"Vernor Vinge - True Names (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

True Names - the novel by Vernor Vinge

Comment by the transcriber:

This is as complete and accurate an etext of the 1984
edition of True Names as I can make. I agree with Project
Gutenberg, regarding the superiority of hard formatted
plain ASCII over other formats. Except that this work
_requires_ some italics, so I've used a bastard mix of
plain text and HTML. If you want to read it as plain
text, the HTML codes for italics are not too annoying;
yet in HTML it will still preserve the original work's
line formatting (minus right justification).
Also included is the Afterword by Marvin Minsky, and
.GIFs of all illustrations from the book. These are
linked in at the correct places in the etext.
One zip file contains the whole lot, for portability.

Enjoy!
The Rectifier, Feb 1998




TRUE NAMES

"The story is a marvelous mixture of hard-science
SF and sword-and-sorcery imagery. Vinge posits that
in a direct neurocybernetic interface, the information
would be analogized by the brain into symbols it is
comfortable with. The "place" in which the Coven
"meets," for example, is or seems to be a castle,
guarded by a program which manifests itself as a
firebreathing dragon, sitting in a magma moat, wear-
ing an asbestos T-shirt. Fail to satisfy it, and it will
"kill" you, dumping you back into the real world--a
fate most Wizards seem to regard as very little better
than death.
"Vinge set himself about fifteen challenges in this
story, any one of which might have wrecked a lesser
writer, and pulled them all off with appalling ease.
No point in listing them all--but the most important
one to my mind is this: he succeeded in making me
feel, for over an hour, what it is like to be more than
human. That is one of SF's major challenges, and it
is bloody hard to do.
"Do not miss this ingenious and truly original
story--it is one of those that, when you're done, you
wish the author were present so you could applaud."
--Analog Magazine