Vinge's Road to the Singularity

Vernor Vinge's 1986 novel Marooned in Realtime undertakes two different tasks, succeeding brilliantly at one and achieving some success, of a rather peculiar sort, in the second. Its first goal was to tell a mystery story stretched across several millennia of future time, and to convey the impact of those millennia on ordinary human beings. This, Vinge certainly achieves. He was probably the first science fiction author so vividly to convey, on a human scale, the massive changes that can occur in deep geological time: the emergence of strange but believable new species, the reshaping of continents, even the slowing of the earth's rotation. Vinge is able to do this because the protagonists of his novel have access to high technology that shields them from the dangers of their environment and the ravages of time – in particular, a tunable stasis field, or "bobble," that prevents the occupants from experiencing the passage of time and protects them from outside forces. (The bobble is a holdover from Vinge's otherwise forgettable prequel novel, The Peace War, a mediocre post-holocaust adventure story.) When conflict or skullduggery separates Vinge's characters from their tech – well, that's when things get particularly interesting.  

Vinge's second goal was to explore the impact of high technology on human intelligence, and this exploration yielded a surprising and, as it turned out, very influential result: the idea that we now refer to as "the Singularity." Vinge began his journey to the Singularity with his very first story, about a human with computer-enhanced intelligence. His younger and more sensible sister persuaded him to set this half-baked first effort aside in favor of another story idea about a chimpanzee with computer-enhanced intelligence. The result was "Bookworm, Run!" (1966), Vinge's first published SF story (and a very entertaining story at that). When Vinge subsequently tried to publish his original story of a super-intelligent human, however, editor John W. Campbell sent him a rejection letter with the note "You can't write this story.  Neither can anyone else." Campbell's point was that human beings don’t have the intellectual tools to understand someone with super-human intelligence, from which one can infer that we can't comprehend a society built by ultra-intelligent people, either.

Vernor Vinge returned to the theme of ultra-intelligent people in his first novel, Grimm's World (1969), and his proto-cyberpunk novella "True Names" (1980), in which characters with genetically or computer-enhanced intelligence conquer their worlds, or at least threaten to do so. In an 1983 Omni article, and more extensively in Marooned in Realtime, he finally embraced and built on Campbell's implied point that superhuman intelligence produces motives incomprehensible to humans. Trans-humans, Vinge observes, could develop technologies that modern human minds simply couldn't understand, and thus would either have solved or lost interest in human problems and solutions. (In the novel, one group of slightly super-intelligent humans develops the means, in the early twenty-third century, to distill antimatter directly from the sun and to construct a time machine; another population of slightly more super-intelligent humans, just two years later, finds these projects boring.) The path that a society of transhumans would follow is not one that ordinary humans could possibly predict or comprehend. As in the interior of a black hole, ordinary rules of human behavior break down in the presence of super-human intelligence; like a black hole, it creates a singularity in human societies.  

This is probably what lies behind the largest mystery in Vinge's novel: what happened to all the people? The main characters of Marooned in Realtime entered stasis for a variety of reasons, but all emerged sometime after 2250 CE, to discover that Earth's cities were completely abandoned and in ruins. Much speculation about what happened follows, but the hypothesis advanced by astronauts Della Lu and Tunc Blumenthal seems to be the one Vinge favors (though he doesn't ever come out and say so): that human beings evolved into a ultra-intelligent form and disappeared, leaving this plane of existence for one more suited to their unfathomable interests. This is sort of what happened at the conclusion of Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, though Vinge chose to treat the Singularity as a prologue to a first-rate adventure and deep-future time-travel story, rather than the conclusion of his tale.  Writers like Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow may call the Singularity hypothesis "the rapture of the nerds," but Vinge at least was willing to suggest that life would go on, and remain interesting, for those Left Behind.