| | Having read all of Card's Speaker for the Dead series, I have to say that while a couple of them are well worth reading - Shadow and Ender's Game, especially, after a while I got tired of the kind of monotone, deprecated humor. The originality was gone, and the constant clever word plays just seemed silly without really new content.
I personally loved Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" (not "A Fire Below"), for his ability to suggest convincingly truly alien species and mentalities. Most sf authors are truly unable to convey that sense. Aliens are usually depicted as just humans with extra digits or who breathe ammonia. The "tines," on the other hand, really did have a different kind of mind. And the logical analysis involved in such scenes as when the fleet is following the heros, based on false premises planted by the Perversion, and each side is playing mind games, manipulating the data while trying to see through the other side's smoke screens, I thought was classic. I recently reread both "A Fire Upon the Deep" and its prequel.
Vinge's prequel to it, however, written a couple decades or so later, "A Deepness in the Sky," not only raises all kinds of interesting questions about the possible limits of progress, but also introduces a genuinely new technology that is all too doable.
I note that only Heinlein and Lois Bujold got more Hugos for their novels than Vinge. Vinge has three now, including the three novels mentioned in this thread and, I believe, a couple of his short stories or novellas got the equivalent awards. The paperback edition of "Rainbows End" has Vinge getting four Hugos, which is incorrect, I gather. Vinge was, however, both the originator of the concept "singularity" as applied to future human progress, and also the original cyberpunk sf author, with his classic "True Names" short story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel
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