Comment by 37ef_ced3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 37ef_ced3 | Hacker News Reader

Read Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster" to see one of the major inspirations for Black Mirror, and a character similar to Elon Musk. Full text here:

https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-...

Also everyone should read Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" to understand a plausible outcome of the technological change we are witnessing today.

It's a bittersweet book, about being a small human in a world where the value of individual creative efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer might of automation and vast collaboration and technological accumulation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

You will recognize Pokemon Go, and many other things that happened after the book was published (2006). Great foresight.

Wikipedia: Vernor Vinge is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and perhaps the first to present a fictional "cyberspace" (in his novella True Names).

By the way, Adam Back (probably Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto) has referenced the True Names novella in interviews when explaining why Satoshi Nakamoto remains pseudonymous. So Vinge influenced that, too.

>It's a bittersweet book, about being a small human in a world where the value of individual creative efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer might of automation and vast collaboration and technological accumulation.

I also hold, strongly and somewhat idiosyncratically, that it would work quite well as a Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki film. (Chew on that for a minute, hahah.) (EDIT: So much so that I did, at one point, badly mock-up a poster for it: https://imgur.com/a/S96hTSV)

RE is phenomenally underrated, not just because of its prescience, but also because of the way that it's simultaneously accessible and layered. It's apropos that Pokemon-like entities show up in the story since, like the original Pokemon games, it's a relatively simple and straightforward story, with some complex thoughts and troubling implications drifting below the surface. I like the tagline, "A novel with one foot in the future," because it perfectly alludes to the nature of adolescence, which describes the setting and also the age (and up) of people who should be reading it if they want to get a glimpse of the times that are fast barreling towards us.

Excusing further Japanese pop culture analogies, I get the feeling that Vinge fans treat it as FFTA to ZOTs' FFT. Which is a bit of a shame, kind of like eschewing 1984 for The Forever War.

(minor spoilers for Deepness follow)

When I read Deepness I actually imagined in my head a Studio Ghibli like aesthetic for the spider world chapters. I thought if it were ever adapted into film or TV, it would be essential to display the spider world as the humans listening to their radio broadcasts imagined it, as a playful, colorful, animated world populated by anthropomorphized cartoon spiders. Given the level of technology and political environment, it would feel very similar to the city backdrops of Kiki's Delivery Service or Howl's Moving Castle.

It would also make the reveal at the end when the spiders and humans finally meet all the much more dramatic, as humans land on the planet to find not the cute lovable anime world we'd been watching, but the primordially scary reality of spiders with human-level intelligence.

> Also everyone should read Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End"

I often wonder if the AI in "Rainbows End" becomes the "Power" that gets resurrected in "Fire upon the Deep".

. . .

*SPOILER!* There's just a hint of the hidden villainy and ruthlessness at the end of Rainbow. *SPOILER!*

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