genies out of bottles: Ideas so powerful that they come to define their careers and create a shockwave which percolates throughout the field or transforms our understanding of the genre. Smith’s space opera. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Herbert’s Dune.

But most of these authors don’t reveal their genies until they’ve got a few dozen stories under their belt. By contrast, Vinge, in the very first story he ever sold, whips out his bottle, smashes it to smithereens, and starts interrogating the genie. The result is a revelation which has been haunting his work, and the entire genre, ever since.

What, exactly, are we talking about? The Singularity. In “Bookworm, Run!”, Vinge asks a very simple question: “What happens when human science creates the first truly superhuman intellect?” And Vinge’s answer is evocative, “You get something incomprehensible. You get a point beyond which the merely human is no longer capable of understanding.”

Vinge’s argument, essentially, is that as you begin to grow intelligence, you reach a point at which that growth becomes essentially exponential. For example, in “Bookworm, Run!”, when you reach the point that your natural memories can be supplemented by artificial databases, you don’t get a situation in which intellect gradually improves: You have an explosive, essentially infinite growth in personal knowledge. And that sudden expansion from knowing a few things to knowing everything creates a dynamic which is, essentially, unimaginable – it can only be thought of in the grossest and most imprecise of ways by those of us who have not yet undergone that change.

In “Bookworm, Run!” Vinge saddles his protagonist and his specific technology with some… unique limitations. In this way he sidesteps the essentially incomprehensible nature of his proto-Singularity (since he hadn’t fully developed the concept yet), and instead sidles up to it from the side. But he doesn’t simply ignore the implications, either, as the end of the story reveals.

This reveals the unique problem of dealing with the Singularity in fiction: How do you tell a story about something incomprehensible by its very nature? Trying to meet that unique challenge of storytelling can give rise to some fascinating solutions and some wondrous world-building. In many ways, his many varied solutions to this problem have come to define Vinge’s career.

“Bookworm, Run!” is also quintessentially Vingean, revealing the future contours of his career, for another reason: In addition to the central conceit of the story, Vinge also casually drops a few other bombshells into his world-building which fundamentally transform society even before the story begins. Not only is he not content in running just a single thought-experiment through his story, the entire setting is permeated with detailed extrapolation.

In this case, the most notable change after the proto-Singularity at the centerpoint of the story, is the availability of cheap fusion reactors. Vinge postulates that this prevalence of cheap energy will create an economic depression, requiring the government to impose a period of strict economic controls. His logic here makes no sense to me, but it’s particularly interesting to look at the story as a starting point for Vinge’s experimentation with the economic organization of a high-tech society, a theme he’ll return to time and again in his work.

(Although I find it interesting to note that if you replace the words “cheap fusion reactors” with “self-replicating nano-factories” I probably wouldn’t have had the reaction of, “How do you figure, exactly?” Is that indicative that self-replicating nano-factories are just the latest “utopia gizmo” of science fiction, or is it that science fiction has finally found the utopia gizmo it’s always been looking for?)

“The Ungoverned” – This question of the ways in which technology can restructure an entire economy and, by extension, society is central to Vinge’s world-building in “The Ungoverned”. Basically, Vinge seems to have quickly reached the conclusion that sufficiently advanced technology inevitably breaks down central authority.

“The Ungoverned” is a novella lying between two novels: The Peace War takes place before it; Marooned in Realtime takes place after it. In The Peace War we see the last desperate efforts of a central authority attempting to cling to power by artificially suppressing technology. In Marooned in Realtime, Vinge takes this question to its extreme: What use is a central authority when an individual is an entire economy unto themselves? “The Ungoverned” lies quite literally between; an anarcho-capitalist society in rapid transition.

But all that is just the world-building. It’s the groundwork and the thematic substance which opens up the door for the rip-roaring war story which is the actual meat of the story. It makes for a fascinating reading because, on the one hand, it’s a fast-paced, no-holds-barred action story; but, on the other hand, it doesn’t take much to peel back the surface and see some frightening conclusions being drawn about the future being drawn. What does it really mean when a handful of people are capable of wielding as much power as a 19^th century superpower? Or even a 20^th century superpower?

