Did not disappoint. Vinge is one of the best ever Scifi writers held back only by the small number of books written

This is a collection of shorter works (from short story to novella size, mostly the later) of award-winning SF author Vernor Vinge. I’ve read it after I enjoyed his Hugo-winning novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. The collection contains almost all his smaller works written between the mid-60s and 2001. Moreover, each work had his preface and afterthought, which makes it even more interesting.Here is a list of titles with short synapses with minimum of spoilers:"Bookworm, Run!...

4 minus. Most of Vernor Vinges's short stories/novelettes are in this collection. Best are (in my view): "Bookworm Run!" The Ungoverned Long Shot ApartnessConquest by DefaultGemstoneJust Peace (m/William Rupp)The Babbler

There's something really interesting about this volume: the consistency with which Vinge stuck to his ideas and theories.Fair enough, he did the selecting so obviously that was his objective, but still.Apart from that, well, Vinge is no stylist really: it's not bad or dull but not very flowing or alive. He clearly is a writer who sees the story as a vehicle for a grander thing: Art at the service of theory, as it were.So, obviously, the reading can be tough going at times.

Huge fan of True Names; just finished reading an earlier collection (True Names... and Other Dangers). This volume contains all of that, minus True Names itself. Stories later expanded to novels are mixed in with true short stories, and it was a fun read."Fast Times at Fairmont High" didn't work for me, but I still intend to read the novel (Rainbows End) at some point. I believe my favorite story from the collection was "Gemstone".

More playful and miscellaneous than I was expecting. As always with him, there are grand gears turning in the background of his stories: there's more to his worlds than we see, and reasons beyond what the characters reason. But overall not as stunning as his novels, even accounting for scale. This is not surprising when you realise that the earliest of these was written when he was a teenager. He really hits his stride halfway through this, 1980.The main intellectual success is his depiction of

mixed bag. overall fairly imaginative, but few truly stand-out stories to remember. a couple - quite prescient, though... ;)

Short story collections are like sampler plates: you don't have the same full-flavored appreciation that comes with an entrée platter or a multi-course meal, but you get a little taste of a wide variety of things -- some of which are inevitably going to resonate with you more than others. I've always loved short stories, and after reading "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky" I enjoyed turning to see a wider range of Vinge's work.Other reviewers are correct that overall, Vinger's lo...

I didn't read all of the stories in this collection, because many of them are pretty ho-hum, and I'm not a big fan of short stories anyway (I prefer novels).The two best short stories here are:"Fast Times at Fairmont High" - uses the same setting as "Rainbows End", where AR is ubiquitous. The story is about a few middle-school kids doing a school assignment and finding unexpected stuff. The level of writing in this story is clearly the highest in this collection, which is perhaps explained by tw...

A surprisingly mixed collection of stories that I found quite captivating. Vinge is richly imaginative without losing sight of scientific possibility. In each story he tests the boundaries of scientific extrapolation and comes up with some surprising visions of what might lie in our future. Prior to this collection I had only read "A Fire Upon The Deep" which I enjoyed but had some minor quibbles with. It inspired me however to seek more of his work so I though I might try this one. This book co...

I wanted to like this book, I've enjoyed Vernor Vinge's novels, why didn't this grab me?I found it tough going at times; not that the writing is difficult or the concepts hard, it just didn't light a fire under me. I think it's about the authors' strength; he's 100% a novel writer, the short stories are undercooked or underdeveloped. And he says as much in the Foreword.Just not to my taste I'm afraid.

fine stuff from a seminal sci-fi author.

It's convenient to have most (unfortunately not all) of Vernor Vinge's short fiction together in one place, though I'd prefer to have it arranged in chronological order.He started off as a writer of short stories, and he says himself that he had difficulty with novels, but I think it's fair to say by now that his novels are more impressive than his short stories. However, his novella "True names" (not included here!) was indeed impressive in 1981, and remains good.The stories in this volume vary...

If I had to describe this in one word: Uneven. I got a little impatient with the stories that were big on ideas but low on character development. However, I liked several stories a lot. My favorites were "The Gemstone", "The Peddler's Apprentice" (co-written with his ex-wife Joan Vinge), "The Blabber" and "The Barbarian Princess."

I've been reading Vinge's stories since the mid-80's and this is a really nice compendium of (almost) all of them -- most notably lacking his most famous, "True Names", which apparently the publisher wants to sell on its own for $10.It's fun to see the short stories that later grew into some of his novels or somehow exist in the same universe: "The Ungoverned" in the world of The Peace War & Marooned in Realtime, "The Blabber" in the Zones of Thought universe ( A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness i...

This is a great collection of most of Vinge's short stories and novellas (there are only two omissions, _True Names_ and _Grimm's Story_, the latter of which became the core of one of his novels, _Tatja Grimm's World_, at least as far as I know). The short stories range in dates from the first stories he ever had published, such as _Bookworm, Run!_, copyright 1966 and written while Vinge was a senior in high school, to one written just for this collection, _Fast Times at Fairmont High_, copyrigh...

Many of these stories were from before the author got good. Vernor Vinge really hit his stride when he wrote novels, in my opinion, but his short stories were very underwhelming.

A nice feature of this anthology is the author's comments on each story - something about the themes he was exploring or the process of writing. The stories themselves are hit or miss. The best are those that are part of (or were the genesis of) his better novels - "The Ungoverned" as an interlude within the series "Across Realtime" or "The Blabber" fitting within the "Fire Upon the Deep" series. Others are disappointing, particularly "The Science Fair" and "Original Sin". Overall, though a dece...

All the shorter jottings of multiple award-winning Vinge gathered together in on place.Vernor Vinge is an important novelist, an alumnus of Analog magazine. His work was published by John W Campbell alongside that of Asimov and Clarke, so he is one of those authors who bridge the period between the ‘Golden Age’ and modern SF.He is not renowned for his short stories, simply because he doesn’t write many of them (see this interview for more on this). Still, there’s plenty to read in this collectio...

This is a collection of Vernor Vinge's short piece from his first published piece in 1965 to a 2001 novella, "Fast Times at Fairmont High" that first appeared here. The only short stories by Vinge written up to publication not included is "True Names" and a story that would later be expanded into Tatja Grimm's World. It suffered a bit from my having just reread the collected stories of Isaac Asimov. I hadn't read those stories for decades, yet often I could remember them as soon as I saw the tit...