Vernor Vinge Books In Order

The Peace War

The Peace War is quintessential hard science adventure. The Peace Authority conquered the world with a weapon that never should have been a weapon the ‘bobble,’ a spherical force field impenetrable by any force known to mankind. Encasing governmental installations and military bases in bobbles, the Authority becomes virtually omnipotent. But they’ve never caught Paul Hoehler, the maverick who invented the technology, and who has been working quietly for decades to develop a way to defeat the Authority. With the help of an underground network of determined, independent scientists and a teenager who may be the apprentice genius he’s needed for so long, he will shake the world, in the fast paced hard science thriller that garnered Vinge the first of his four Hugo nominations for best novel.

Marooned in Realtime

Multiple Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge takes readers on a fifty million year trip to a future where humanity’s fate will be decided in a dangerous game of high tech survival.

In this taut thriller, a Hugo finalist for Best Novel, nobody knows why there are only three hundred humans left alive on the Earth fifty million years from now. Opinion is fiercely divided on whether to settle in and plant the seed of mankind anew, or to continue using high energy stasis fields, or ‘bobbles,’ in venturing into the future. When somebody is murdered, it’s obvious someone has a secret he or she is willing to kill to preserve. The murder intensifies the rift between the two factions, threatening the survival of the human race. It’s up to 21st century detective Wil Brierson, the only cop left in the world, to find the culprit, a diabolical fiend whose lust for power could cause the utter extinction of man.

Filled with excitement and adventure, Vinge’s tense SF puzzler will satisfy readers with its sense of wonder and engaging characters, one of whom is a murderer with a unique modus operandi.

Across Realtime

Siege of Titan is the first book in the epic new science fiction series that chronicles humanity’s first interstellar confederation that is torn apart by religious strife and extremism. In the first book of the Star Crusades series, the bloody struggle is told through the eyes of an illegal pit fighter named Spartan, who is forced to choose between incarceration or military service. Choosing the Confederate Marine Corps over servitude he begins his thirty long weeks of training. Together with his group of marines, they are honed into a force ready to be thrown into the meat grinder on the newest and greatest planet in the Confederacy, Proxima Prime. His term of service will soon become one of violence and carnage, as the entire sector is ripped apart by a brutal and virulent religious movement and its shocking plans. What starts as a series of suicide bombings and hijackings through the Confederacy quickly turns into a full scale revolution on Prime that threatens the entire planet and quickly spreads to its orbital Naval Station and beyond. As every warship and military transport in the area is rushed to its defence, the fate of the planet and the entire sector lie in the hands of a small number of rookie marines. Siege of Titan is a classic work of realistic military science fiction set against the background of the first interstellar human empire.

Tatja Grimm’s World

Multiple Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge’s first full length novelAs a mud spattered youngster, Tatja quickly realized she was different from the stone age primitives with whom she grew up. Her insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge could not be quenched among them; she had to explore and learn more about the strange world she lived on. She finds the bastion of all culture, arts, entertainment and history for the entire planet, the seven hundred year old science fiction magazine Fantasie, which is produced entirely aboard a gargantuan floating vessel the size of a small city. But despite the printing presses, sail powered vessels, and mind expanding technology, Tatja is still dissatisfied. Rising through the ranks, she finds that the people on the enormous barge are just as unintelligent as the primitives she grew up with. But others have come to the planet who not only challenge her intelligence, but offer her a tantalizing opportunity to uncover answers to mysteries that have long plagued her. But with opportunity comes risk. And if she acts unwisely, she could bring doom to the only world she knows.

Grimm’s World

Multiple Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge’s first full length novelAs a mud spattered youngster, Tatja quickly realized she was different from the stone age primitives with whom she grew up. Her insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge could not be quenched among them; she had to explore and learn more about the strange world she lived on. She finds the bastion of all culture, arts, entertainment and history for the entire planet, the seven hundred year old science fiction magazine Fantasie, which is produced entirely aboard a gargantuan floating vessel the size of a small city. But despite the printing presses, sail powered vessels, and mind expanding technology, Tatja is still dissatisfied. Rising through the ranks, she finds that the people on the enormous barge are just as unintelligent as the primitives she grew up with. But others have come to the planet who not only challenge her intelligence, but offer her a tantalizing opportunity to uncover answers to mysteries that have long plagued her. But with opportunity comes risk. And if she acts unwisely, she could bring doom to the only world she knows.

