Rating: 
Summary: One of the best Sci-Fi books I've ever read!
Review: I've been reading and enjoying sci-fi books since I was little, and this book is easily one of the top 5 sci-fi books I ever read in my life! I highly recommend it to both sci-fi genre veterans and neophytes. You won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: As good the 4th time as the 1st.
Review: I've read ADitS 4 times, and it was as good the 4th time as it was the first. The main reason for this is the same as why I used to like the Firesign Theater's albums -- on subsequent perusals, I found things I had missed previously, though of course I also enjoyed the melodrama, the high tech, the cool aliens, and the strangeness of the far future. But what sets this tale aside from more run-of-the-mill sf is its depth -- even the title itself can be taken more than one way. The multifacetedness of language (and perhaps of reality itself) can be taken as a central theme of the book. More directly, the story is about steganography -- it itself is an exercise in that art. The best science fiction usually is. After four readings, I have come to the conclusion that A Deepness in the Sky is one of the 5 or 10 best science fiction novels of the 20th century. I eagerly await Dr. Vinge's next book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good plot twists, but needs an editor
Review: Are there no editors left in New York publishing houses? Vinge is a good writer, with capable characterization and a couple of good plot twists up his sleeve, but this novel is sloppy. He desperately needs an editor to help him trim this behemoth down to size. On the one hand, I was drawn into this (overcomplicated) plot by his intriguing depiction of the Spiders; on the other hand, the climax went on *forever*, with layer upon layer of subplot and false endings. The hard science was above average: I was disappointed to learn nothing new about the OnOff star, but was gratified to have Vinge's expertise in networking on display at every turn. His use of humans as nodes in a network was both innovative and horrifying. The soft science was weak: the Spiders are just another human civilization, with very few traits that make them different from us. In the end, that is one of the supports for his major plot twist, but it feels more than a little contrived. Altogether, it was a satisfying read, better than many I've read lately, but left me feeling as though I'd eaten too big a meal.
Rating:
Summary: An engaging epic, well worth the read
Review: A Deepness in the Sky tells a compelling story that spans decades. At the same time it is both epic in scope and a well-focused tale; the story centers around one alien world and the remnant of two fleets that have traveled light years to reach it. Vernor Vinge is very careful with his science, reinforcing the incredible distance between the stars and thus creating real tension when the survivors must rely on themselves and the inhabitants of the planet they've come to exploit.Vinge draws his characters well. The good guys are not without flaw and the bad guys are not without merit, and all the main characters have a certain poignancy about them. Each chapter tends to switch the viewpoint character, to good effect. Given the sheer number of characters, I would have liked to see more of some of them, despite the already hefty size of the novel. The ending of the story did not completely satisfy me. One half of the resolution the reader learns fairly early; the other seems to come out of nowhere. Despite Vinge's careful explanation of this latter half after the fact, I feel that he could have done more to build up to it. (Going into the ending, there didn't seem to be very many loose ends, but then a twists comes along that's almost completely unexpected.) This is likely to be a matter of personal preference, though. On the whole, A Deepness in the Sky is full of ideas and powerfully told. Definitely recommended.
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Summary: fantasy in a space setting
Review: Since the fantasy I've read lately has been uninspiring with one or two exceptions, I thought I'd switch to science fiction, even though I generally dislike hard sf. However, I must say this book really won me over, although I was sorry it was sf and kept thinking it should have been a fantasy. Why? Well, so many of the characters are straight from fantasy novels. There is a brilliant, enslaved linguist who is compared at one point to an enchanted princess, there is a prince-in-exile hero figure who saves the good guys (Qeng Ho) against the evil Emergents. The Emergents have an evil tyrannical leader who is very much a dark lord type. Even though most of the novel takes place in a fleet of spaceships and on an alien planet, you get a real sense of epic through flashbacks. I loved the alien spiders, who felt more human than alien, and reminded me of fantasy elves or trolls - part human, part strange. Even if you don't like sf, you will probably like this one if you like fantasy. I also liked the fact that Vinge took on interesting ideas about free will, slavery, and what it means to be human. My only complaint is that it was a bit too long for the story.
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad, but a bit overrated
Review: I had a tough time with this book. I liked the story and most of the characters, Pham Nuwen, Ezr, and Sherkaner Underhill. I thought the idea of a world that orbited a sun that had an "off-time" was a cool idea as well. The best Science Fiction is supposed to give the reader a sense-of-wonder and this book worked in that aspect with the divergent cultures and alien world while illustrating humanity in the alien situations. I did have a tough time realizing that the Spiders were the Spiders for the first couple hundred pages. They acted VERY human and I do believe that was deliberate. The names of the Spider characters even sounded human and even had a place that they called Princeton. Like I said this was probably intentional, to illustrate how similar the Spider culture was/is to human culture. I just thought there could have been a better or easier way to draw the line between the Spider culture and Human cultures in the beginning of the novel. The other aspect I thought was difficult was the way time was measured, in KSeconds. All time, hours, days and weeks were converted to this Kilosecond measurement, and I found it more of an annoying distraction than anything. Overall, the story was good, but the two aspects I illustrated above-my uncertainty over the Spider culture and the Time measurement were too much of a distraction to enjoy the story to its fullest.
