Quote

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
Science
Seemed
Seems
Lead
Ideas
Took
Find
Months
Percolate
Writing
Fiction
Eighteen
Time
Consciousness
Cultural
Like
Middle
Decades
Easy
Began

More quotes by Vernor Vinge

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Hexapodia as the key insight...I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs?
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The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
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Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.
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He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
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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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Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.
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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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Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.
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What we have is a data glut.
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Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
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We're endangered by our own success.
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How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
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In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.
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Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.
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The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
Vernor Vinge
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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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It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
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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.
Vernor Vinge
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Politics is good when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.
Vernor Vinge