“Conquest by Default” – This story takes a slightly different approach to Vinge’s vision of technological profligacy leading inevitably to extreme libertarianism. Here we have a system with a central control designed to deflect the monopolistic tendencies within the anarcho-capitalist structure. And if you think that Vinge is whole-heartedly endorsing the anarchic chaos which he appears to believe inevitable, then this is a story which will make you think twice.

“The Peddler’s Apprentice” – This story, which is a collaboration between Vernor Vinge and his ex-wife Joan D. Vinge, highlights several of the ways in which Vinge sidesteps the enigma of the Singularity. Once again we have a centralized authority artificially holding society’s technological progress in check, but we also get to view the Singularity through the eyes of a primitive. We also get to see Vinge’s willingness to dream across incredibly vast scales of time: A vision of civilizations rising and falling; or rising and disappearing into the Singularity; with the vestiges of either being given a chance to rise again over the spans of hundreds of millennia.

“The Science Fair” – Vinge also has a real flair for developing completely alien cultures with a great depth of thought. In reading “The Science Fair” I was reminded of something John Campbell once said: A good science fiction author, writing in 1900, would be able to predict the automobile. A great science fiction author would predict the traffic jam. In similar fashion, Vinge doesn’t just create imaginative and memorable alien races, he follows through on the basic qualities of their nature to logically produce the cultures, societies, and technologies such a species would naturally create.

“Original Sin” – This talent for creating alien races and then extrapolating upon their biological imperatives to create unique and multicultural societies is the foundation which makes “Original Sin” such a classic. The other element which deserves comment here is Vinge’s ability to invest a relatively large cast of character with a lot of individual depth. The result is a multi-faceted character drama which is made even more impressive given that several of those characters are completely alien in their countenance and in Vinge’s ability to create that character drama within the confines of a crisis capable of reshaping the known universe.

“Original Sin” is also notable because it shows Vinge hitting the central thesis of A Mote in God’s Eye several years before Niven and Pournelle.

“The Barbarian Princess” – It’s also interesting to note how most of Vinge’s novels have grown out of his short fiction. “The Barbarian Princess” is part of his pastiche novel Tatja Grimm’s World, which will be dealt with at length in its own reaction.

“The Blabber” – This short story is probably most famous because it’s the genesis point of the Zone universe, which serves as the setting for Vinge’s two best-known works, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. But “The Blabber” is a damn fine story in its own right.

The conceit of the Zones universe is a way for Vinge to cheat the exponential growth curve which ends inevitably in the Singularity. Basically, if Vinge is right about the Singularity, humans don’t get to go to space: Long before the industrial trends give us interstellar flight, the informational or biogenetic or artificial intelligence trends result in humanity becoming something transhuman.

So Vinge sidesteps the issue by, basically, waving his authorial hand and saying: “These technologies would surely be nifty… but they just don’t work. Too bad.” Vinge is hardly the only author to do this, but what makes Vinge’s experiment interesting is that he makes his authorial hand-waving explicit to the universe itself AND varies those technological limitations.

The result is a galaxy split into multiple “zones” (hence the name applied to the fictional milieu): In the Unthinking Depths at the galactic core, intelligent thought itself is impossible (or, at least, intelligent thought as we know it). If you and I were to jump on a spaceship and head down towards the galactic core, at some point our brains would simply stop functioning at anything but an animalistic level.

One step up from the Unthinking Depths is the Slow Zone. That’s where we are now: Human-level intelligence is possible, but not much more than that and the limits of physics are already pretty well known to us: FTL and gravity-control systems are impossible, for example.

The next step up is the Beyond. Here you can get some pretty sophisticated AI systems and other forms of superhuman intelligence. FTL, gravity-control, and some other amazing, physics-bending technologies are easily achievable. Basically, the Beyond is the realm of classic space opera.

