True Names (Penguin Worlds)

2 Comments to “ True Names (Penguin Worlds)”

1. Anonymous says :

   November 9, 2019 at 6:55 am

   5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

   
   Cyberpunk fiction classic that’s still relevant today, 13 Jun. 2017

   By 

   
     

   Mr. G. Carroll (LDN | HKG | SZX)

   Verified Purchase(What is this?)

   This review is from: True Names (Penguin Worlds) (Paperback)

   Vinge’s True Names is published by Penguin with a collection of essays from a range of technology thinkers including 

   – Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer who founded one of the first massive online multiplayer games, back when dial up bulletin boards were the bleeding edge. Farmer worked at Yahoo! when I was there and was involved in Yahoo! 360 and still consults on community / social platform issues
   Bruce Schneier wrote about how security products fail us. Bruce is one of the world’s leading commentators on all things hack and cryptography related
   – Mark Pesce is better known now as an Australian-based computer academic, but two decades ago he invented VRML – a way of representing the internet as a 3D thing and prescient in the light of Oculus Rift and others. 
   – Marvin Minsky; was a pioneer in AI and machine learning provided an afterward to the story

   That True Names managed to attract essays from these people should be an endorsement in itself.  Re-reading it two decades on, Vinge’s story echoes and riffs on the modern web. Hacking, cyberterrorism, constant government surveillance and the tension between libertarian netizens versus the regulated  real world. The central theme of Mr Slippy; a hacker who is identified by US government officials and co-opted as an unwilling informant and agent provocateur feels reminiscent of LULZSec leader and super grass Sabu. It’s amazing that Vinge wrote this in 1981 – although he envisages the web as being rather like a Second Life / Minecraft metaverse – with NeuroSky style interfaces. 

   Penguin’s careful curation of essays riffing on the themes of True Names is where the real value is in my opinion. For someone who cares about technology and consumer behaviour. It is worthwhile keeping this book on the shelf and diving in now and again. 
2. Anonymous says :

   November 9, 2019 at 7:24 am

   
   Cyberpunk? Hardly., 31 Aug. 2019

   By 

   Tippz

   Verified Purchase(What is this?)

   This review is from: True Names (Penguin Worlds) (Kindle Edition)

   The Kindle edition is package with a large number of essays expanding on themes associated with the novella True Names. This review is limited to the novella.

   The cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction was rooted in the work of New Wave SF authors such as Philip K Dick, Roger Zelazny and JG Ballard. Its themes began to emerge in the late 1970s in SF comics such as Judge Dredd, and crystallized around the 1982 Riddley Scott movie Blade Runner, the Japanese manga series Akira, and, in particular, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984).

   Gibson consolidated four elements that came to define the subgenre: technology (especially the internet, cybernetics and artificial intelligence), society (a dystopic near-future extension of neo-liberalism), an unending desolate urban landscape, and a hard-bitten noir style, building on authors such as Raymond Chandler and William Burroughs and the gonzo journalism of Hunter S Thompson.

   The most striking aspect of Neuromancer was its prediction of the internet, which didn’t exist when the novel was published. Gibson, who knew very little about computers, called it cyberspace. Placed in the novel’s dystopic social and urban milieu and described in Gibson’s attenuated language, the invention provides a disturbing and powerful fictional presence.

   Neuromancer wasn’t the first novel, though, to predict the internet. Versions were also described in The Schockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975), and in Vernon Vinge’s 1982 novella True Names.

   Despite its billing, though, True Names isn’t genuinely a work of cyberpunk. Only one of the four core themes is addressed in detail: Vinge’s cyberspace, known as The Other Plane, is reached through EEG readings aand a little bit of transcendental meditation. Full of magical tropes (castles, dugeons, warlocks and spells), its atmosphere is evked in a detailed and reasonably convincing manner.

   Vinge touches on two more of cyberpunk’s core themes. State security is pitted against subversive hackers, who, in a clever extension of the use of magical tropes, must keep their True Names secret for fear of being identified and penalised in the real world. The natty teenage security agents who appear late in the book, slightly reminiscent of the John Travolta character in Pulp Fiction, are also a nice touch. There’s little, though, to transmit the feeling of menace that comes across in Neuromancer and, indeed, in earlier works such as Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for Blade Runner).

   In addition, a short descriptive passage about the urban landscape in Providence is slightly suggestive of scenes in Blade Runner. It’s said that Vinge was unable to sit through the movie because it reminded him so clearly of the landscape he had been attempting to realise in the novella. If so, it’s a pity that he didn’t make more effort to bring it to life.

   The element that is completely lacking, however, is style. In Neuromancer, Gibson captures the reader immediately with an iconic first sentence:

   The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

   (It’s ironic that the image he intended to convey, the black-and-white static of an untuned cathode ray tube, would not have existed in the post-modern world intended to evoke, but the power of the language is still undeniable).

   He then continues in a noir style with short sentences that disdain nouns and even pronouns as subjects. The effect, if this was a first person narrative, would be something like a hastily scribbled diary; but, in the context of a third person account, the attenuated writing works to draw the reader into the perceptual framework of the protagonist, Case, so as to appreciate his experiences as if they were first hand.

   (In some of Gibson’s later work – such as The Peripheral, published in 2014 – the technique becomes so attenuated as to become little more than an irritating and confusing mannerism).

   In True Names, Vinge achieves nothing like this. The narrative style, detached third person, is flat. The tricks considered an essential part of modern creative fiction are largely absent; the narrative point of view sometimes wanders from the protagonist, Mr Slippery, to other characters (in particular, Erythrina), and there are large blocks of expostulatory dialogue unbroken by stage direction, so the reader finds it difficult to picture the speaker during these bouts of mansplaining. The objective, authorial account of Mr Slippery’s experiences is a hindrance to empathy. His motivations and responses lack complexity, and we never really get to know him as an individual person.

   The same goes for the other characters: despite their obvious physical differences, whether they’re human or mechanical or, on The Other Plane, representations of people, robots, or fax machines, they’re all pretty…

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