A Fire Upon The Deep

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of the imagination
Review: Two orphaned children possess the key to defeating the planet-consuming Blight in this sweeping space opera by Vernor Vinge. Johanna and Jefri Olsndot each find themselves alone on a medieval world populated by pack-minded, dog-like beings, where life is cheap and the key to power lies in undermining the opposition. Jefri's desperate calls for help are answered by Ravna and Phem (a long dead spacefarer who was re-animated by one of the seemingly god-like Powers), who with two alien Skroderiders (half slug, half machine) flee the Blight's destruction to try and save Jefri and the galaxy.

With a wondrous variety of really different alien beings, and a unique cosmology that is itself a significant part of the story, this is one of the most imaginative sci-fi novels in decades. Suspenseful, but packed with action as well, the threads of the various subplots keep readers attention even as the main overall plot seems to hang suspended for much of the book. Who will betray whom, among the complex sets of forces all seemingly at odds with each other?

Still, there are some weaknesses, perhaps the most serious of which is the stupefying pall of death that hangs over the novel. Not only are entire civilizations wiped out (including one character's home), but some of the story's principals, whom we've grown to love and care about over the course of the book, are also killed outright. As such, this book is probably too intense (not to mention a tad too complicated) for young teens. For adults, it's possible that some will feel that the pieces all fall into place a little too easily at the end. After the long build up (several hundred pages) of backstabbing, distrust, double-dealing, and planned betrayals, things actually unravel pretty quickly, but not necessarily in a way that all readers will approve. All of which is not to take anything (or at least very much) away from Vinge's achievement, which is a brilliantly conceived cosmos of varying physical laws that gives rise to a bewildering variety of intelligences, some few of which are human and/or realistic enough to make us care about their fates.

Rating:
Summary: ZOINKS!!!!
Review: Fact: Vinge is a computer scientist
Result: His characterization is his weakest point, but the ideas he presents are wonderfully expressed and worthy of all the awards this book has garnered.

Fact: This is a space opera through and through
Result: Prepare to be whisked all over the darn galaxy, and be sure to bring your camera as you will meet some REALLY interesting alien species (including the skrode riders, surely one of the most ingeniuous creations i have met in my 20+ years reading SF.

Fact: This is hard SF at its very best
Result: If you're into psychological or social SF, then this book will seem too "rigid" for you...the cold seep of techno-worship permeates every page.

Fact: This book is a great intro to the pre-quel, A Deepness in the Sky, which (believe it or not), is actually better in many cases than aFUtD.
Result: you can read one or the other book first, but be sure to read both because stories like these come only a few times every decade (esp since Vinge is one heck of a slow writer).

Rating:
Summary: This is true sci fi
Review: I was impressed with the cosmological inventiveness of the author. Pham Nuwen is reincarnated or reconstructed from a wreck of human body parts from starfarers in some ancient past in slow time. Pham is inhabited by a "Power" who animates his actions and reactions and has buried within his mental processes a program that will somehow save the world. In the preceeding spider novel "A Deepness in the Sky" Pham was a likeable, bluff and gruff ancient starfarer rescued and reanimated by the Queq Ho in that story so it was a bit of a problem to believe him as a young, virile humanoid character in this saga. But then, that is one of the delicious challenges of sci fi - suspending one's point of reference - and this book was worth the effort.

Jefri and Johanna are orphaned children from a starship that crash landed on an alien planet and are caught in an alien net of political and private dynastic warfare. They have no adult referent apart from the alien creatures whom they called "tines" who had killed their parents and captured these two children. They are thrust unwillingly into adult roles and 8 year old Jefri also has the added responsibility for the care and maintenance of 127 other children still suspended in cold stasis on the starship all throughout the tines' warfare. The thought of this was especially eerie. The novel invites the reader to explore philosophical issues of xenophobia, helplessness, reincarnation and nanomedicine as well as offering up a stunning chase across the universe by human hating zealots bent on destroying the last human to a man because they believe that the humans had reanimated a weapon of mass destruction from an ancient computer proram. It also invites the reader to explore the devastation and horror wrought by computer viruses designed by an unknown technological society far advanced of what we can imagine today. This book is chilling in many ways. An excellent read.