And beyond the Beyond there is the Transcend: Here Vinge’s Singularity is possible. And, in fact, due to the nature of the Zones universe almost inevitable: A High Beyonder civilization has been artificially arrested on the precipice of the Singularity. Take them into a Zone where the Singularity is possible and they practically fall into Transcendance.

The net result is a universe where you, as an author, can literally scale the technology to whatever your current needs are, while also profiting immensely from unique interactions between the Zones. For example, “The Blabber” takes place near a border between the Zones, on a human colony world just far enough within the Slow Zone to be inexorably stuck, but close enough to the Beyond to know what they’re missing out on.

As a story, “The Blabber” begins to show a truly mature Vinge working his craft like a maestro. It mixes crafty and subtle storytelling; a character drama and coming of age story told with touching sincerity; marvelously intricate extrapolation and world-building; a cleverly conceived alien species; and at least a dozen nifty ideas thrown around to create sensawunda on a grand scale.

“Fast Times at Fairmont High” – As “The Blabber” was the genesis point for A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, “Fast Times at Fairmont High” is the genesis point for Vinge’s forthcoming Rainbows End. In this new cycle of stories, Vinge chooses to examine the Singularity by jumping onto the on-ramp and taking us down the gaping maw of the rapid plunge into computer-assisted super-consciousness.

What makes “Fast Times at Fairmont High” so very interesting is that Vinge’s technological predictions are not particularly outrageous. Indeed, what makes this story so utterly compelling, on a level beyond its immediate characterization and plot (which are both sterling), is Vinge’s completely believable extrapolation of the effect that technology scarcely more advanced than our own will have on the daily lives of every man, woman, and child alive.

Indeed, you can begin seeing signs of that change around us even now: The experience that I had in high school in the mid-to-late ‘90s was only tangentially different in the slightest of ways from the high school experience kids had twenty years earlier. Less than ten years later, ubiquitous proliferation of ‘net access, cell phones, wireless devices, online communities, and more have fundamentally changed the high school experience. It’s easy to say “this changes everything” – and it’s so very rarely true – but it’s actually happening right now. These new technologies are fundamentally changing the way you study; it changes the way you learn; it changes the way you socialize – it changes the way in which you live. And when you change the way people live their lives at a societal level, you change the very nature of that society. And it’s not just the change which is notable, it’s the pace of the change: Meaningful generation gaps which begin shrinking into spans of less than a decade.

What gives Vinge’s effort it’s distinction is that he doesn’t simply take a look at current trends, extend the graph lines by a few years, and then present the result. Instead he narrowly looks at the trends in the advance of computer technology and extends those graph lines a few years. Then he imagines what types of applications those technologies will make possible. Then he imagines what people will do with those types of applications. Then he imagines what a whole society of people doing those things would look like; what types of synergies would be created; what other technologies would be pursued. It’s a gestalt; it’s the traffic jam lurking behind the automobile.

OTHER SHORT STORIES

In the four years since The Collected Short Stories were published, Vernor Vinge has published two additional short stories: “Synthetic Serendipity” and “The Cookie Monster”. (These stories are both available legally online — follow the links.)

“Synthetic Serendipity” – This story takes place in the same near-future universe as “Fast Times at Fairmont High”. What I find interesting is that, despite sharing largely the same locales and a similar cast of characters, there is little thematic or content overlap between the two stories. This seems to go back to the discipline which lies behind the austerity of Vinge’s artistic output: He may go back to visit the same settings and even the same characters, but somehow he finds the ability to keep everything *completely* fresh.

I’m reminded by a story that my friend David Kloker told me the other night: The first time he went to New York City he spent the night sleeping on the floor of his friend’s dorm room at NYU and, in the morning, went to an anti-nuclear rally. The second time he went to New York he stayed at a 5-star hotel in Manhattan , supped beneath a glass chandelier, and spent the evening at the opera. The two experiences, though separated by scant miles, seemed to take place in two completely different cities. And, as my friend David says, if you stand on a busy, bustling street corner and reflect upon this, you can be humbled through the understanding that there is a reality which can only be understood through disparate views – at the interstice of diffracted experience.

