Vernor Steffen Vinge was an American science fiction writer and academic. He taught math and computer science at San Diego State University.
He was the first to widely popularize the notion of technological singularity, as well as one of the first authors to propose a fictitious “cyberspace”.
He earned the Hugo Award for his books A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), and Rainbows End (2006), as well as the novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004).
He became a somewhat active writer to science fiction journals in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969, he developed the short “Grimm’s Story” (Orbit 4, 1968) into his debut novel, Grimm’s World. Vinge earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego, in 1971, under Stefan E. Warschawski’s supervision. His second work, The Witling, debuted in 1976.
Vinge rose to fame in 1981 with his novella True Names, which may have been the first to portray a completely fleshed-out vision of cyberspace, and would subsequently be important to cyberpunk fiction by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and others.
His ex-wife, Joan D. Vinge, is also a science fiction novelist. They were married from 1972 to 1979.
Vernor Vinge died on March 20, 2024, at the age of 79, in La Jolla, CA. He’d been suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
He had no children and is surived by his siblings.
