statelineblues, the "Realtime" series is one of the best I have ever read. I suggess you Amazon Vinge's works and find them.
___POTENTIAL MINOR SPOLERS______
There's a short novella about the "Ungoverned Lands" which is sort of a peaceful and high-tech "L. Neil Smith Libertarian/Anarchist vision of North America" that comes after the tinkerers defeat the Peace Authority in "The Peace War". There's another "war" brewing when the more traditionaly governed nation-state of the New Mexico Republic makes a move on the Libertarian "Ungoverned Lands" of Kansas and Nebraska on a trumped-up basis.
The farmers of Kansas have contracted with a security corporation that calls itself the "Michigan State Police" taking the name of the pre-Peace War institution. And they send one "cop" to stop the New Mexican Army. Fortunately some of the wealthier and more paranoid farmers are very, very, very, well armed. LOL. He was sent more as a negotiator, as the New Mexicans are unprepared for what they're getting into...
The third part of the series, "Marroned in Realtime" deals with the aftermath of "The Singularity", the point when Humanity's technology self-reinforced at an exponential rate to reach a runaway point, and humanity either evolved into abstraction from the viewpoint of normal humans, or went extinct, whatever happened dosen't really matter, as we're not smart enough to find out.
Since the time of the Peace War, various people had been "bobbled", (think like a Larry Niven'esque stasis field) for crimes, by being attacked, or to save them selves from emergencies like crashing spaceships, or even just as an easy way to travel into the future. These people are at various states of increasingly high technology depending on how close to the singularity they got bobbled.
After popping out into an abandoned and empty earth after the singularity took place, they band together to use thier bobbles to travel forward in time and collect other bobbled survivors. Some characters from the previous books come together after being bobbled, several millions of years in the future.
The higher-tech people are very, very, high tech. They have robots, nanotech that can make anything they want, AI that can design it for them, and thier "mansions" convert into spaceships that are capable of everything from near lightspeed interstellar travel to living at the bottom of the ocean. They don't really carry weapons, as they have unobtrusive robot bodygaurds following them everywhere, able to unleash God-knows-what if trouble were to start.
Then there is a "murder". When the village "bobbles up" to freeze themselves to make a jump a few hundred years into the future to collect some other survivors that are about to un-bobble, one of the leaders is marooned by being left outside, to die a natural death surviving on her own on an Earth where evolution has changed plants and animals, and even the continents have shifted...
Very cool stuff.
Vinge's "Fire Apon the Deep", and "A Deepness In The sky" are separate, and placed in the ramscoop trader galaxy of the "Queng Ho" , but they too are some of te best SF I've ever read.
___POTENTIAL MINOR SPOLERS______
There's a short novella about the "Ungoverned Lands" which is sort of a peaceful and high-tech "L. Neil Smith Libertarian/Anarchist vision of North America" that comes after the tinkerers defeat the Peace Authority in "The Peace War". There's another "war" brewing when the more traditionaly governed nation-state of the New Mexico Republic makes a move on the Libertarian "Ungoverned Lands" of Kansas and Nebraska on a trumped-up basis.
The farmers of Kansas have contracted with a security corporation that calls itself the "Michigan State Police" taking the name of the pre-Peace War institution. And they send one "cop" to stop the New Mexican Army. Fortunately some of the wealthier and more paranoid farmers are very, very, very, well armed. LOL. He was sent more as a negotiator, as the New Mexicans are unprepared for what they're getting into...
The third part of the series, "Marroned in Realtime" deals with the aftermath of "The Singularity", the point when Humanity's technology self-reinforced at an exponential rate to reach a runaway point, and humanity either evolved into abstraction from the viewpoint of normal humans, or went extinct, whatever happened dosen't really matter, as we're not smart enough to find out.
Since the time of the Peace War, various people had been "bobbled", (think like a Larry Niven'esque stasis field) for crimes, by being attacked, or to save them selves from emergencies like crashing spaceships, or even just as an easy way to travel into the future. These people are at various states of increasingly high technology depending on how close to the singularity they got bobbled.
After popping out into an abandoned and empty earth after the singularity took place, they band together to use thier bobbles to travel forward in time and collect other bobbled survivors. Some characters from the previous books come together after being bobbled, several millions of years in the future.
The higher-tech people are very, very, high tech. They have robots, nanotech that can make anything they want, AI that can design it for them, and thier "mansions" convert into spaceships that are capable of everything from near lightspeed interstellar travel to living at the bottom of the ocean. They don't really carry weapons, as they have unobtrusive robot bodygaurds following them everywhere, able to unleash God-knows-what if trouble were to start.
Then there is a "murder". When the village "bobbles up" to freeze themselves to make a jump a few hundred years into the future to collect some other survivors that are about to un-bobble, one of the leaders is marooned by being left outside, to die a natural death surviving on her own on an Earth where evolution has changed plants and animals, and even the continents have shifted...
Very cool stuff.
Vinge's "Fire Apon the Deep", and "A Deepness In The sky" are separate, and placed in the ramscoop trader galaxy of the "Queng Ho" , but they too are some of te best SF I've ever read.