Similarly, the Fairmont High we see in “Synthetic Serendipity” is the same school as the one we see in “Fast Times”… yet the experience is fundamentally different. And by refusing to hit any of the same beats a second time – by showing a completely fresh facet of his creation – Vinge adds remarkable depth to a setting which has only had a few thousand words dedicated to it.

“The Cookie Monster” – It’s difficult to do a review of this story because any substantive discussion of it would necessarily reveal the central mysteries which Vinge so very skillfully unwraps for you over the course of the story itself.

So let me speak in generalities for a moment: The escalation of the story’s central mystery and the execution of the plot are solid and well-paced. The characters not only have distinct personalities and unique roles, but genuinely make you care for them. The story, as a whole, explores a lot of different dynamics within the situation in a very efficient, entertaining, and creative fashion. There’s essentially no dead air in the story, and Vinge manages to hit a wide thematic range without beating you over the head with any particular message: Slavery. Genocide. Resistance. Freedom. Hope. Despair.

In “The Cookie Monster” I find a summary of Vinge as a whole: He excels at mixing old and new ideas alike, analyzing their implications to an unprecedented depth, twisting them in original ways, combining them in great quantities, accelerating the pace of change, and waiting to see what comes out of the mix. And then, once he’s got all that worked out, he’ll quite casually figure out where the crisis points and character dramas naturally arise and then execute the resulting story in a flawless fashion.

That’s “The Cookie Monster”. That’s Vinge. That’s genius.

GRADES:

COLLECTED STORIES OF VERNOR VINGE: A+
“Synthetic Serendipity”: A
“The Cookie Monster”: A+

Vernor Vinge
Published: 1966-2005
Publisher: Tor
Cover Price: $16.95
ISBN: 0-31-28758-43
Buy Now!

Today we have the first brand new, never-before-seen WIR reaction to appear on the website. I spent the month of March reading through essentially every word written by Vernor Vinge, and this is the first in a series of WIR reactions which will cover his entire corpus of work:

WIR 46: The Short Stories of Vernor Vinge

I’ve also recently been spending a good deal of time listening to every single note of music ever published by the Flaming Lips. It may just be a personal and idiosyncratic synchronicity, but I’ve found that their albums At War With the Mystics and (even moreso) The Soft Bulletin have proven to be the perfect musical accompaniment for Vingean exploits.

A few years ago I was asked, based on my analysis of the intrigues of the prequel trilogy, to share my thoughts on what a sequel to the original Star Wars trilogy would look like. The result was the following essay. Originally written shortly before the release of Revenge of the Sith, it has been given a minor revision to take into account the particulars of that last film.

EPISODES VII, VIII, and IX

Everything I’ve read would seem to indicate that George Lucas originally intended for Episodes VII-IX to be the “Further Adventures of Luke Skywalker”, and that a lot of that material got rolled into Return of the Jedi. (Although, of course, the story fluctuates.)

But let’s speculate.

Each STAR WARS trilogy would seem to be formed of two components:

(1) A Star War. In the original trilogy this was the Rebellion. In the prequel trilogy this is the Clone War or the Separatist Civil War.

(2) The Skywalker Saga. To some extent this can be thought of as “the story of Anakin Skywalker” — and Lucas has certainly tried to spin it that way in pulling his dramatic commitment back to six films – but the reality is the prequel trilogy is the story of Anakin and the original trilogy is the story of Luke. Anakin’s story certainly continues into Luke’s, but claiming that the focus of the second trilogy is Anakin’s redemption would be wildly inaccurate.

So what might a sequel trilogy look like?

Well, first off we need a star war: It’s right there in the title. What would it be? The Extended Universe certainly shows us some intriguing possibilities, ranging from a resurgent Empire to intergalactic invaders. But here’s my thought: A Droid Uprising. (Obi-Wan: “If druids could think, there’d be none of us here.”) There’s a rather serious disconnect between the attitudes we see people holding towards druids in the Star Wars universe — whether it’s Obi-Wan’s off-hand comment or the casual wiping of droid memories — and the intelligent, independent, and sentient behavior we actually see droids like C3-PO and (particularly) R2-D2 engaging in.

