Vernor Vinge died on March 20, 2024. I am not sure it is necessary for a person to have a “favorite author”, and I might not give the same answer every day, but if pressed I might come up with Vernor Vinge. I stumbled first across his essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era around the same time I stumbled across Bill Joy’s Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us and Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. At some point I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. These four works really expanded my imagination about the range of possibilities for the future of our species and civilization, and I recommend them to others.

These works also got me interested in science fiction not just as a form of entertainment, which it certainly is, but as a way to further expand my imagination. Some science fiction is painful to read, but the best science fiction expands your imagination painlessly as you are being entertained, and Vinge was just a fantastic storyteller, maybe even the best ever. I love Rainbow’s End as much for being a great novel as for opening my eyes to what augmented reality could mean as it begins to take hold. A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are two of my absolute favorite books, and Children of the Sky is also wonderful for everyone who loves A Fire Upon the Deep. Rest in peace, Vernor Vinge.