12/7/2020 True Names - Wikipedia

True Names
True Names is a 1981 science fiction novella by American writer
Vernor Vinge, a seminal work of the cyberpunk genre. It is one of the True Names
earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace,
which would later be central to cyberpunk. The story also contains
elements of transhumanism, anarchism, and even hints about The
Singularity.

True Names first brought Vinge to prominence as a science fiction

writer. It also inspired many real-life hackers and computer
scientists; a 2001 book about the novella, True Names: And the
Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, included essays by Danny
Hillis, Marvin Minsky, Mark Pesce, Richard Stallman and others.[1]
It was awarded the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 2007.

Contents Author Vernor Vinge

Country USA
Plot summary
Language English
Afterword
Series Binary Star #5, ed.
Reception
James R. Frenkel
See also
Genre Science Fiction,
References cyberpunk
External links Published 1981 (Dell Publishing)
Media type Novella
Plot summary ISBN 0-440-10757-1

The story follows the progress of a group of computer hackers (called "warlocks" in the story) who are
early adopters of a new full-immersion virtual reality technology, called the "Other Plane". Warlocks
penetrate computers around the world for personal profit or curiosity. Forming a cabal, they must keep
their true identities—their "True Names"—secret even to each other and to the "Great Adversary", the
United States government, as those who know a warlock's True Name can force him to work on their
behalf, or even cause a "True Death" by killing the warlock in real life.

The protagonist is a warlock known as "Mr. Slippery" in the Other Plane. The government learns Mr.
Slippery's True Name—Roger Pollack, a holonovelist in Arcata, California—and forces him to investigate
the Mailman, a mysterious new warlock which it suspects of conducting a large-scale subversion of
databases and networks. The Mailman has been recruiting others, such as the warlock DON.MAC, by
promising great power in the real world, and claims to be responsible for a recent revolution in
Venezuela. Because he never appears in the Other Plane, and reacts to events only after a significant
delay, Mr. Slippery and fellow warlock Erythrina begin to suspect that the Mailman may be an
extraterrestrial invader, subverting global databases to gradually conquer the Earth while causing True
Deaths of the warlocks he recruits.

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Mr. Slippery and Erythrina receive permission from the government to use the old Arpanet to access
massive amounts of computational power around the world as they search for the Mailman. As they
become the most powerful warlocks in history they realize that DON.MAC is a sophisticated "personality
simulator" working for the Mailman. It violently defends itself, and both sides use network connections
to military weaponry to attack in the real world. Erythrina is forced to reveal her True Name to Mr.
Slippery as the battles, real and virtual, cause global chaos. They succeed in destroying the many copies
of the Mailman's AI, and although tempted to keep their power over the world realize that they do not
wish to be tyrants.

Ten weeks after the war and resulting worldwide economic depression from the disruption in computer
systems, Mr. Slippery returns to the Coven and learns that the Mailman may have survived. Fearing that
Erythrina succumbed to temptation for power, Pollack visits her—Debbie Charteris of Providence, Rhode
Island—in person. The elderly Charteris, an early military computer programmer, reveals that the
Mailman was not an extraterrestrial, but a National Security Agency AI research project to protect
government systems. Mistakenly left running, it slowly grew in power and sophistication, and used non
real-time communication to disguise its inability to fully emulate the human mind. As Charteris
succumbs to senility she transfers more of her personality to the defeated Mailman's kernel, and tells
Pollack that "when this body dies, I will still be, and you can still talk to me".

Afterword
Minsky's afterword reviews ideas from his Society of Mind concept: the idea "that there is, inside the
cranium, perhaps as many as a hundred different kinds of computers, each with a somewhat different
basic architecture", which specialize in different tasks and communicate, though perhaps only crudely.
Minsky considers our conscious minds to be higher-level executives, which don't really understand the
inner workings of the subcomponents but rather select "simple names from menu-lists of symbols which
appear, from time to time, upon our mental screen-displays." Tying this back to virtual reality, Minsky
suggests that "we, ourselves, already exist as processes imprisoned in machines inside machines! Our
mental worlds are already filled with wondrous, magical, symbol–signs, which add to every thing we 'see'
its ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’."[2]

Reception
In 2001, The New York Times declared that Vinge's depiction of "a world rife with pseudonymous
characters and other elements of online life that now seem almost ho-hum" had been "prophetic",[3]
while Kirkus Reviews called it "still compelling".[4] Strange Horizons called it a "landmark".[5]

See also
Simulated Reality
Neuromancer
Snow Crash

References
1. True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier review (http://www.publishersweekly.com/
978-0-312-86207-7), Publishers Weekly, December 24, 2001

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2. Minsky, Marvin. "Afterword to Vernor Vinge's novel, "True Names" " (https://web.media.mit.edu/~mins
ky/papers/TrueNames.Afterword.html). Retrieved 24 October 2014.
3. A Scientist's Art: Computer Fiction (https://web.archive.org/web/20190519184707/https://www.nytime
s.com/2001/08/02/technology/a-scientist-s-art-computer-fiction.html), by Katie Hafner, in The New
York Times; published August 2, 2001; retrieved May 19, 2019
4. TRUE NAMES and The Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re
views/vernor-vinge/true-names/), reviewed at Kirkus Reviews; published November 1, 2001;
archived online May 20, 2010; retrieved May 19, 2019
5. Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/rainbows-end-by-ver
nor-vinge/), reviewed by Colin Harvey, at Strange Horizons; published June 5, 2006; retrieved May
19, 2019

External links
True Names (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?14225) title listing at the Internet Speculative
Fiction Database

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This page was last edited on 13 May 2020, at 04:21 (UTC).

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