The Idea Man

This is the face of cyberpunk.

For reals.




Meet Vernor Vinge.

Few people associate Vernor with cyberpunk because his work reads like straight "hard" sf (with a cybernetics focus). There are no strung-out data cowboys wandering through a Megalopolis; no one gets high on exotic mil-spec drugs smuggled out of the decaying warehouses of the Russian army; the future isn't particularly grimy, and no one wears mirror shades at night.

But it was Vinge who used cyberspace in a short story called  True Names, three years before the publication of Neuromancer, and a year before William Gibson coined the term.

In his novella The Ungoverned, Vinge outlined how an anarchist/libertarian society might function, with the traditional roles of government - defense, justice, and other "monopolies of legitimate violence"- provided as services by private companies. This was 1985. It anticipated the "franchise governments" of Snowcrash and The Diamond Age by seven years.

And it's Vinge - yes, Vinge - who posited the Singularity and "technological runaway," unintentionally creating Transhumanism, a movement that is, for all intents and purposes, a techno-religion.

I like him.