« Kathy's Favorite Video Games | Main | How Interesting are Engineers? »
October 19, 2004
Reading Vernor Vinge
I just finished reading Vernor Vinge's The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. I've read other works by Vinge before, so I'm familiar with his style of writing, but I still feel like I've been missing out all those years before I read Vinge's works. Oh well, I should just make up for that now, I guess. Good thing I already own almost all of Vinge's works.
The Peace War is set around the year 2048. I was told by Todd that the heroine is really Della Lu. Throughout the book I was skeptical of that statement. Since I can't delve into the reasoning behind my skepticism without divulging the story's plot, I won't. But, suffice it to say, Della Lu kicks serious booty. It is so refreshing to read a cyberpunk novel where the smartest and most capable character/hacker is a female.
Marooned in Realtime takes place some fifty million years after the events of The Peace War. Guess what? Everyone from the first novel is gone, except for Della Lu. She's back, and even better than before. Huh? How did she live so long? Well, you'll have to read the book to find out how she did it. This book is also a murder mystery rolled into a cyberpunk theme. Vinge is very good at accumulating events like a snowball that climaxes into an avalanche at the end of the story. Unlike traditional mystery novel/novella writers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie though, Vinge does not focus on the whodunnit aspect by liberal sprinklings of red herrings. Instead, the mystery wafts around the core of the story, which is about a futuristic, technology-driven cyberpunk society.
If you do decide to read the above books, I recommed also grabbing a copy of the short story, entitled The Ungoverned, and reading it after The Peace War, but before Marooned in Realtime. The short story will give you a better sense of one of the main characters in the second novel.
Posted by Kathy at October 19, 2004 10:17 PM