“Once in a great while a science fiction story is so visionary, yet so close to impending scientific developments that it becomes not only an accurate predictor, but itself the locus for new discoveries and development.”
So goes the Goodreads and back-cover summary of Vernor Vinge’s 
, a short story that predicted with startling accuracy the future of computing and digital worlds. The story, originally published in 1981, is as prescient as other landmark sci-fi works, like Clarke’s 2001. The version I read is verbosely titled True Names and the opening of the cyberspace frontier. It collects essays from the 90s about computing, cryptography, digital worlds, and the then-burgeoning internet.
My unabashed recommendation is to read True Names (the short story) and skip the preceding essays. Vinge’s short story remains a benchmark for sci-fi storytelling. The talented Mr. Slippery is a warlock, or an incredibly powerful virtual reality being in modern parlance. The feds discover his true name, however, and enlist him to track down the elusive and lethal Mailman, a cyberspace entity behind some nefarious machinations that could reshape the world. Vinge tells the story with his own vernacular, crafting language to define the as-yet-undefined. The idea of cyberspace wasn’t common when Vinge wrote True Names, so he relied on fantasy or fantasy-adjacent terms to set the scene. Roger Pollack—Mr. Slippery—and his cabal of warlocks inhabit “The Other Plane,” which we would know as the Internet or virtual reality.
True Names is both a worthwhile quickfire story (not quite novella-length) and a work of art that heralded a stunningly accurate image of the future. I recommend it for its place in the pop culture zeitgeist alone.
What I can’t recommend, however, is the amalgamation of outdated essays padding the collection’s length. The guest writers tackle myriad ideas, and their essays are introduced with, at best, tenuous connections to the short story. They were all published in the 1990s or thereabouts, and it shows. While some of the essays contain interesting nuggets—one discusses the need for cryptography to protect user information from the government, while another talks about a digital world founded by early Lucasarts—they vary so wildly in tone and style that it all feels like a muddled hodgepodge of tech talk without a clear goal. Their tangential relation to True Names is not enough to convince me they’re worth reading, and most of them are in such dull textbook prose it’s hard to keep your eyes from glazing over.
The bottom line on True Names is simple: it’s good and worth a read. The essays surrounding it in this particular collection can fall by the wayside. They’re unlikely to add much to your understanding of the story if anything at all.
Rating: True Names – 7.5/10
