"For historians of cyberculture, science fiction author Vernor Vinge enjoys unimpeachable street creed," wrote Andrew Leonard in Salon.com. Leonard went on to explain that before William Gibson "dazzled the SF world with Neuromancer, Vinge captured the essence of the online reality to come in his eerily prescient 1981 novella, True Names." Vinge further explored the use of the Internet in his 1992 novel, A Fire upon the Deep, having his distant future culture communicate with one another via a simulacrum of newsgroups. A Fire upon the Deep's companion novel, the 1999 A Deepness in the Sky, however, backtracks to a time before computers have reached sentient powers. Other award-winning titles from Vinge include The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime, which explore other effects of technological innovations in electronic and genetic engineering. Winner of Hugo awards and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Vinge is professor emeritus in mathematics...