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Summary: Deep in Vernor's imagination
Review: I just finished reading, this, the HUGO award winner for yr. 2000. So far, Mr. Vinge hasn't disappointed me with any of his books. His latest is a masterpiece. After reading "A Fire Upon the Deep" I was interested very much in this man called Pham Nuwen and his exploits BEFORE the "Old One" from the beyond put him together and gave him "godshatter". But that was in a different book. In the next Vinge book I expected to read more about the life of Pham Nuwen and how he came to be. At the beginning I was a little disappointed, but when the Pham Nuwen character started his rise to the top to not only save himself, and the Qeng Ho, but save those mysterious "Spiders". And I was completely amazed at the characterizations of the spiders, a wholly alien culture, but very well rendered for human beings to understand. We saw them through their eyes, NOT our eyes, and this simple, creative ploy by Vernor was enough to elevate this story for me, especially when we finally see them through Human Eyes! But finally, the story of Pham Nuwen, his rise from medieval Prince and his almost defeat at Brisco Gap is marvelous. And although I would have preferred a full book about this story, I would never have enjoyed the insights into Pham's character if the story was not told in Pham's future, looking back on it. A very enjoyable read, good enough to stay up all night to finish!
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Summary: Vinge and subtle details
Review: "Queng Ho": when I first encountered this in AFutD, my first guess was that it was inspired by "Cheng Ho", the famous Chinese admiral of the 1400s who led many expeditions on long voyages, with naval technology far in advance of those he visited. This may be coincidence, given the number of Vietnames-sounding names, but note that "Q" and "Ch" are English representations of fairly similar Chinese sounds. Programming-archaeologist: this was a great term that resonates with many software professionals. That current code might still be in use 5000 years from now may be horrifying, but wouldn't surprise me, as code often lives on far longer than one would expect. [I was astonised to find that code I'd written around 1970 was still being used in 2000.] Jan 1, 1970: although UNIX's existing 32-bit time/date stamps run out in 2038, there is a relatively straightforward upgrade to 64-bit timestamps that easily lasts billions of years. Vinge corectly alludes to the complex "frame corrections", i.e., of course it is very complicated to convert any idea of universal time to local time, even on Earth, much less in relativistic starships. It is not at all unreasonable to think that some timing mechanism persists for thousands of years (we have some like that already), especially with distributed systems that want to use time-synchronization algorithms. Of course, a serious nit might be to expect the epoch-date to be taken from UNIX rather than Microsoft. :-) Localizors: the predecessors of these are of course, a current topic of serious computer architecture research.... Conclusion: Vinge often peppers his books with subtle details, including very current computing technology research. The network postings in AFutD were hilarious in their satire of sequences I've seen posted on Usenet. Vinge does one of the best jobs among SF authors of incorporating current computing technology and extrapolating it believably.
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Summary: avid sci fi reader
Review: I have read sci fi for over fifty years. This book was long and tedious. The characters were boring and the aliens were like something out of a childrens book.There was some good ideas in the book but failed to hold my interest.Save your time and money. If you want really great science fiction, try Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure. My alltime favorite.
Rating: 
Summary: Reaching but not quite touching...
Review: How do I do justice to this book in a short review? First, the good points, and there are many. The concept of Focus -- 10! I am forever changed after obtaining this concept from Vinge: thanks! The OnOff star and Spider World -- 8. The Qeng Ho -- 9.5. Pham Nuwen -- 8. The Emergents - 2.5: why do I keep seeing shades of the House Harkonnen here? The Qeng Ho and Emergents don't really seem different races; different political parties maybe. The many great digs at software as an "engineering" discipline when it is in fact a cosmic mess in the making (shades of "The Mythical Man-Month") -- 8.5: now where did the satire on Bill Gates go? :) The trouble with reviewing the book is that the author has so many great ideas he doesn't seem to have the power to deal with to a satisfying resolution. For instance, he harps on how one shouldn't underestimate the ability of Focus to make the Focused loyal to their masters, then, ahem, you have to read to the ending to see how he discards it to give us a "surprise ending". Similarly, the realization that there never will be any "warp drives", or any "artificial intelligence", yet his acceptance of ramscoops, which go against too many known laws of physics to be worth more than the few novels they engendered already. The spider people: here he seems to have hit his head on his own limits. He tries to beg his own question, so to speak, of how horrible creatures that humans instinctively cringe at can develop higher intelligence, even love and morality, and still enjoy "cold sucks", with a "trick" that some may swallow, but for me it just left me wanting a better, more imaginative author to drive the "ramscoop" of the novel into my psyche. The one-dimensionality of the spider world was also disappointing. Are humans alone in having "good" and "bad" guys? Why wouldn't the spiders adopt Focus to their own ends? For that matter, why wouldn't certain unscrupulous Qeng Ho? Does Pham Nuwen tell them all what to do? Nuwen, also, doesn't quite cut it as a hero; while I tried, I couldn't quite care about him, nor, for that matter, any of the characters of any species. When the nukes were flying, I really didn't care if they all got vaporized, and I can't imagine anybody else who would either, including the author: the plot was all we cared to survive. I also couldn't understand how the OnOff star was essential to the evolution of sapience in spiders rather than, for instance, woolly mammoths. The Epilogue attempted, I think, to put the novel into a grander space frame, but to me it only destroyed the last illusion that the fictional world was real: the idea that "superbeings" left "all this" long ago for the human Qeng Ho to stumble onto, frankly, sucked eggplant. Still, this is a novel that provokes deep thoughts. If only the author had spent less energy on his academic career and more on his novelist career, he might have punched-through to the latent novel that was "in there" somewhere... I give it 4 out of 5 stars.
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