In Deep: An Interview with Vernor Vinge
as the new space opera was the concept of the Zones of hought embedded within it: the cosmos is divided into shifting zones which set natural limits on the speed of travel and implicitly on the speed of thought. It was a concept that Vinge would explore further in A Deepness in the Sky (1999), set some 30,000 years before A Fire Upon he Deep (Vinge likes to play with big numbers, huge spans of time and space). he ideas implicit within these two novels clearly had a great attraction to both Vinge and his readers, but it is only now that he has returned to the setting a third time, with he Children of the Sky. It begins just two years after the events of A Fire Upon he Deep, barely an eye-blink on the sort of scale that Vinge usually likes to work, yet it is an unexpected sequel to such a wide-ranging novel, never once moving of planet. I began by asking whether, when he wrote A Fire Upon he Deep, he had thought of it as a novel that might spawn sequels. Probably, but in general, I don’t have an organized view of sequels. I usually think, “Oh sequels would be nice”, but without the steely resolve to ensure that they get written. How, then, did you come to write a sequel to A Fire Upon he Deep so long after the original? Partly because of an unsuccessful attempt at such a sequel. Around the turn of the century, I made a serious attempt to expand my novella, “he Blabber”, into a novel. his would have qualiied as sequel to A Fire Upon he Deep (but set much later than he Children of the Sky). I wrote twenty to forty thousand words, but it was not going well. In retrospect—especially considering how diicult it was to write he Children of the Sky—I should not have given up so easily. I hope I can do something with the piece in the future.
he Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge Tor Books, October 2011
And why the delay? Partly distraction by other things: very legitimately, my day job (teaching at San Diego State University)! However, I retired from that job in 2000. And there were several other writing projects, mainly short stories, but one novel, Rainbows End.
Interview by Paul Kincaid It is nearly 20 years since Vernor Vinge published A Fire Upon he Deep. It was his third novel. he Peace War and Marooned in Realtime had already marked him out as a hard sf writer worthy of serious attention, but it was A Fire Upon he Deep that really made a mark on the ield, winning that year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel. It was a complex, richly imagined, fast moving novel that shifted focus between spectacular space battles and irst contact with an alien race, the Tines, where personality and intelligence lie within the pack rather than the individual. Most signiicantly, what earned this novel recognition as one of the key works of what would become known 36
Already, our discussion had raised a number of issues I wanted to pursue further, and I would come back to the diiculty in writing Children later, but irst of all I wanted to talk more about “he Blabber”. First published in 1988 (so it actually precedes A Fire Upon he Deep) and included in Vinge’s Collected Stories, it is a beautifully constructed story that is clearly set within the universe of the Zones of hought. But I don’t remember it as being in any way a sequel to Fire, so I wanted to ind out where he’d been planning to take the story. “he Blabber” takes places several thousand years after Fire and Children. In “he Blabber”, galactic distances and the passage of time