Customer Reviews

Witling

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

 

 

An excellent light SF adventure. Our heroes are captured on a medieval planet where it turns out the locals have telekinetic powers. Lacking such powers, our heroes are regarded as inferior "witlings".

Vinge, as usual, writes well and has thought things through in interesting ways. Conservation of momentum causes interesting limits (and also interesting capabilities) for telekinesis. For example, it is cheap to move between points at the same longitude and opposite latitude. So the Summer kingdom has a single Imperial palace split between the hemispheres, and the Winter kingdom has annual migrations from North pole to South pole.

Not "A Fire Upon the Deep", but that's a very high bar.

Some of the other reviewers have already told about the book, so I'll just say that I've enjoyed it very much. I've had the book for quite some time and I've reread it from time to time. I noticed some of the reviewers didn't appreciate the book at all which totally dumbfounds me! Oh well, we can't all have the same taste.
I also have to add that the book tells a wonderful story about how beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When one person may see another person as homely or unattractive - someone else may see beauty. The human female character, Legwott, is seen as short, big-boned and homely by human standards. However, she is seen as lithe, fragil and beautiful (quite the fairy princess) by the alien humanoid race in the story.

Vernor Vinge was just getting warmed up with this short, but amusing 1976 offering. With "The Witling", Vinge violates the fundamental rule of fiction -- show, don't tell. There are long rambling internal monologues where all the super-cool technical ideas are introduced and explained. The characters all act and talk like graduate students in a research lab.

"The Witling" is well worth it for the ideas, but nowhere near as complete an offering in terms of either technology or characterization as his as his captivating Marooned in Realtime series or his already classic "A Deepness in the Sky". Like me, you might also enjoy witnessing the evolution of Vinge's craft. And while I don't want to give too much away, there is a notion of discontinuity of time and place in this work that should be familiar to fans of Vinge's later work.

Humanity is spread out amongst the stars but the lack of a faster than light drive means that systems are, at best, only loosely connected. Empires have risen and fallen and Armageddon has come to many worlds.

One world is trying to recover from such a catastrophe. It has reached out and colonized a planet in a nearby system. That planet is just self-sufficient enough to try and explore its system. It sends out a mission to explore a world a bit further out and finds a civilization. The civilization is what we would call feudal but it has its surprises.

As the explorers, an archeologist (specializing in recovering technology) and a pilot, await recovery, disaster overtakes their ship. It is destroyed and they are captured by the locals. It is only then that they learn the strange secret of this world. They may be backward in terms of technology but they make up for it with an amazing ability. They are natural teleports.

The explorers, of course, are not. This makes them "witlings", those without the ability to teleport. In this culture, that means that they are fit for little more than slavery. They are desperate to get to the far side of the planet to recover a beacon there and send for help. They realize that with teleportation comes the potential to solve humanity's interstellar problems and a lot is riding on their success. In this mission they are aided by a crown prince, who is also a witling.

There are problems. Massive intrigue is the norm in the prince's court. All factions and foreign powers believe the strangers are the key to power. Teleportation may make some things easy but it is still subject to all sorts of physical laws which make transport directly to the beacon impossible. Also, the local food is toxic.

It's a race against time, well told and well written.

Vinge describes a world in which teleportation is an everyday reality --he and clears up all the little details of plausibility which other writers were too lazy or uninformed to bother with. Angular momentum, conservation of energy--these and other science aspects are beautifully worked out, behind a seeming fantasy scenario. A book to delight that small minority which still cares about science in science fiction.

Here Vinge works out the details of an alien technology and uses it to construct and bring to life a whole planetary society. He does this very well, and in this sense the book is first-rate science fiction. As a story of human interaction, it's perhaps not quite first-rate, but it's very competent, and above average by science fiction standards. I'm not entirely happy with the ending; on the other hand, I'm not sure what sort of change would constitute an improvement.

To deal with a couple of criticisms from other reviewers:

1. There is no resemblance to Bester's "The Stars My Destination" (aka "Tiger! Tiger!") except that both stories involve some kind of teleportation.

2. I don't think this book should offend feminists. The offended reviewer seems to have misinterpreted one rather ambiguous paragraph at the end, and damned the whole book on that basis.

