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When I began writing science fiction in the middle 60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

Vernor Vinge

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Vernor Vinge
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 2
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Waukesha
Wisconsin
Vernor Steffen Vinge
Ideas
Took
Percolate
Find
Months
Writing
Fiction
Eighteen
Time
Consciousness
Cultural
Like
Middle
Decades
Easy
Began
Science
Seemed
Seems
Lead

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Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
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Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.
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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
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It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
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Once upon a time I was such a good liar I could talk the fish right into my mouths.
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I have come to kill you.The death's heads shrugged. You have come to try.
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All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.
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I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
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Well, what do you know, Pham said. Butterflies in jackboots.
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And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.
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Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
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He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
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One of his greatest talents was empathy no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.
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The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
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Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.
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Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
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Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.
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The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
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We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
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Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.
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