Customer Reviews

Tatja Grimm's World

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This will never be regarded as one of Vinge's hard core stories, such as "Fire Upon the Deep", it is rather a diversionary exercise from Vernor, that explores in classic SF style a delightfully created ocean world, populated with numerous divergent and isolated cultures, but loosely tied together by nomadic traders. One group stumbles upon and shelters a young woman, an apparently feral child, but who reveals through a series of well-written episodes, a precocious capacity to learn. Soon she far surpasses those who protected her, indeed she come to reverse the roles, and yet her true motives are often hidden, even from those who have come to love, and sometimes fear her most. In a sequence of six well-paced episodes, her influence in this early industrial metal-scarce world grows, until the climatic crisis, set in an extreme altitude mountain-top observatory, finally unravels the entire plot. A likeable, and moving tale, less techo-oriented than his other works, but one that reveals another aspect to Vinge, well worth tracking down if you are a fan.

Vernor Vinge is one of my favorite authors, but Tatja Grimm's World is not typical Vinge. What I most enjoy in his other novels is the outpouring of novel science ideas played out on realistic tableaus. Vinge manages to populate his sci-fi stories with great characters that we can relate to--even those almost completely alien--and places them into solid societal (often completely alien) foundations. "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky" are his primary recent efforts, extremely futuristic and alien, but with human connections rarely found elsewhere.

Tatja Grimm's World lacks the science ideas so unique to those novels: it is fantasy, not science fiction. This book combines two novellas Vinge wrote in the 60s, with a prequel written in the 80s; they fit seamlessly together into a very readable, interesting novel. The book centers on the titled character, a possible alien stranded on a world with almost no metals, and an island-based society. Is Tatja an android, or a future being stranded in the past? Maybe she's simply an evolutionary jump in the existing people, or perhaps she's another life-form altogether. The mystery about her past is combined with an ambiguity about her intentions. Is she evil or good, or is she beyond either in terms the islanders (and possibly we) can understand? The mystery and tension that builds up about Tatja is the key to the novel. Other than her, the stories are fairly pedestrian. Vinge doesn't do much with the lack of metals on the world, but does serve up a couple neat ideas (in the newer prequel) about the island-based societies.

Vinge makes the novel work based almost completely on Tatja Grimm's characterization. Even so, the novel feels incomplete. Vinge leaves a teaser that another story was (is? Tatja would be great character for a new Vinge novel!) in the offing. Although I was disappointed with the lack of hard sci-fi typical of Vinge, I did enjoy this book.

If you are new to Vernor Vinge, and are looking for great science fiction, try his two novels mentioned above; you won't be disappointed. If you are a Vinge or fantasy fan, I recommend Tatja Grimm's World as a quick and interesting read.

I'm a big Vernor Vinge fan, and bought this book on the strength of the first section (which was reprinted in a compendium. This book may appear to be new, but is actually also a reprint, too). This is a good way to read "early" Vernor Vinge, and the story/characters/locations make for compelling reading in the first parts of the book. But the last section just doesn't hold together, as it involves the murky motives of [spoiler warning] off-worlders who are never fully developed as characters, and their motives are based on really silly sci-fi. So while it didn't live up to my expectations, it did make for decent plane-reading on a transcon trip.

-avi

The book is a rough work, not very easy to follow. Definitely worth reading for people who already love Vernor Vinge, but I wouldn't buy it otherwise.

Vinge tells the story of a girl that is born in an aboriginal culture that is very low tech. An opportunity arises for her to enter the society of a floating city and become more educated. She is hyper-intelligent, and ascends swiftly to a position of power and influence. A look at whether her origin will make her act differently in such a situation. With a few SF magazine jokes thrown in here and there, as one of the elements of the story is a publication of that type that has been running for centuries.

Tatja is a barbarian girl from the interior of a massive continent. Her world is poor in metals and civilization is mostly restricted to the island fringes. The mainland is mostly for barbarians.

