Vernor Vinge - References in Other Works

References in Other Works

In Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus (published in 1972, before Vinge had written his best-known work), the narrator finds a collection of Vernor Vinge stories on a top shelf of a far-future library on a distant world, though the cover has been so worn down that he thinks a librarian must have mistaken the "V. Vinge" on the spine as "Winge".

In David Brin's Kiln People, there is a reference to the main character experiencing something like "Vingeian focus," a quick reference to A Deepness in the Sky. Vinge's review of the book is featured on the back cover.

The "Vinge catastrophe" is mentioned in chapter 8 of Charles Stross' novel Accelerando.

In the sleeve notes for Harmonic 313's album When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence, Mark Pritchard refers to his "good friend Vernor Vinge", crediting him for naming the "technological singularity".

In Robert J. Sawyer's WWW:Watch, a novel featuring an emerging artificial intelligence, a character quotes from Vinge's 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity in reference to what is happening. (The listener is surprised to hear that the author's name is pronounced "Vinjee" instead of rhyming with "hinge".)

The 'Tine' race, introduced in A Fire Upon the Deep, is an example of a Gestalt-Sentient species: a race that is only sentient in a grouping of individually non-sentient members (distinct from the more common group consciousness in that individual members of such are still themselves sentient or a hive mind in that there is no single sentient entity controlling large groups of non-sentients)). This type of alien race is rarely used in Science Fiction, as it has no Earth analogue and is thus hard for people to understand. Anvil of the Stars, by Greg Bear, also makes use of this type of alien with its 'Cord' race, although as both books were released in 1992, it is unlikely that one references the other.

In Questionable Content, a fictional speech on A.I. rights is quoted. The full speech, available on the artist's website, gives the speaker as "V. Vinge."