"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.


An excellent light SF adventure   January 2, 2007
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

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.




A Great Book - You Should Enjoy!   April 24, 2000
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

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.


A fascinating world; excellent ideas   August 28, 1999
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

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.


First-rate science fiction   October 26, 2000
 5 out of 7 found this review helpful

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.