The novel “Tatja Grimm’s World” by Vernor Vinge was published for the first time in 1987.

Tatja Grimm is a girl from a savage tribe. When she meets the ship Tarulle, which publishes the magazine “Fantasie”, she gets adopted by its editors. She can’t speak their language but soon shows her intelligence and gets involved in their activities.

The magazine “Fantasie” has been spreading fantastic tales for centuries but its editors are trying to use it also to provide readers with scientific knowledge. However, for Tatja Grimm traveling on the Tarulle is only one way to learn more about the people who inhabit the various islands because the girl has much more ambitious plans.

In 1968, Vernor Vinge wrote the novella “Grimm’s Story”. The following year he added another part to obtain the novel “Grimm’s World”. The novel was further expanded to obtain the current version by adding a new initial story, also published under the title “The Barbarian Princess” in the anthology “The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge”.

Tatja Grimm’s adventures are set on Tu, a planet very poor in metals whose surface is covered by oceans with various islands scattered within them inhabited by populations of humans. Because of these limitations, after several centuries the technological level on the planet is pre-industrial.

In this situation, Tatja Grimm is different from the others with her great intelligence and her insatiable curiosity. She grew up in a savage tribe but looks elsewhere for answers to her many questions and is found by the crew of the ship Tarulle, traveling in the seas of the planet to spread the magazine “Fantasie”.

The (perhaps) final version of this work is formed by three stories set a few years away from each other. In the first, a slightly different version of the story “The Princess Barbara”, Tatja Grimm joins the “family” of the magazine “Fantasie” and gets involved in its editors’ activities.

This is the story written most recently by Vernor Vinge and is the one I liked the most. Initially, it’s the history of the editorial staff of “Fantasie” because Tatja Grimm can’t speak their language and therefore can’t communicate with them but the girl becomes important in the story.

What I found particularly interesting in this story is the problem of the spreading of scientific knowledge on a planet like Tu. “Fantasie” is more or less the equivalent of a science fiction magazine and in the course of their journeys its authors and editors have to deal with local superstitions.

The central story of “Tatja Grimm’s World” is the original one, in which Tatja mastered the language of the editors of “Fantasie” and has taken an important position on Tarulle. It’s the story that draws out the girl’s true plans as she can take advantage of her superior intelligence. In the end, it shows her ambitions’ scope.

The last part of “Tatja Grimm’s World”, which in the final version occupies about half of the novel, is the one in which Tatja Grimm carries out her plans. It also allows Vernor Vinge to tell a bit of the planet’s history, allowing us to understand the reasons for the situation of the people living there.

The second and the third part of “Tatja Grimm’s World” are the most adventurous. In my opinion they’re enjoyable but not the best written by Vernor Vinge. There are intriguing ideas but probably he needed to develop them further to exploit them to their fullest. The author wrote these parts in the early years of his career but he started giving his best only in later years with his real novels.

The characters aren’t developed very much, also because Tatja Grimm quickly becomes the dominant one. The pace is fast in almost all the stories with a lot of action, various twists and dramatic events that create tension so even when there are dialogues between characters the story manages to avoid getting boring.

In my opinion, “Tatja Grimm’s World” is a novel a bit uneven but overall pretty good and enjoyable. It has some food for thought but the way it’s developed ends up being mostly a planetary adventure story and consequently a rather easy reading.