Vernor Vinge; sci-fi stories have touch of prophesy

Vernor Vinge, a mathematician and prolific science fiction author who in the 1980s wrote a novella that offered a glimpse of what became known as cyberspace, and who soon after that hypothesized that artificial intelligence would outstrip human intelligence, died on March 20 in the La Jolla area of San Diego. He was 79.

James Frenkel, who edited nearly all of his work since 1981, said the cause of death, in an assisted living facility, was Parkinson’s disease.

David Brin, a science fiction writer and a friend of Mr. Vinge’s, said in a tribute on Facebook, “Vernor enthralled millions with tales of plausible tomorrows, made all the more vivid by his polymath masteries of language, drama, characters and the implications of science.”

Mr. Vinge was renowned for his novella “True Names” (1981), in which he created an early version of cyberspace — a virtual reality technology he called the “Other Plane” — a year before William Gibson gave the nascent digital ecosystem its name in a story, “Burning Chrome,” and three years later popularized the word in his novel “Neuromancer.”

In “True Names,” Mr. Slippery, one of the anonymous computer hackers known as warlocks who work within the Other Plane, is identified and caught by the government (the “Great Enemy”) and forced to help stop a threat posed by another warlock.

In a 2001 article about Mr. Vinge, Katie Hafner, at the time a technology reporter for The New York Times, wrote that “True Names” “portrays a world rife with pseudonymous characters and other elements of online life that now seem almost hohum,” adding that in retrospect the book seemed “prophetic.”

Mr. Vinge’s immersion in computers at San Diego State University, where he began teaching in 1972, led to his vision of a “technological singularity,” a tipping point at which the intelligence of machines possesses and then exceeds that of humans.

He described an early version of his vision in Omni magazine in 1983.

“We’re at the point of accelerating the evolution of intelligence itself,” he wrote, adding, “Whether our work is cast in silicon or DNA will have little effect on the ultimate results.” He wrote that the moment of the intellectual transition would be as “impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole,” and that at that moment “the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”