6 ms·

This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.

Voultapher 2y ago
Thomas Nau is such a fantastic villain. Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices.
- atemerev 2y ago
  Reasoned decisions (if you think that empire building is reasonable) without morality and empathy _are_ evil. This is how Putin operates. Also, raping and torturing are very "evil for the sake of evil", if you ask me.
  - smogcutter 2y ago
    Yeah, discovering Nau’s chamber of horrors is meant to strip any illusions about his motivations.
    - Voultapher 2y ago
      Book spoilers. IIRC wasn't it the chamber/ship of someone he worked with, that he tolerated? Read it like six or seven years ago, so the details are fuzzy. The impression I kept was that he did a lot of evil stuff not because he relished the suffering he created in others, but because he didn't mind it.
      - vvillena 2y ago
        Yes, it was not his chamber, but Nau never wanted one because he kept a pet in the open.
      - int_19h 2y ago
        It's both. On one hand, he is aware that one of his valued subordinates "needs" to regularly murder people, and doesn't consider it an issue so long as that subordinate remains productive and is kept in check to avoid "wasting resources". But there's also a record of him personally torturing and raping one of the captives for the sake of it - which he keeps around, presumably to rewatch every now and then.
        smogcutter 2y ago
        Thats right, I forgot about Nau’s enforcer (whose name escapes me atm). Anyway I think the point remains - after that point, the reader is meant to understand that the emergents self-serving justifications are just that.
- rakejake 2y ago
  I think Greg Egan in one of his novels has a line that goes like "Humans cannot be universe conquerors if they don't overcome their bug like tendencies to invade and destroy". Nah, it is this very tendency that makes them universe conquerors. Nothing to beat good old fashioned greed and discontent.
- natechols 2y ago
  > Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil, and there's never any indication given that they actually care about those terrible prices, or even reflect on them for long. Vinge is very good at channeling the Orwellian language that regimes like these use, but I didn't find his intent at all ambiguous. The really compelling and ambiguous character in that book is [redacted spoiler], who really does grapple with the moral implications of his decisions, but ultimately chooses the not-evil path. Personally I think this also highlight's Vinge's biggest flaw as an author for me, which is that in all of his books, the most fully realized and believable protagonist is a scheming megalomaniac, with second place going to the abusive misanthrope of Rainbows End, and third to the prickly settlement leader in Marooned in Realtime. All of the more sympathetic characters feel like empty vessels that just react to the plot.
rakejake 2y ago
A Deepness in the Sky was perhaps the first "hard sci-fi" novel I ever read (this was before I knew of Greg Egan). The concept of spiders and the onOff planet was just awe-inspiring. While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwhelmed within the first paragraph of the first page). Highly entertaining and interesting. I wonder what Vinge thought of LLMs. If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today. A huge loss indeed.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today. I mean, I don't think LLMs have been notably useful in decoding unknown languages, have they?
  - rakejake 2y ago
    No idea, though being next-token predictors, it can't hurt to use LLMs?
  - jerf 2y ago
    All currently-unknown real languages that an LLM might decode are languages that are unknown because of a lack of data, due the civilization being dead. An LLM won't necessarily be able to overcome that. In the book the characters had access to effectively unbounded input since it was a live civilization generating the data, plus they had reference to at least some video, and... something else that would be very useful for decoding language but would constitute probably a medium-grade spoiler if I shared, so there's another relevant difference. Still, it should also be said it wasn't literally LLMs, it was humans, merely, "affected" in a way that they are basically all idiot savants on the particular topic of language acquisition.
    - 2y ago
dpq 2y ago
I second that. Re-read it multiple times and enjoyed every minute and every page. The creative concepts making up this book such as localizers/smart dust or the Focus captivated by their plausibility, and the unsolved mystery of the onOff bothered me as much as it did Pham Nuwen. R.I.P. dear friend, you will be missed and remembered.

Voultapher 2y ago

Thomas Nau is such a fantastic villain. Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices.

atemerev 2y ago
Reasoned decisions (if you think that empire building is reasonable) without morality and empathy _are_ evil. This is how Putin operates. Also, raping and torturing are very "evil for the sake of evil", if you ask me.
- smogcutter 2y ago
  Yeah, discovering Nau’s chamber of horrors is meant to strip any illusions about his motivations.
  - Voultapher 2y ago
    Book spoilers. IIRC wasn't it the chamber/ship of someone he worked with, that he tolerated? Read it like six or seven years ago, so the details are fuzzy. The impression I kept was that he did a lot of evil stuff not because he relished the suffering he created in others, but because he didn't mind it.
    - vvillena 2y ago
      Yes, it was not his chamber, but Nau never wanted one because he kept a pet in the open.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      It's both. On one hand, he is aware that one of his valued subordinates "needs" to regularly murder people, and doesn't consider it an issue so long as that subordinate remains productive and is kept in check to avoid "wasting resources". But there's also a record of him personally torturing and raping one of the captives for the sake of it - which he keeps around, presumably to rewatch every now and then.
      - smogcutter 2y ago
        Thats right, I forgot about Nau’s enforcer (whose name escapes me atm). Anyway I think the point remains - after that point, the reader is meant to understand that the emergents self-serving justifications are just that.
rakejake 2y ago
I think Greg Egan in one of his novels has a line that goes like "Humans cannot be universe conquerors if they don't overcome their bug like tendencies to invade and destroy". Nah, it is this very tendency that makes them universe conquerors. Nothing to beat good old fashioned greed and discontent.
natechols 2y ago
> Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil, and there's never any indication given that they actually care about those terrible prices, or even reflect on them for long. Vinge is very good at channeling the Orwellian language that regimes like these use, but I didn't find his intent at all ambiguous. The really compelling and ambiguous character in that book is [redacted spoiler], who really does grapple with the moral implications of his decisions, but ultimately chooses the not-evil path. Personally I think this also highlight's Vinge's biggest flaw as an author for me, which is that in all of his books, the most fully realized and believable protagonist is a scheming megalomaniac, with second place going to the abusive misanthrope of Rainbows End, and third to the prickly settlement leader in Marooned in Realtime. All of the more sympathetic characters feel like empty vessels that just react to the plot.

rakejake 2y ago

A Deepness in the Sky was perhaps the first "hard sci-fi" novel I ever read (this was before I knew of Greg Egan). The concept of spiders and the onOff planet was just awe-inspiring. While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwhelmed within the first paragraph of the first page). Highly entertaining and interesting. I wonder what Vinge thought of LLMs. If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today. A huge loss indeed.

rsynnott 2y ago
> If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today. I mean, I don't think LLMs have been notably useful in decoding unknown languages, have they?
- rakejake 2y ago
  No idea, though being next-token predictors, it can't hurt to use LLMs?
- jerf 2y ago
  All currently-unknown real languages that an LLM might decode are languages that are unknown because of a lack of data, due the civilization being dead. An LLM won't necessarily be able to overcome that. In the book the characters had access to effectively unbounded input since it was a live civilization generating the data, plus they had reference to at least some video, and... something else that would be very useful for decoding language but would constitute probably a medium-grade spoiler if I shared, so there's another relevant difference. Still, it should also be said it wasn't literally LLMs, it was humans, merely, "affected" in a way that they are basically all idiot savants on the particular topic of language acquisition.
  - 2y ago

dpq 2y ago

I second that. Re-read it multiple times and enjoyed every minute and every page. The creative concepts making up this book such as localizers/smart dust or the Focus captivated by their plausibility, and the unsolved mystery of the onOff bothered me as much as it did Pham Nuwen. R.I.P. dear friend, you will be missed and remembered.