Vernor Vinge > Quotes

“So much technology, so little talent.”
― Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End

“I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“[The Universe] does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that can not be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“On this small world, there will be no more real darkness. But there will always be the Dark. Go out tonight, Lady Pedure. Look up. We are surrounded by the Dark and always will be. And just as our Dark ends with the passage of time in a New Sun, so the greater Dark ends at the shores of a million million stars. Think! If our sun's cycle was once less than a year, then even earlier our sun might have been middling bright all the time. I have students who are sure most of the stars are just like our sun, only much much younger, and many with worlds like ours. You want a deepness that endures, a deepness that Spiderkind can depend on? Pedure, there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“So High,
So Low,
So Many Things to Know”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.”
― Vernor Vinge, The Children of the Sky

“Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.

“It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.

“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”

Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.”

“Almost precisely.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“Hexapodia as the key insight”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“[He] was an insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had become.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names

“We're endangered by our own success.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.”
― Vernor Vinge, The Children of the Sky

“You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering.”
― Vernor Vinge, The Children of the Sky

“Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.”
― Vernor Vinge, The Children of the Sky

“Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“Ravna became a librarian. "The ultimate dilettante!" Lynne had teased.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep