Vernor Vinge: Across Realtime

The author's afterword: that's where he explains what he was trying to say with the previous hundred thousand words, right? Well, I'll try to avoid that. Basically, I have an apology and a prediction.

The apology is for the unrealistically slow rate of technological growth predicted. Part of that is reasonable, I suppose. A general war, like the one I put in 1997, can be used to postpone progress anywhere from ten years to forever. But what about after the recovery? I show artificial intelligence and intelligence amplification proceeding at what I suspect is a snail's pace. Sorry. I needed civilization to last long enough to hang a plot on it.

And of course it seems very unlikely that the Singularity would be a clean vanishing of the human race. (On the other hand, such a vanishing is the timelike analog of the silence we find all across the sky.)

From now to 2000 (and then 2001), the Jason Mudges will be coming out of the woodwork, their predictions steadily more clamorous. It's an ironic accident of the calendar that all this religious interest in transcendental events should be mixed with the objective evidence that we're falling into a technological singularity. So, the prediction: If we don't have that general war, then it's you, not Della and Wil, who will understand the Singularity in the only possible way-by living through it.

San Diego

1983-1985