R2-D2 as leader of a Droid Rebellion? Nah. That’s a little too weird. But what about Grievous, the Droid General? Obi-Wan may have thought he destroyed him by burning out the organic organs in his chest, but what if those remains were recovered and preserved? (The most obvious questions would be, “By who?” and “For what purpose?”) Combine these speculations with the very old rumor that a character from the prequel trilogy would be frozen in carbonite only to return in the sequel trilogy and you start getting some very interesting synergies.

Let’s turn our attention from that and take a look at the Skywalker Saga for a moment. From what we’ve seen, the Skywalkers seem irrevocably tied up with the Prophecy of the Chosen One. Now, frankly, I’m still pretty damn hazy on exactly what this Prophecy is all about. What, exactly, does it mean to “bring balance to the Force”? The obvious interpretation of the words seems rather belied by the fact that none of the Jedi say, “The Chosen One? Kill him now before he can revive the Dark Side in order to balance out our massive success as practitioners of the Light Side of the Force!”

(Tangent: One interesting theory I came up with a while back was the idea that the whole Skywalker-as-Chosen-One thing is a red herring. What if Palpatine is the Chosen One who brings balance by orchestrating the destruction of the Jedi, whose wide-spread use of the Force created unnatural imbalances? It doesn’t fully track, but it’s an interesting thought.)

In any case, there’s actually two questions here: What do the Jedi THINK the Prophecy means? And what does the Prophecy ACTUALLY mean?

I’m not sure what the Jedi think the Prophecy means, but I believe that what the Prophecy actually refers to is the finding of a third path: A balance within the individual Force-user between the Light and Dark sides of the Force. A healing of the philosophical schism which occurred when the Sith and the Jedi parted ways a millennia ago, the former succumbing to self-destructive egomania; the latter becoming the caretakers of a stagnating civilization.

In such an interpretation, the Chosen One is not, of course, Anakin: It’s Luke. And what we see in Return of the Jedi is not just the rebirth of the Republic, it’s a rebirth of the Jedi. It’s not just a return of the Jedi wiped out twenty years before: It’s a return of the True Jedi, whose path was lost in an artificial schism.

(REVISION NOTE: The Jedi’s interpretation of the Prophecy would appear to rely on the dichotomy between the Living Force (sensitivity to the moment arising from the interconnection of all things) and the Unified Force (the binding nature of the Force which results in destiny and shapes the future). Finding balance between these two sides of the Force would be seen as a positive way to escape the stagnation inherent in the Old Jedi Order’s reliance upon the Unified Force.)

Now, in the Extended Universe, we’ve seen a persistence of the old Light/Dark dichotomy. But, personally, I believe that Luke’s teachings would be influenced by that moment in Return of the Jedi where he opened his heart to the Dark Side… and DIDN’T fall. His New Jedi Order would be a rediscovery of how to walk the Path of Balance.

Where does all that take us? I’m not sure. But let’s talk about the Skywalkers some more. Looking at the Star Wars saga from a structural standpoint, we also see a generational transition between the trilogies, and I would expect to see the same thing happen again with the sequel trilogy. The Skywalker(s) at the center of the sequel trilogy would be the children of either Luke or Leia (or both).

But what’s their story? In the prequel trilogy we see the Fall of Anakin Skywalker. In the original trilogy we not only see Luke avoid that fall, we also see Anakin’s Redemption. Is there a third angle to this story? Or is the cycle complete, and all we could see is redundancy?

(Another tangent: One of the things I find brilliant about the prequels is the subtle enhancement of Luke’s character arc in the original trilogy. Having seen only part of Anakin’s fall, I find that I “worry” a lot more about Luke falling to the Dark Side. Having seen only the original trilogy, Luke is clearly the Hero of the tale; you just expect him to resist temptation. But having seen his father — and Luke is so very much like his father — you can’t help but begin to entertain the worrisome notion that Luke could be just as vulnerable to temptation. But I digress.)

