alt Hacker NewsFascinating. Vinge is about the furthest from “soft” sci-fi I can think of. We must have very different definitions of what makes something soft.
It’s certainly true that Vinge doesn’t spend much time on the engineering details, but I find him unusually clear on “imagine if we had this kind of impossible-now technology, but the rest of what we know about physics remained, how would people behave?”
He was, after all, a physics professor.
Rainbow’s End is much clearer on this than his distant future stuff, of course.
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>He was, after all, a physics professor.
Actually, he was a mathematics and computer science teacher at San Diego State University.
Soft vs hard is based on how closely the world tracks with modern physics/science. As such even just FTL is soft, let alone everything else that doesn’t fit.
> Fascinating. Vinge is about the furthest from “soft” sci-fi I can think of. We must have very different definitions of what makes something soft.
That award goes to Greg Egan who has full list of citations on his website for each of his novels, as well as a list of mathematicians and physicists he requested help from.
If you want to read books that occasionally delve into pages of equations, Greg Egan is the author for you! (Seriously though, really good books, and the implications of his "what-ifs" are pretty damn cool)