Rating:
Summary: Good far-term hard Science Fiction, for advanced readers
Review: I'd heard about this book for years before finally picking it up. I am a selective fiction reader and generally try to stick with hard SF. Niven ranks as my all-time SF favorite, but Vinge has impressed me with this book (as well as with its prequel).

Set tens of thousands of years into the far future, A Fire Upon The Deep is an engaging yarn of human survival amidst an alien caste system that dates back billions of years. At the center of the tale is the concept of the galactic Zones: regions of the galaxy wherein the laws of physics, technology, and even thought, change depending on your proximity to the core. The farther out you are from the core, the better.

Earth and most of humanity are lost to the past, mired forever in the Slowness closer to the core, where faster than light travel and really advanced technology is impossible. One plucky group of humans, whose origins are murky at best, have managed to make it to the Beyond--a fertile Zone far from the core in which both advanced technology and FTL travel are abundant--and establish themselves there amongst a vast community of other sentient beings. These humans and most other Beyonders are overshadowed still by the Powers from the Transcend, a Zone above even the Beyond where potential and technology are nearly limitless. The Powers are a group of god-like sentient superbeings that may at one time have been dwellers in the Beyond that evolved to their current state.

When an expedition of Beyond humans unearths an impossibly ancient computer archive of Transcend origins, they unwittingly unleash a Superpower that threatens to consume both the Beyond and the Transcend, killing or satanically "possessing" all in its path. Even other Powers.

To find out what else happens, you'll just have to read the book!

Vinge certainly keeps the Hard in this hard SF story. A college professor in his own right, Vinge's grasp of the sciences seems dizzying at times. Therefor I would not recommend this book for younger readers or for readers who prefer media related fiction like Star Wars or Star Trek. But if you think you're ready to graduate to the next level in your SF reading, I would highly recommend this book. Even I found it a satisfying challenge, and I've been reading hard SF since my first year in college. Vinge gloriously blends some gripping storytelling with compelling and believable science. I got so caught up in it that I literally spent an entire day reading from the middle chapters until the end.

It was that good.

Rating:
Summary: Inventive and engaging
Review: A really impressive science fiction book which posits a universe made up of zones of different speed which affect the development of the races in those zones. When humans begin to explore an ancient archive, they accidentally let a very old scourge loose upon the galaxy and only a child marooned on a distant medieval planet close to the slow zone can save the worlds threatened by the being that is released.

_A Fire Upon the Deep_ contains some of the best aliens that I've seen in science fiction. They have a complete and full feel and explore both possible differences and similarities in possible sentient races. If there was a flaw for me, it was that the main character-- a human information manager named Ravna, was significantly less well-developed than the fanciful races that surround her. Perhaps its a minor thing to complain about, but it felt a little strange to me how opaque she seemed, given how important she was to the rest of the book.

Deserves the praise that it's received.

Rating:
Summary: Galactic Folktale...
Review: Just finished the sci-fi novel A FIRE UPON THE DEEP by Vernor Vinge.

So many layers going on all at once -- somehow pulling closer to each other as the book progressed. What a fantastic piece of thought and imagination -- and nothing ever got so complicated that I felt I needed to be an engineer to follow the science/space theory. The ideas of Transendence, the layers of space, were very nicely laid out.

So many cool races, so many histories, so many things that had happened and yet to come. It reminded me - with the children - of Philip Pullman's stories - between world's, between people.

Looking forward to reading the "prequel" of sorts A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY.

