| | Tatja Grimm's World |  | Author: Vernor Vinge
Publisher: Baen
Category: Book
List Price: $3.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 307804
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 4.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0671653369
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780671653361
ASIN: 0671653369
Publication Date: July 1, 1987
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Product Description
Multiple Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge’s first full-length novel
As a mud-spattered youngster, Tatja quickly realized she was different from the stone-age primitives with whom she grew up. Her insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge could not be quenched among them; she had to explore and learn more about the strange world she lived on.
She finds the bastion of all culture, arts, entertainment and history for the entire planet, the seven-hundred-year-old science fiction magazine Fantasie, which is produced entirely aboard a gargantuan floating vessel the size of a small city. But despite the printing presses, sail-powered vessels, and mind-expanding technology, Tatja is still dissatisfied. Rising through the ranks, she finds that the people on the enormous barge are just as unintelligent as the primitives she grew up with. But others have come to the planet who not only challenge her intelligence, but offer her a tantalizing opportunity to uncover answers to mysteries that have long plagued her.
But with opportunity comes risk. And if she acts unwisely, she could bring doom to the only world she knows.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 An Evolutionary Tale October 17, 1999
46 out of 48 found this review helpful
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.
 Not For Hard Science Fiction Enthusiasts February 16, 2006
16 out of 34 found this review helpful
BEWARE. First of all, let me say that I am a big Vernor Vinge fan. I have read and loved most of his work. So when I saw that this novel was coming out early this year (2006), I ordered it sight unseen. However, as it turns out, this is NOT a new book. It is a reprinting of an older novel. And, it is NOT science fiction - it is fantasy? What, Vernor Vinge?? Yup, fantasy. If I was jaded, I would say that this is a sneaky ploy on the part of Professor Vinge's publisher to make a fast buck. My advice - leave this old mummy be and read another Charles Scheffield or Greg Egan novel.
A Character-Based Fantasy That Works November 27, 2006
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
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.
 Compelling reading... up to a point May 11, 2006
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
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
Disappointed December 15, 2005
7 out of 15 found this review helpful
I have to say, I am disappointed. I mean, this stuff is still much better than the standards of a normal author, but this is Vernor Vinge we're talking about here. I read The Peace War. Fantastic. Best thing I've ever read. I then ate up Marooned in Realtime. Thus two things held the position of best thing I've ever read, far above the rest. Then Fire Upon the Deep. I think that's what it was called. The thing with the sound-thinking dog-rat creatures. Ok. Pretty good. Not up to the same standard, but how could it realistically be? Then True Names. Ok, pretty good. And then this. I have to say, he peaked around the mid 80s. He wasn't up to his later standard in this book. The problem is that the protagonist is kind of a mean person. I don't like her. She played the other characters she could influence the way no one but an enemy would. And a villain as the central character is an interesting idea but it just doesn't work. Not in this case, at any rate. Nobody wants a spoiled brat with a superiority complex (and she proves it to be just a complex in the end as far as I'm concerned, with an amazing display of naivety) and who always must get her way for a protagonist. I liked Rey Guille and Svir a lot more. They were real characters, the way characters should be in a story. I didn't like Tatja. Read it and I think you'll agree with me. I did, however, find it slightly amusing that Vinge worked in Claude Shannon's Coding Theorem and mixed it into the mostly otherwise nonsense ramblings (that's the way incredibly smart people talk, supposedly) that passed between Tatja and her love interest. But having no theory of electricity, I somehow doubt she would have much of a concept of a 'channel', no matter how smart she's supposed to be. But it was worth noticing. Coming from someone who wasted two years getting a graduate degree on the subject and now is unemployed.
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