What this book is not: It's not A Fire Upon the Deep, or A Deepness in the Sky, or The Peace War, or Marooned in Realtime. Those books were so rich that as soon as I finished them, I wanted to reread them again. This book ... I'll read it again, but probably not anytime real soon.

What this book is: A decent, straightforward adventure story with a leavening of neat scientific ideas. It reminded me a lot of the science fiction adventure novels that I read and enjoyed in junior high and high school.

But it's a little more than that. Right when I least expected it, the book hit me with Something To Think About. I was blindsided by one paragraph. It made a point about the sorts of people we call the crippled, the seriously handicapped, and especially the "mentally retarded" -- how we see them, versus how they may see themselves. How, despite having a serious "defect," they may still be able to love, and other people still love them. I'm done with the book, I've put it away, but I'm still thinking about that one paragraph.

(One other reviewer misread this paragraph as "antifeminist." If it struck you that way, you need to step back and look at this from a broader perspective than gender politics. Especially reconsider your attitude toward people who have less brainpower than you, or who have serious handicaps. Do you hold them in contempt? Do you think it's wrong that some people love them?)

I would recommend this book primarily for two audiences:

1) Young bright readers of science fiction, say junior high and up. It's a good, fairly fast-paced adventure story, but also smart, logical, science fiction. And while it's far from didactic, it does make that one little point that made me think.

2) People who are already fans of Vernor Vinge and who would like to read one of his early works to see how he has grown as a writer. There are glimmers, here and there, of the ideas that Vinge would later play with at length. It's a decently entertaining story with a few hints of the greatness to come.

Even in the '70 s Vernor Vinge was there with his very interesting and well-presented ideas...

As an other reviewer says, it is obvious that the story is written by a relative beginner in the field, but, wow, how many beginners would dream of being able to write a story like that!

From Vinge I have read only A Fire into the Deep and its prequel A deepness into the Sky and throughout the "Witling" you can recognize the seeds of what he would become later.

Some common traits are recognizable: he seems to have an obsession about medieval or generally backward civilizations who, however, have certain talents or abilities which make them dangerous and uncontrollable... So humans are presented most of the times as the technologically more advanced civilization, who, however, are trapped in these worlds.

And, of course, there is the wealth of ideas that is the trademark of Vernor Vinge. He doesnt only throw the ideas. He presents them as scientific facts, focussing on all its uses and consequences... a real delight for Scifi fans.

Vernor Vinge is one of my favorite authors - let alone science fiction authors - and I admire him like heck for Deepness in the Sky, Fire Upon the Deep, for his amazing short stories, Marooned in Realtime, etc.

The only thing going for this book is that you can see how much Vinge matured and deepened as an author--it's interesting in that sense. Otherwise, it's a pretty bad book.

The whole conceit is shallow and not all that interesting. To not give anything away, mostly it centers on a light-physics examination of a fairly standard what-if set-up.

The plot, while pretending to be about political maneuvering, is silly, contrived and dull.

But the absolute worst thing - what makes this 1.5 stars - is the ending.

It is just SO misogynist! I don't want to give anything away, but I really, really resented the ending--no woman would EVER have written it, and no man would EVER have written it of a male character. It's insulting. Ruined an otherwise mediocre but okay book.

I don't think the book is worth it.

But I URGE you to read his later works. Utterly fabulous. Thankfully he didn't stop with this one!

A book read years ago and never forgotten. An imaginative technical premise, interesting charactors, and fast paced adventure - all the ingredients of entertaining space opera. But what really blew me away was the ending, and years later I can still recall that mind blowing, apparently controversial, final paragraph (actually last two or three paragraphs) word for word.
Potential readers, please don't be put off by the reviewer that called it mysogynist. If you can capable of seeing the universe, and human charactor, in more than one dimension, you will understand. It's called irony! (but its actually more than that..)
Maybe like me, you will have tears in your eyes, and feel like you've been kicked in the stomach after reading the last page of this book, but it will also ring true. Oh, maybe I'm overstating it - just read the book.
I want to explain why the ending is NOT anti-feminist, in fact the reverse, but it will involve spoilers, so if you haven't read the book yet, I recommend you just take my word for it and don't read any further. The following is an explanation of how I interpreted the ending for the interest of others who have read this book.
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