Rating:
Summary: A Pinnacle
Review: I've been reading science fiction for 40 years, and I say 'A Fire upon the Deep' is a work of genius, completely engrossing and packed with ideas and action. One of the top 5 SF books I've ever read.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Cosmology; Great Characters; Good Story
Review: I wouldn't call this the perfect SF novel- For that, read Dune; but, Vinge wonderfully suceeds where so many other SF authors fail. He creates a compelling universe where one can get totally immersed and dwell on the possibilites posited by the author long after reading the story itself. Vinge's Zones of Thought are a wholly original concept, although a bit of a stretch. I can't remember another SF book I've read where a totally alien race- the Tines - are so well developed. The pack mind concept is not entirely new, but the depth of character development of the individual Tines, and how they evolved over time is indeed a rarity. I truly enjoyed Pham's character as well, and plan on reading "A Deepness in the Sky" just to get more of him.
The only annoyance (albeit a very small one) about this book is "the Net of A Million Lies". Vinge (being a Comp Sci professor) assumes that he can extrapolate the use of Newsgroups from the early days of the internet into the Eons old, galaxy wide "Known Net". Millions of life forms and civilizations use postings on these Newsgroups as their primary method of communication and sharing information. Granted this novel was written before the World Wide Web, etc. but I think Vinge could have have used his boundless imagination to give us something a bit more imaginative. Anyway, this book is well worth the time; I would go so far as to say that it is a must read for any fan of hard SF.

Rating:
Summary: Good writing, good story, interesting universe
Review: "A Fire Upon the Deep" develops themes that Vinge first explored in a novelette called "The Blabber." I love this particular universe for a couple of reasons. First, it features aliens with multi-bodied, composite personalities that change with membership in the group "ego," but which do NOT result in a slavish hive culture like the Borg of Star Trek. These creatures -- the Tines -- nicely turn the concept of "self" inside out. Second, the universe in this book challenges a fundamental notion of modern physics: namely, that the physical "laws" or regularities demonstrated to be reliably true in our local stellar neighborhood must necessarily hold true throughout the entire galaxy.

Personally, I'm willing to believe that the fundamental structure and dynamics of spacetime are essentially similar across our local galactic cluster, perhaps, but no further. But Vinge dares more for the sake of a good yarn. He posits that spacetime varies structurally and dynamically within our OWN galaxy. The premise works like this. As space flattens with the relative absence of mass toward the edge of our galaxy, the speed-of-light barrier to travel no longer holds, anti-gravity devices become possible, and the alien societies that dwell in those realms live lives that smack of magic -- so long as they STAY in those remote regions. Their advanced technologies do not work closer to the galactic core. The Earth, being located more-or-less midway between the edge and the center of the galaxy, occupies the "slow zone," where the speed of light remains an absolute and anti-gravity is impossible. Closer in to the galactic center, Vinge imagines that information itself becomes distorted by the density of mass and the resulting intense warp of spacetime. As you approach the center, computer systems no longer function and, deeper in to the galactic core, intelligence itself becomes impossible. Vinge also images a sort of galactic "weather" that affects the boundaries between these zones. Fuzzy and changeable to begin with, the zones swell and retreat and storm like currents or tides or whirlpools in the ocean.

So, how does Vinge make a whopping good story out of all this? By inventing aliens in all three zones, moving human colonists into the borderland between the "slow zone" and the fast-moving upper/outer galaxy, motivating different characters to engage in devious plotting both economic and political in nature, and stirring the mixture well with the myth of the dying and resurrecting hero/god. Then he sets a couple of bright, good-hearted kids in the middle of a scary, imperfect world and turns them loose.

Granted, the story is space opera -- but it is well-written and page-turning space opera. The characters are well drawn, the universe is fun to play with, and the book is a great read.

I also recommend the book's sequel, "A Deepness in the Sky."

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful and exciting
Review: It's a compelling read, which is a good thing because the concepts could be very dry in the hands of a lesser writer.

Vinge explores the organization of intelligence: single-organism (like yourself), several organism (animals that have sentient intelligence only when they form a joint personality), machine intelligence, godly intelligence, et cetera. Few books make it so much fun to think about such basic philosophical issues. (And if you think that these issues won't affect us in the years ahead, then when you're done with the novel check out the essay that will come up under Vinge's name on Google.)

That being said, I could see giving the book only 4 stars. Almost all of the cool concepts are introduced in the first 200 pages. The remaining 400 pages are 'just' the conclusion to a memorable space opera.

Included in the book are some very funny extrapolations/send-ups of early-90s newsgroups.