The Extended Universe, in fact, offers many faceted views of this fall-and-redemption cycle. Perhaps the least satisfying of these is Dark Empire — in which (MINOR SPOILERS) Luke falls himself and then finds redemption. Although there are a lot of interesting things about Dark Empire, Luke’s fall is not only a redundant telling of his father’s story, it also directly saps the power and conviction of the conclusion of Return of the Jedi. (The Emperor’s resurrection also detracts from the conclusive nature of  Return of the Jedi, in my opinion.) Perhaps the most interesting is the Knights of the Old Republic computer roleplaying game, which I won’t spoil here for anyone who hasn’t played it. (You should.) Mara Jade is another obvious example here.

Perhaps the mirror here is one of letting Luke play his role as the Chosen One to save his children (or Leia’s children). Luke is the Redeemer. (Doc Brown: “It’s not you, Marty. It’s your kids!”) This, of course, raises the question of how Luke let things go wrong in the first place. (Maybe he wasn’t there? Maybe Luke disappeared years ago and part of the story of the new trilogy is figuring out where he went and why.)

The larger problem with such a story, though, is its inherently unfocused nature: Is it a story of the kid’s fall? Their redemption? One or the other has strength. Both in the same arc would tend to make them a pale imitation of the previous trilogies (each of which was allowed to focus on one theme over the other).

Let me make a major digression here and look at the trilogies from a Campbellian perspective: It’s interesting to note that Lucas takes a Campbellian hero cycle and, to at least some extent, extends it into a generational epic. Shmi Skywalker is the metaphorical World Goddess, her virgin womb the wellspring of the Skywalker hero-legacy. In Anakin the promise of the hero (Chosen One) is twisted as his hero-journey is warped: The corrupted nature of Anakin’s reunion with his mother lays the seed; the death of one father-figure (Qui-Gon) and the failure of another (Obi-Wan) open the door for the corrupted father-figure of Palpatine to turn Anakin’s Apotheosis into a Fall. The result is the transformation of a hero-cycle into a Greco-tragedy.

But the hero-seed of Shmi Skywalker does not end its journey in Anakin Skywalker, it jumps to Luke. In this way Lucas raises Campbell ‘s cosmogonic cycle from a single hero and extends it to the Skywalker family as a whole. Luke’s hero-cycle, unlike that of his father, cannot be corrupted.

Campbell writes: “Two degrees of initiation are to be distinguished in the mansion of the father. From the first, the son returns as emissary, but from the second, with the knowledge that ‘I and the father are one’. Heroes of this second, highest illumination, are the world redeemers, the so-called incarnations, in the highest sense. Their myths open out to cosmic proportions. Their words carry an authority beyond anything pronounced by the heroes of the scepter and the book.”

Luke is a hero of the second sort: “I am a Jedi… like my father.” And Luke is also given his father’s blessing: “Tell your sister you were right… You were right…” This indoctrinates him as the Redeemer.

(Actually, Lucas’ working of the hero-cycle at the end of Return of the Jedi is both intricate and subtle. Campbell also writes: “Stated in direct terms: the work of the hero is to slay the tenacious aspect of the father (dragon, tester, ogre king) and release from its ban the vital energies that will feed the universe.” Luke doesn’t actually slay his father, but metaphorically the content is obviously there. More subtly, however, is the fact that Anakin’s moment of redemption is ALSO a father-slaying: The warped father-figure of Palpatine.)

But there’s one major leg of the cosmogonic hero-cycle missing here: The hero’s return. The Redeemer’s revolution and transformation of society. This would seem to be Luke’s destiny, with his revolution being the New Order of True Jedi walking the Path of Balance and his new society being that of the New Republic . (This is also an interesting mirror with Anakin: In Anakin’s failed apotheosis we see the destruction of the Jedi and the fall of the Republic. In Luke’s successful apotheosis we see the founding of a new Jedi Order and the return of the Republic.)

So if the sequel trilogy is the story of Luke as Redeemer, wouldn’t that mean the sequel trilogy would focus on Luke and not the next generation of Skywalkers? Not necessarily. No moreso than the story of Anakin’s redemption was told to us with Anakin as the focus of the story. Indeed, part of the strength of the STAR WARS saga to date is the fact that the second half of Anakin’s story became merely part of Luke’s story: A large tapestry woven into an even larger saga.

