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Paperback - 384 pages
Tor Books; ISBN: 0312862075

Synopsis
In 1981, three years before publication of William Gibson's   _Neuromancer_ (1984),  Vernor Vinge's critically acclaimed novella "True Names" invented the concept of cyberspace. This book is the first forum to explore the blossoming discoveries and groundbreaking applications, both current and future, on the new frontier of the Internet and all its subsets.

A study of _True Names_, Vernor Vinge's critically acclaimed novella that invented the concept of cyberspace, features that complete text of the novella, as well as articles by Richard Stallman, John Markoff, Hans Moravec, Patricia Maes, Timothy May, and other cyberspace pioneers.

When I was starting out as a PhD student in Artificial Intelligence at Carnegie Mellon, it was made known to us first-year students that an unofficial but  necessary part of our education was to locate and read a copy of an obscure science-fiction novella called *True Names*. Since you couldn't find it in  bookstores, older grad students and professors would directly mail order sets of ten and set up informal lending libraries -- you would go, for example, to  Hans Moravec's office, and sign one out from a little cardboard box over in the corner of his office. This was 1983 -- the Internet was a toy reserved for American academics, "virtual reality" was not a popular topic, and the term "cyberpunk" had not been coined. One by one, we all tracked down copies, and  all had the tops of our heads blown off by Vinge's incredible book.

 In my grad student days, we loved to sit around and discuss the implications of Vernor's ideas. Sixteen years later, I do research at MIT, and it's still fun to sit around and talk about how Vernor's ideas are coming to be.
 (Amazingly enough, Vinge has done this not once, but twice: *Marooned in Realtime* contains ideas even more interesting than *True Names* -- all in the setting of a murder mystery that takes place 50 million years in the future.)

  - Olin

Alan Kay's emphasis on magic indicates that the supernatural metaphors that saturate technoculture may have a more substantive basis than the fondness that many hackers have for _Sandman_ comic books or D&D.

These metaphors arise and take power because, as William Irwin Thompson noted in a discussion of computer games, "the conventional worldview of materialism is not subtle enough to deal with the complexities of a multidimensional universe in which domains interpenetrate and are enfolded in one another." The science-fiction author Vernor Vinge came to a similar conclusion in _True Names_, a brilliant novella whose vision of a networked virtual world predates _Neuromancer_ by three years.  Unlike the bright neon grid of Gibson's cyberspace, the Other Plane of Vinge's story is a Tolkienesque world of swamps, castles, and magic, a half-dreamed environment that is generated partly through electronic cues that stimulate the "imagination and subconscious" of its electrode-wearing users.  The hacker denizens of the Other Plane band together as covens of witches and warlocks, and at one point, a few of them discuss how magical metaphors came to dominate "data space":

The Limey and Erythrina argued that sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomistic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communication protocols.  It was, they argued, just more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment.
 - Erik Davis - _Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism In The Age Of Information_

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