The Vorkosigan Saga is a series of science fiction novels and short stories set in a common fictional universe by American author Lois McMaster Bujold. The first of these was published in 1986 and the most recent in May 2018. Works in the series have received numerous awards and nominations, including five Hugo award wins including one for Best Series.
Vernor Steffen Vinge was an American science fiction author and professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He was the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and among the first authors to present a fictional "cyberspace". He won the Hugo Award for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), and Rainbows End (2006), and novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2001) and The Cookie Monster (2004).
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of self-improvement cycles, each successive; and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence which would ultimately result in a powerful superintelligence, qualitatively far surpassing all human intelligence.
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is a subgenre of science fiction in which the Earth's civilization is collapsing or has collapsed. The apocalypse event may be climatic, such as runaway climate change; astronomical, an impact event; destructive, nuclear holocaust or resource depletion; medical, a pandemic, whether natural or human-caused; end time, such as the Last Judgment, Second Coming or Ragnarök; or any other scenario in which the outcome is apocalyptic, such as a zombie apocalypse, AI takeover, technological singularity, dysgenics or alien invasion.
The Kzinti are an alien cat-like species developed by Larry Niven in his Known Space series.
Singularitarianism is a movement defined by the belief that a technological singularity—the creation of superintelligence—will likely happen in the medium future, and that deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the singularity benefits humans.
Telempath is a science fiction novel by Spider Robinson set in a dystopian near-future in which human cities have fallen into ruin and the population has been sharply reduced. The novel, Robinson's first, is an expansion of his 1977 Hugo Award-winning novella By Any Other Name. It was first published under the Berkley imprint of G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1976.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is a 1994 novella by Roger Williams, a programmer living in New Orleans. It deals with the ramifications of a powerful, superintelligent supercomputer that discovers god-like powers to alter reality while studying a quirk of quantum physics discovered during the prototyping of its own specialised processors, ultimately heralding a technological singularity. After remaining unpublished for years, the novel was published online in 2002, hosted by Kuro5hin; Williams later published a print edition via print-on-demand publisher Lulu. One reviewer called the novel "a well-written and very creative, if flawed, piece of work" and ranked it as one of the more important works of fiction to deal with the idea of a technological singularity.
The Peace War is a science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge, about authoritarianism and technological progress. It was first published as a serial in Analog in 1984, and in book form shortly afterward. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1985. A sequel, Marooned in Realtime, was published in 1986. The two novels and "The Ungoverned", a related novella, are collected in Across Realtime.
In futures studies and the history of technology, accelerating change is the observed exponential nature of the rate of technological change in recent history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change.
Accelerando is a 2005 science fiction novel consisting of a series of interconnected short stories written by British author Charles Stross. As well as normal hardback and paperback editions, it was released as a free e-book under the CC BY-NC-ND license. Accelerando won the Locus Award in 2006, and was nominated for several other awards in 2005 and 2006, including the Hugo, Campbell, Clarke, and British Science Fiction Association Awards.
Marc Stiegler is an American science fiction author and software developer. He co-authored Valentina: Soul in Sapphire (1984) with Joseph H. Delaney. The novel features Valentina, a computer program that is one of science fiction's earliest examples of sentient software, in contrast to mainframe-based AIs such as HAL and Colossus. His notable works also include David's Sling (1988), a techno-thriller that explores the concept of e-democracy.
"The Ungoverned" is a 1985 science fiction novella by American writer Vernor Vinge, set between his novels The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. It was first published in Far Frontiers, Volume III, first collected in True Names and Other Dangers, and later published in the 1991 edition of the omnibus Across Realtime. The novella is a direct exploration of the concept of privately funded decentralized defense in the absence of a State, as described by Gustave de Molinari in "The Production of Security".
Many of the tropes of science fiction can be viewed as similar to the goals of transhumanism. Science fiction literature contains many positive depictions of technologically enhanced human life, occasionally set in utopian societies. However, science fiction's depictions of technologically enhanced humans or other posthuman beings frequently come with a cautionary twist. The more pessimistic scenarios include many dystopian tales of human bioengineering gone wrong.
Rainbows End is a 2006 science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge. It was awarded the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel. The book is set in San Diego, California, in 2025, in a variation of the fictional world Vinge explored in his 2002 Hugo-winning novella "Fast Times at Fairmont High" and 2004's "Synthetic Serendipity". Vinge had tentative plans for a sequel, picking up some of the loose threads left at the end of the novel. The many technological advances depicted in the novel suggest that the world is undergoing ever-increasing change, following the technological singularity, a recurring subject in Vinge's fiction and nonfiction writing.
The Xeelee Sequence[a] is a series of hard science fiction novels, novellas, and short stories written by British science fiction author Stephen Baxter. The series spans billions of years of fictional history, centering on humanity's future expansion into the universe, its intergalactic war with an enigmatic and supremely powerful Kardashev Type V alien civilization called the Xeelee, and the Xeelee's own cosmos-spanning war with dark matter entities called Photino Birds. The series features many other species and civilizations that play a prominent role, including the Squeem, the Qax, and the Silver Ghosts. Several stories in the Sequence also deal with humans and posthumans living in extreme conditions, such as at the heart of a neutron star (Flux), in a separate universe with considerably stronger gravity (Raft), and within eusocial hive societies (Coalescent).
Flash is a science fiction novel by American writer L. E. Modesitt Jr., published in 2004.
The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge is a collection of science fiction short stories by American writer Vernor Vinge. The stories were first published from 1966 to 2001, and the book contains all of Vinge's published short stories from that period except "True Names" and "Grimm's Story".
Blue Remembered Earth is a science fiction novel by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds, first published by Gollancz on 19 January 2012. It describes the efforts of two adult siblings to solve a mystery in the pseudo-utopian 2160s. The novel is the first of the Poseidon's Children trilogy, which follows humanity's development over many centuries, with the intention of portraying a more optimistic future than anything Reynolds had previously written. The second book in the trilogy, On the Steel Breeze, was released on 26 September 2013, and the trilogy's finale, Poseidon's Wake, was released on 30 April 2015.
"Home to Roost" is a Nero Wolfe mystery novella by Rex Stout, first published as "Nero Wolfe and the Communist Killer" in the January 1952 issue of The American Magazine. It first appeared in book form in the short-story collection Triple Jeopardy, published by the Viking Press in 1952. This novella and the 1949 novel The Second Confession are notable expressions of Stout's contempt for both Communism and McCarthyism.
