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Five BYO AI
Dec. 17th, 2024 12:37 pmVinge, Vernor, 1992, a fire upon the deep: Tom Doherty Associates, 613 pages.
I haven't read everything by Vinge, but I would be surprised if he's written another book better than this one. It is a thriller, in which an extremely powerful and implacable foe pursues relatively helpless and inoffensive people who, paradoxically, are the only ones who can protect the galaxy from it. But what does a plot summary tell you about a good book. This book is full of edge-of-the-seat drama, delightful aliens, futuristic technology, and the equivalent of e-mail messages from a galaxy spanning information network that add realism and allow the author to tell us things the characters can't know. It is sort of a perfect storm of the book, as far as I am concerned, and I can't believe no one's yet tried to make a movie or series of movies out of it.
Here is how it begins. 5 billion years before the story opens an evil computer program that was intelligent and self-aware tried to take over the galaxy. This conquest would have included its extinguishing all independent thought in the galaxy. But something, we never meet in, destroyed the evil thing and all recorded history in the galaxy's civilizations begins 5 billion years ago. That is so long that nobody really thinks about how odd it is to have a clean slate then that's as wide as the galaxy. A chunk of memory, as in RAM or the futuristic equivalent, exists just outside the main civilized part of the galaxy and it is in active. But a human civilization, not a very important one, finds it and tries to mine it for the valuable information it contains. We all know where this is going and soon enough the investigators are destroyed. But that's just the prologue. The entity immediately embarks again on its original plan, interrupted by a mere 5 billion years in suspended animation, and it creates what soon becomes known as "the blight." But I have to tell you another thing. The author hypothesizes that for some unknown reason the interiors of galaxies contain a field that suppresses intelligence of both natural organisms and artificial organisms like computers. So the interior of the galaxy is the unthinking depths, old earth is in what's called the slowness, were faster than light travel is impossible, above the slowness is the beyond, divided into three syllable airs and above the beyond is the transcend, which is really outside the galaxy entirely. If you move up into the transcend and are not soon destroyed, you become a power and may ultimately evolve into something like a god, although those are not usually interested in mundane things like galaxies. Some of these powers or even greater entities are perverted and instead of doing what ever they are supposed to do they decide to control and destroy a helpless little creatures inside galaxies. Like us. It's one of these that is creating the blight. So while the blight is systematically subverting and destroying the vastly powerful civilizations of the high beyond, subsisting on computers more intelligent than Einstein, faster than light travel, and technology based mainly on force fields and things even weirder, when human spaceship escaped the initial attack and headed for the bottom of the beyond where something mysterious might be able to defeat the blight. I'm not going to spoil the story by telling you what happens with that plot line. But the world where much of the rest of the story plays out is inhabited by arrays of intelligent doglike creatures. Each individual member of that race consists of three to six doglike beings, which are individually about as intelligent as dogs. But a pack communicates within itself telepathically. Keith Laumer explored something a little bit like this in one of his amusing Retief stories. Retief was stationed on a planet where the natives consisted of isolated organs, like spleens, eyes, feet, and so on. A bunch of organs got together to make a more powerful being. Just like with Vinge's story, in Laumer's older story the intelligence rose with the complexity of the organism. That book was written with firmly in cheek, but "a fire upon the deep" makes a serious attempt to portray the colonial doglike organisms realistically I think the attempt is pretty successful. This is just one example of the care that Vinge used in putting this story together. You need to read it.
I haven't read everything by Vinge, but I would be surprised if he's written another book better than this one. It is a thriller, in which an extremely powerful and implacable foe pursues relatively helpless and inoffensive people who, paradoxically, are the only ones who can protect the galaxy from it. But what does a plot summary tell you about a good book. This book is full of edge-of-the-seat drama, delightful aliens, futuristic technology, and the equivalent of e-mail messages from a galaxy spanning information network that add realism and allow the author to tell us things the characters can't know. It is sort of a perfect storm of the book, as far as I am concerned, and I can't believe no one's yet tried to make a movie or series of movies out of it.
Here is how it begins. 5 billion years before the story opens an evil computer program that was intelligent and self-aware tried to take over the galaxy. This conquest would have included its extinguishing all independent thought in the galaxy. But something, we never meet in, destroyed the evil thing and all recorded history in the galaxy's civilizations begins 5 billion years ago. That is so long that nobody really thinks about how odd it is to have a clean slate then that's as wide as the galaxy. A chunk of memory, as in RAM or the futuristic equivalent, exists just outside the main civilized part of the galaxy and it is in active. But a human civilization, not a very important one, finds it and tries to mine it for the valuable information it contains. We all know where this is going and soon enough the investigators are destroyed. But that's just the prologue. The entity immediately embarks again on its original plan, interrupted by a mere 5 billion years in suspended animation, and it creates what soon becomes known as "the blight." But I have to tell you another thing. The author hypothesizes that for some unknown reason the interiors of galaxies contain a field that suppresses intelligence of both natural organisms and artificial organisms like computers. So the interior of the galaxy is the unthinking depths, old earth is in what's called the slowness, were faster than light travel is impossible, above the slowness is the beyond, divided into three syllable airs and above the beyond is the transcend, which is really outside the galaxy entirely. If you move up into the transcend and are not soon destroyed, you become a power and may ultimately evolve into something like a god, although those are not usually interested in mundane things like galaxies. Some of these powers or even greater entities are perverted and instead of doing what ever they are supposed to do they decide to control and destroy a helpless little creatures inside galaxies. Like us. It's one of these that is creating the blight. So while the blight is systematically subverting and destroying the vastly powerful civilizations of the high beyond, subsisting on computers more intelligent than Einstein, faster than light travel, and technology based mainly on force fields and things even weirder, when human spaceship escaped the initial attack and headed for the bottom of the beyond where something mysterious might be able to defeat the blight. I'm not going to spoil the story by telling you what happens with that plot line. But the world where much of the rest of the story plays out is inhabited by arrays of intelligent doglike creatures. Each individual member of that race consists of three to six doglike beings, which are individually about as intelligent as dogs. But a pack communicates within itself telepathically. Keith Laumer explored something a little bit like this in one of his amusing Retief stories. Retief was stationed on a planet where the natives consisted of isolated organs, like spleens, eyes, feet, and so on. A bunch of organs got together to make a more powerful being. Just like with Vinge's story, in Laumer's older story the intelligence rose with the complexity of the organism. That book was written with firmly in cheek, but "a fire upon the deep" makes a serious attempt to portray the colonial doglike organisms realistically I think the attempt is pretty successful. This is just one example of the care that Vinge used in putting this story together. You need to read it.