Tatja is also much brighter than everyone else she encounters. Desperate to find people who are not "stupid", she wanders to the coast impressing everyone she meets with both her intelligence and her ruthlessness. Upon arriving at the coast, she is at first delighted to find a civilization roughly analogous to the Renaissance but is soon disappointed that everything seems to be the result of centuries of slow progress. She expected to find geniuses and instead had to settle for normal people.

Even so, she has a master plan. She believes that there is life "out there" in space and there she might find people with who she is comfortable. Putting her plan into action though will require some groundwork, like taking over the most powerful kingdom on the world.

It turns out that Tatja is right and that is frightening because the outsiders are quite sinister and have their own motives.

This story reads well most of the time but there are occasional lapses when it is not always clear what is happening. Even so, it was a fun book to read. It is one of Vinge's earlier works and his later ones are better but, even so, this one is still worthwhile.

As most reviews mention, this is early Vinge that doesn't have the far future tech you may expect from his later novels.

I disagree, however, with those reviews that claim this is a "fantasy" novel, or even with those that don't see it as hard sci fi. It has a fantasy feel, perhaps, in that the setting is a pre-technological (actually prototechnological) culture, where the fighting occurs with blades and gunpowder, rather than lasers and cyberwarfare. But it is true science fiction, in the sense that it takes a single premise -- how would human society and technology develop on a metal-poor planet? -- and weaves an interesting story within those constraints. It even qualifies as "hard" sci fi, in the sense that everything that happens is constrained by known and plausible physics, although it certainly doesn't have the high tech or space opera backdrop that that label usually suggests. I don't mean to be overly hung up on such labels, but it's important to know what sort of book you're ordering, and this one is harder than most to categorize.

The novel itself is entertaining throughout, but fairly uneven. The latter two thirds of the book were written and published separately in the late 60s, and are a straightforward action story of the heroine's quest to surpass the limitations of her metal-poor world. The first third was written nearly twenty years later, to provide some depth and character development for this title character, as she scales the scientific and political ladder of her homeworld. This first section greatly improves the book, and shows how much Vinge developed as an author between the 60s and the 80s. It is more character-driven than action-driven, and is a lot of fun. The character of Tatja Grimm is compelling: part warrior princess, part ingenue, part savant, she is a classic and well-written heroine. Unfortunately, this quality is not quite maintained in the transition to the later portions of the book, and it loses some momentum, paradoxically, just as the action begins to heat up.

All in all, though, it's a solid book. It is interesting for Vinge fans to see how far he has come as an author, and to see the early hints of some of his favorite themes of intelligence, technological progress, and interfaces between cultures across a technological discontinuty. And it's an entertaining, although not fully engrossing, story for casual readers.

This early set of works from Vinge, are at times quite interesting; but, the ending fails to truly satisfy the buildup.

The 2nd and 3rd stories were published as short stories in 1968 and 1969, with the "prequel" being published in 1986, thus giving this "Trilogy" enough bulk to allow it to be published as a three part novel TATJA GRIMM'S WORLD. While Tatja Grimm is one of the main characters in each of the short stories, she is actually not the hero or heroine in any of them - indeed, she actually plays the "bad guy" more often than not in the 2nd & 3rd stories... only in the first story is she made out to be a "good guy".

One peeve worth mentioning... the art on the cover, while good, does not depict any actual scene from within the book... yes, there are human inhabited "termite mounds" described in detail in one of the stories in the book - but the termite mounds are obviously land based (who ever heard of "sea termites"!)

fabulous story from begining to end...Vernor is a great writer and this is a "guaranteed" dont put me down read...A true scince fiction story.

This started off really well. Then it took some very fast twists and turns that left me wondering if I wasn't reading a book that was missing some chapters. This was an interesting idea for a story, but eventually you begin to consider Svir and Cor as the protagonists and Tatja is just an annoyance. By the end, you are depressed because the characters you've come to care about most (including Anchu) have been killed off and Tatja's future is - well - Grimm.

Too disjointed and too depressing for me. I only give it two stars. My favorite Vernor Vinge book so far is A Fire Upon The Deep.