So, how would we see Luke’s story as the Redeemer and World-Changer similarly reflected as being merely a part of the larger story of his children?

It would definitely be interesting to see how Lucas would answer that question.

But for our own entertainment, let’s throw a few pieces out on the table and see what happens with them:

A DROID UPRISING

This is the central crisis on which we hang our plot. It’s the focus of tension and conflict, and provides all the pretty pyrotechnics you need for a grand space opera. It grows naturally out of the themes and elements we’ve already seen in the STAR WARS saga, while also staying true to the saga’s basic palette of classic, Golden Age science fiction.

MARA JADE

Mara may belong to the Extended Universe, but her love story of redemption is so perfect in the role of Luke’s wife that if she didn’t exist we’d have to create her. (And it wouldn’t be the first time that a creation of Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy made the jump to the big screen.) She wouldn’t necessarily be the Mara Jade of the Extended Universe, but she would be a Force-using servant of the Emperor who comes into direct conflict with Luke in the struggles which follow the destruction of the second Death Star. Although all of this would have happened off-screen, in her redemption we have the dark temptress transformed into the life-womb of the Skywalker Children. Speaking of which…

THE SKYWALKER CHILDREN

Here I see influence from the Children of the Lens (E.E. “Doc” Smith). The twin daughters of Luke and Mara; the twin sons of Han and Leia. They form the nucleus of the New Jedi Order, and their collective hero-cycle redemption is the thematic core of this third act in the Skywalker Saga. But the journey will not be smooth or predestined, for the twins are fated to be pitted one against the other.

THE NEW JEDI ORDER

In this we see Luke’s role as the Redeemer. Although twenty years have passed and the foundations of the New Order are already becoming firm, in its mere existence we can see the fruits of Luke’s apotheosis. The Order is the backbone of the New Republic, and the Skywalker Children are the nucleus of the Order: Thus we see how Luke’s role as the Redeemer is subsumed into the hero-cycle of his children.

A GRAIL QUEST

The Arthurian Grail Quest is an inversion of the hero-quest, in which the hero-quest itself becomes a tragic form. What would the grail-object be in the world of STAR WARS? I’m not sure. But in a grail-quest we would see that elusive third facet of the hero-cycle: In Anakin we see a failed hero-cycle lead to tragedy. In Luke we see a successful hero-cycle turned to apotheosis. In the Skywalker children we would see a grail-quest in which some would rise to ascension and others would be debased.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LUKE SKYWALKER

After the world-change, the hero must depart — it’s the final stage of his existence. In the case of Luke, his disappearance would not only play a part in triggering the crisis which initiates the hero-cycle of his children, it would also be the breadcrumbs on the path which would lead them to the grail-quest.

And how about some droid Force users? Or, rather, not Force users. Because the Force binds together *living* things. But if that’s the case, who are the Droid Knights? And how can they do the things they do?

EPISODE VII: THE FORGOTTEN SHADOW

The last remnants of the Empire have been swept away at the Battle of Talame. But in the aftermath of victory a dark mystery prevails: At the height of the battle, Jedi Master LUKE SKYWALKER vanished, his ship disappearing without a trace.

As the galaxy searches for the lost Jedi Master, Luke’s wife, MARA JADE, and his daughter, AMELIA, are dispatched to the Republic shipyards at Halon Prime, to investigate the facility’s sudden communications silence.

Meanwhile, on the small world of Pelori IV, an ancient menace has returned — an old threat for a New Republic …

Pan down to the ship of Mara and Amelia, running silent through intergalactic space. Cut inside to a brief conversation between Mara and her daughter. Even here, a micro-jump from Halon Prime, there’s no sign of any communications in the system. They jump. After a few seconds, they drop out of hyperspace into catastrophe: Hundreds of ruined Republican ships litter the starways, their still-burning hulls drifting listlessly through an endless field of debris…