A Fire Upon The Deep

A Fire Upon The Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge’s career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind’s potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these ‘regions of thought,’ but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence. Fleeing the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue mission, not entirely composed of humans, must rescue the children and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.

A Deepness in the Sky

After thousands of years searching, humans stand on the verge of first contact with an alien race. Two human groups: the Qeng Ho, a culture of free traders, and the Emergents, a ruthless society based on the technological enslavement of minds. The group that opens trade with the aliens will reap unimaginable riches. But first, both groups must wait at the aliens’ very doorstep for their strange star to relight and for their planet to reawaken, as it does every tow hundred and fifty years…
. Then, following terrible treachery, the Qeng Ho must fight for their freedom and for the lives of the unsuspecting innocents on the planet below, while the aliens themselves play a role unsuspected by the Qeng Ho and Emergents alike. More than just a great science fiction adventure, A Deepness in the Sky is a universal drama of courage, self discovery, and the redemptive power of love.

The Children of the Sky

After nearly twenty years, Vernor Vinge has produced an enthralling sequel to his memorable bestselling novel A Fire Upon the Deep. Ten years have passed on Tines World, where Ravna Bergnsdot and a number of human children ended up after a disaster that nearly obliterated humankind throughout the galaxy. Ravna and the pack animals for which the planet is named have survived a war, and Ravna has saved more than one hundred children who were in cold sleep aboard the vessel that brought them. While there is peace among the Tines, there are those among them and among the humans who seek power and no matter the cost, these malcontents are determined to overturn the fledgling civilization that has taken root since the humans landed. On a world of fascinating wonders and terrifying dangers, Vernor Vinge has created a powerful novel of adventure and discovery that will entrance the many readers of A Fire Upon the Deep. Filled with the inventiveness, excitement, and human drama that have become hallmarks of his work, this new novel is sure to become another great milestone in Vinge’s already stellar career. One of Library Journal’s Best SF/Fantasy Books of 2011

The Witling

This second novel by multiple award winner Vernor Vinge, from 1976, is a fast paced adventure where galactic policies collide and different cultures clash as two scientists and their faith in technology are pitted against an elusive race of telekinetic beings. Marooned on a distant world and slowly dying of food poisoning, two anthropologists are caught between warring alien factions engaged in a battle that will affect the future of the world’s inhabitants and their deadly telekinetic powers. If the anthropologists can’t help resolve the conflict between the feuding alien factions, no one will survive. This edition features sixteen full page illustrations by Doug Beekman.

Rainbows End

Four time Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge has taken readers to the depths of space and into the far future in his bestselling novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Now, he has written a science fiction thriller set in a place and time as exciting and strange as any far future world: San Diego, California, 2025. Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer’s patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world renowned poet. Now he is seventy five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he’s starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son’s family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen year old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access through nodes designed into smart clothes and to see the digital context through smart contact lenses. With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re train at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination. In a world where every computer chip has Homeland Security built in, this conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert’s son and daughter in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot. As Robert becomes more deeply involved in conspiracy, he is shocked to learn of a radical change planned for the UCSD Geisel Library; all the books there, and worldwide, would cease to physically exist. He and his fellow re trainees feel compelled to join protests against the change. With forces around the world converging on San Diego, both the conspiracy and the protest climax in a spectacular moment as unique and satisfying as it is unexpected. This is science fiction at its very best, by a master storyteller at his peak.

True Names

Once in a great while a science fiction story is so visionary, yet so close to impending scientific developments that it becomes not only an accurate predictor, but itself the locus for new discoveries and development. True Names by Vernor Vinge, first published in 1981, is such a work.

Here is a feast of articles by computer scientists and journalists on the cutting edge of the field, writing about innovations and developments of the Internet, including, among others:

Danny Hillis: Founder of thinking machines and the first Disney Fellow.

Timothy C. May: former chief scientist at Intel a major insider in the field of computers and technology.

Marvin Minsky: Cofounder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer: Codevelopers of habitat, the first real computer interactive environment.

Mark Pesce: Cocreator of VRML and the author of the Playful World: How Technology Transforms Our Imagination.

Richard M. Stallman: Research affiliate with MIT; the founder of the Free Software Movement.

Under African Skies (With: Kim Stanley Robinson,,Mike Resnick,Gregory Benford,Bruce Sterling)

A collection of science fiction tales set in a futuristic African continent features the writing of Vernor Vinge, Gregory Benford, Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Howard Waldrop, and Mike Resnick.