Tatja Grimm's World

I picked up Tatja Grimm's World after I read Vernor Vinge's short story collection because at that point it was basically the last piece of his fiction bibliography that I hadn't read.  It had lackluster reviews but it was also short, so I figured I owed it to the author of A Deepness in the Sky and Across Realtime to complete my collection of his work (mentally and physically).

The first part of the book is a barely changed version of a short story in the collection I read.  Which was honestly what drew me in to the story.  Tatja is a very smart woman in a world of normally smart people and the viewpoint characters for a couple parts are book publishers who love books which obviously immediately endeared them to me.

However, the book itself is one of the author's first works.  Comparatively, it lacks depth and cohesion and if you look closely you can see a lot of ideological ties to his later works.  Things that he hadn't quite worked out how he wanted them to go but knew he liked the concept of.  In addition, it is hampered by basically being a few stories hammered together in an attempt to make a novel and some of the jumps are a little jarring.

Basically, if you like Vernor Vinge and his work, you should read this.  It is pretty short and definitely in his style, but come at it expecting short stories set in the same universe rather than a novel.  However, this should definitely not be your introduction to Vernor Vinge, for that I recommend either Deepness in the Sky or Fire upon the Deep (depending on if you believe in reading things in chronological order or the order in which they were published).

Overall, I would give this a 81%.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

When I started reading Across Realtime, I knew that I wanted to read the story that fell in between the two books contained within (see my review of Across Realtime for more info) so I grabbed this short story collection on my Kindle.  As I mentioned before, Vernor Vinge has some fantastic ideas and so I was a little worried that the short story format would not give him time to explore each idea to the fullest.  There were definitely some ideas that I felt could have held up whole novels, but it was definitely a good read, especially for fans of his other work.   As one would expect from a short story collection there were many good stories and a few bad ones.

Each of the stories had an introduction by him and some of them had a post script as well.  It made the collection have a much more personal feel than it otherwise would have.  I wish that other short story collections would do the same.  It also helped to explain the background of some of the stories that were part of his larger work collections.

This was a nice little collection.  My biggest problem with it is that, when you read all of his short stories, some of which are set in the same (or at least very similar) worlds as his novels, it becomes apparent that he does not place nearly as much value on a cohesive canon as I do.  Perhaps that is unfair.  What I mean to say is that some of the stories that take place in (supposedly) the same universe as some of his other stories are so different from the novel based stories in those universes as to necessitate serious explanation as to how the characters reached that point.

However, that is more of a personal problem than any one with the book.  Overall, I would give this book an 86%.

Across Realtime

Warning: Since Across Realtime is a collection of two books, The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime, this review will have minor spoilers for The Peace War so that I can adequately discuss Marooned in Realtime

Vernor Vinge has always been a man of great ideas.  In every single one of his books that I have read, one of the central ideas in it has been unique or, at the very least, extremely interesting.  For example, in The Witling, he has a group of aliens that can teleport but, because he is a hard science fiction writer, he does it in such a way that it still takes into account momentum and everything else on a planetary scale.  This then shapes the way that they teleport and makes the story much more interesting than a normal teleportation story.  In another of his stories (A Fire Upon the Deep), there is an alien species that look like dogs.  However, alone they are only semi-sentient.  But they can commucate with each other to form packs which work together as one brain.  If the packs get too big, though, the number of competing desires and ideas becomes impossible to manage and they are no longer a functioning organism.  These are just two of his ideas that have convinced me that he is definitely worth reading.

As I mentioned in the warning, Across Realtime is two books.  They both take place in the same universe but one takes place long after the other.  There are very few repeated characters (and it could be argued that there are none) but the second book takes the science concepts introduced in the first book and takes them to their logical conclusion.  Since I have hyped his ideas up until this point, you are probably wondering what those science concepts are in this book.  Before the book starts a group of people called The Peace Authority has become the ultimate power in the world because they have developed a technology called bobbles.  These bobbles are spheres that nothing can penetrate, not light, heat, or anything else.  They have covered all of the military installations in the world with these bobbles and, because of this, most governments have broken down.  (THIS IS WHERE THE MINOR SPOILERS BEGIN)  Through the course of the book, the protagonists discover a key fact about the bobbles: time stops within them.  They also discover how to modulate the amount of time that a bobble is active for, allowing them to be used defensively or offensively.

The second book takes place "mega years" in the future, with a different protagonist.  This protagonist was introduced in the short story "The Ungoverned" which was collected in a short story collection (which I will review soon).  I read that story in between the two parts of Across Realtime.  Honestly, I am very glad that I did.  It doesn't contribute very much to the main story, but it fills in a lot of background for some of the characters which is nice in the beginning. 

Vernor Vinge avoids predicting what technological heights humanity will have reached millions of years in the future by having some people "miss" some event where all of the people except for those who were bobbled.  The story in the second part is kind of a mystery story trying to figure out how someone managed to get left outside a bobble for such a long period of time despite safety protocols.

(THIS IS WHERE THE MINOR SPOILERS END)  I really enjoyed this book, as I have every Vernor Vinge book I have read.  One of my only problems with it was that it did not include the aforementioned short story.  (Note: one edition of the book does contain this story but the one I read does not)  Overall, I would give this book a 92%.