Book Description
The Peace War is quintessential hard-science adventure. The Peace Authority conquered the world with a weapon that never should have been a weapon--the "bobble," a spherical force-field impenetrable by any force known to mankind. Encasing governmental installations and military bases in bobbles, the Authority becomes virtually omnipotent. But they've never caught Paul Hoehler, the maverick who invented the technology, and who has been working quietly for decades to develop a way to defeat the Authority. With the help of an underground network of determined, independent scientists and a teenager who may be the apprentice genius he's needed for so long, he will shake the world, in the fast-paced hard-science thriller that garnered Vinge the first of his four Hugo nominations for best novel.



From the Inside Flap
After the World Ends

Fifty years before, the "Peace Authority" took control of governments worldwide with a radically different weapon, the "bobbler," which encased its targets within an impenetrable force field, rendering resistance impotent. After the decimation caused by severe plagues, civilization fell into a semifeudal state, and all high technology was banned.

But Paul Naismith, inventor of the bobbler, has never given up hope, and having hidden from the usurpers for decades, he is finally ready to lead the tinker underground against the evil he helped to create. The odds against them seem impossibly long. Nothing has been able to defeat the Peace Authority's bobbler.

Until now . . .

"Combines the tautness of a political thriller with strong characterizations. A suspenseful story."
--Library Journal

"Conveys the excitement of a conceptual breakthrough as well as the gap between theory and actuality."
--Publishers Weekly

"A fascinating scientific concept worked into a colorful, carefully thought-out future."
--Locus



About the Author
Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin and raised in Central Michigan, science fiction writer Vernor Vinge is the son of geographers. Fascinated by science and particularly computers from an early age, he has a Ph.D. in computer science, and taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University for thirty years.

He has won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and A Deepness in the Sky (1999), and for the novella "Fast Times at Fairmont High" (2001). Known for his rigorous hard-science approach to his SF, he became an iconic figure among cybernetic scientists with the publication in 1981 of his novella "True Names," which is considered a seminal, visionary work of Internet fiction.

He has also gained a great deal of attention both here and abroad for his theory of the coming machine intelligence Singularity. Sought widely as a speaker to both business and scientific groups, he lives in San Diego, California.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
After being out of print for more than a decade, one of Vernor Vinge's earliest novels is available once again. Welcome back to The Peace War, the Hugo Award–nominated 1984 classic about how scientific breakthroughs can be turned into civilization-altering weapons by unscrupulous political organizations.

When a group of researchers, led by genius mathematician Paul Hoehler, discover a way to generate "bobbles -- impenetrable, spherical force fields that can separate small areas of space from the normal universe -- a cadre of radicals at the lab site uses the technology to encapsulate important government and military installations all over the world in the name of peace. Fifty years later, the dictatorial group (known as the Peace Authority) has stopped war and mass killings; but in doing so, it has thrown civilization back centuries and has virtually wiped out scientific innovation, most of which is considered illegal. There is, however, an underground network of freethinkers and scientists known as Tinkers, who are plotting to overthrow the Peace Authority and free the millions of innocents being oppressed by the fanatical tyrants. Leading the cause is no other than Paul Hoehler, the man who discovered the bobble technology half a century earlier!

Fans of Vinge's later works -- like the shelf-bending Hugo Award–winning novels A Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky -- will delight in this visionary work, a quintessential hard science fiction tale that is just as powerful today as it was in 1984. It's a classic, pure and simple! Paul Goat Allen

FROM THE PUBLISHER