Sometime in late 1982 maybe early 1983, I ran across True Names at the university library. It was a fairly quick read but when I finished I felt oddly out of sync with my surroundings, as if hours or even days had passed while I was reading. Such was the engrossing nature of the work. I must have sat there for another hour or so musing furiously about what I’d just read. And I was consumed for days, by the big ideas in that little book.
I recently re-read the novella and found it to be every bit as astonishing today, 25+ years on.
In terms of technology certainly things have advanced quite a bit since the 1980s, and all too often such rapid change dooms speculative fiction to quaintness. Occasionally however an author will really grok a technology progression and ride it right into tomorrow. Such is the case with Vernor Vinge, and True Names is notable for its descriptions of the emergence and leverage of mindspace, that particularly disruptive technology just now in its MMORG-3D infancy.
Once startling ideas become over time, commonplace. Today we are well along the path of integrating the “cyberspace” of the internet into our cultural fabric. And in these days when the “Singularity” concept is creeping ever into the mainstream (at least as half-baked trendy cliché), some of the mind-expanding aspects of True Names may not seem all that shocking. For example, in order to comprehend and manage data-streams beyond the handling bandwidth of basic humans, the protagonists learn to leverage extra-human sensory and processing tools, delegating lower level “awareness” to external computational processes much like the autonomic nervous system handles our breathing and other ‘background’ bodily processes without higher-level tending. It is at this point the flesh and blood protagonists transcend human awareness, in small steps at first, accelerating onward at an increasing rate. It is the cusp beyond which science, to the static observer, appears as magic. It is the seed of the Singularity.
Now this ground has been well-covered by a variety of authors in recent years, with notable efforts by John Barnes in Mother of Storms and Charles Stross in Accelerando. And probably even well before, in glancing blow, by Teilhard de Chardin. Indeed you could argue that this is an aspect of tool use that has been with us from the first fur jacket.
However at the time, as a punk kid knowing little about exotic phenomenology the “bootstrapping awareness” concept hit me like a lightning bolt. Even now it is, I think, one of the more powerful concepts illustrated by True Names. Barring self-extinction, Humans will continue to use, integrate and finally subsume a complex armamentarium of tools, ever increasing in power and ever decreasing in viable lifetime. Mindspace will inevitably exceed the mind.
In addition to their lush, adventurous prose Gibson and Stephenson gave us ‘cyberspace’ and ‘metaverse’, respectively, establishing themselves as visionaries of the modern internet-laced world. But prior to both, with his 1981 novella True Names Vernor Vinge provided a startling vision of extra-human mindspace, a vision that we are only now beginning to experience in the most primitive forms.
The fact that this classic and influential work was out of print for so long and remains somewhat obscure, when the shelves of your local big-box bookstore are larded with all manner of tedious crap is, well, a True Shame.