Quotes from Vernor Vinge

And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.

It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.

The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.

We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.

I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.

Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.

Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a human civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from every wall, rebuilding what had been merely superhuman.

At the Docks' altitude, gravity was still about three-quarters of a gee. Air fountains hung a breathable atmosphere over the middle part of the platform. The day before, she had taken a sailboat across the clear-bottomed sea. That was a strange experience indeed: planetary clouds below your keel, stars and indigo sky above.

Though his invention worked superbly [...] his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end.

Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality.

Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time.

A truce with monsters, mediated by a fool.

How long must a fish study to understand human motivation?

So even in hell, there are clowns.

They had been at the center of something vast, but as usual with the affairs of the Powers, no one knew quite what had happened, nor the result of the strivings. "A Fire Upon the Deep

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all–no one's around to write horror stories.

Where the surf meets the shore – lots of neat things can happen there.

I think the Mailman is taking us on one at a time, starting with the weakest, drawing us in far enough to learn our True Names—and then destroying us.

While We are out of Touch or How to Survive and Prosper during the Next Thirty Minutes by Your Friend, the Mysterious Stranger