Rating: 
Summary: The Best of the Best
Review: A Deepness in the Sky surpasses A Fire Upon the Deep (And I loved AFUtD) because of the intense character development. You lived lifetimes with these characters and came to deeply care for or deeply despise them. I find Vinge's view of the future to be far from pessimistic. In fact, I feel he tries to convey hope. The human race has destroyed itself many times yet has continued to perservere and reinvent itself. And what a better example to follow than the Spiders of Arachna. They bettered themselves after each dark period. There are always visionaries (Sherkaner Underhill) who can lead the people/spiders to a higher quality of life.
Rating: 
Summary: An Engrossing Story
Review: I am an avid science fiction reader. I found this to be a very engrossing story. It was hard to put the book down. My only complaint is that some of the major characters were one dimensional and one of them had a pretty rapid, not to well justified change in direction. A well thought out, well paced, unpredictable story. I recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Hugo award winning sequel to a Hugo winning classic
Review: A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY was selected as the 2000 Hugo Award winner for best SF Novel!My statement in the title is a bit inaccurate however, since Deepness is really more of a prequel than a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, the (tied) Hugo Award winning novel for 1993. This time, however, Vinge won the Hugo in a standalone fashion, and deservedly so. Thematically it is very different than its predecessor...as other reviews have said, it is definitely NOT space Opera. It's a first contact novel, an exploration of varieties of humanity...its science fiction at its best. A review of one of Vinge's novels predicted that he might win the Nobel Prize for Literature someday. (unprecedented for a SF writer). With novels like A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY, I can believe it possible.
Rating:
Summary: PROMETHEUS Award Winner!!
Review: This excellent work was just selected as this year's winner of the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Science Fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary!
Review: If Neal Stephenson hadn't published a novel this year I'd have no doubts whatsoever about which book will win the Hugo: It would be A Deepness in the Sky without question. As it is, I suspect this may be one of those years they grant a tie, because this is easily one of the five best SF books I have read in as many years. Based on the Universe created in Vinge's first Hugo winner - A Fire Upon the Deep - A Deepness in the Sky is really a prequel. The early adventures of one central character from Fire are detailed - all taking place some 30,000 years or so earlier. And we really get two stories for one here as Vinge seamlessly incorporates the events of Pham's antecedent youth (singlehandedly creating an interstellar empire) with the "present day" difficulties in which he finds himself embroiled while joining in on an investigation to a mysterious planet that revolves around a star with very unusual properties. While there, they come into a conflict with another human society with some nefarious - but fascinating - tendencies. Either Pham's decades-long quest to overthrow them or his lifelong work creating an intrestellar trading society would be enough plot to satisfy most writers. But not Vinge, as those are just two of several interconnected plotlines in a dense, page-turning festival of creativity. Fans of Vinge's previous work will, of course, expect some well-drawn and wildly imaginative aliens and the book satisfies in this respect as well. The planet-bound, arachnoid race the humans are watching have been imbued by Vinge with a truly unique culture. The nature and culture of the arachnoids - in the tradition of all the very best SF - flows naturally, logically and gracefully from the environemnt in which they exist - an environment not quite like any other in my experience with the genre. Planetside they have their own subplots and political intrigues. Again, whereas these alone would be enough to sustain a novel for lesser writers, here they are merely perfectly integrated apsects of the larger, epic story. Neither does he skimp on characterization. Human or alien every important character is exquisitely drawn and - almost to a man - interesting to know. The long and the short of it is you should buy this book! It is truly extraordinary. I personally recommend reading A Fire Upon the Deep first, but you can understand one without the other, or read them in either order and still enjoy them - I just think the order they were written in is best.
Rating:
Summary: Sci-Fi Literature
Review: A taut and subtle epic in what has become true Vinge style. And it is the subtlety with which the events are played out that make this a vintage story. I have anxiously awaited Vinge's next book since reading his masterpiece A Fire Upon the Deep. This work lacks some of the heartwarming characters that were in that masterpiece. There is still heart in this work but the overlaying theme is true grit, hard sci-fi, and incredible treachery. The enemy was never so clearly defined as the Emergents came to be. Here there were enemy's, heroes, and innocents; the usual ingredients that make Vinge's works so breathtaking, and will no doubt garner him another Hugo. Like his previous work, there is some labor involved in reading Vinge. His crafting is so subtle to be painstaking. But the effect is incredible and the conclusion well worth the labor. Vinge easily embarrasses nearly every writer in his genre while teaching writers of any genre a trick or two. I almost thought that the conclusion of this work had a Hollywood type ending. How could all these people come out of this alive? But the more I thought of this, and other more intricate parts of the novel, the more it became clear that all was thought out to every i dotted and every t crossed. The ending is probably appropriate for the amount of foreplay that went in to building it up so. I am in awe with Vinge's hand at subtlety, duplicity, and terror in its most downplayed form. I think this book had strengths in areas where his prior piece did not attempt to go too far with, yet for pure enjoyment value I think Fire was a superior piece. Both are thinking readers' stories but Deepness goes to an incredible extreme, and its vastness makes it almost a study. It's not often where you get a seamless blending of plot and character. Vinge has mastered both well. His ability to take it one step further, with both of his recent works, by making his alien characters so real, so alien, and yet, so human-like. Like his dogs in Fire, his Spiders in Deepness are compelling, interesting, fascinating, and so soulful they are endearing. Vinge has become to science fiction what Clavell is to the Asian genre: a wonderful storyteller. The question becomes, will Vinge get boring in trying to tie everything together into a collection of novels that read as one saga? Or will he just get boring? I hope not. He is much too talented to have wasted words. Can Vinge craft a third masterpiece? He is in a somewhat stilted genre. Science fiction has never shared the same respect as mainstream literature or even mystery. This is something that will work in his favor. He is less likely to become tiresome as some literary writers end up being. My only sadness is that it will be some years before Vinge has composed his next piece and sometimes that is just too long.
Rating:
Summary: My Vote For Hugo Award 2000
Review: Vernor Vinge had done it again! __A Deepness in the Sky__ is an epic SF novel with complex and interesting characters. The book provides intrigue, "history," a fascinating alien race, Not so Evil versus Evil (it would be hard to call the trader race and Pham "good") and a complex love triangle -- not to mention great plotting and speculation. A classic.
Rating:
Summary: The Alienness of Humans, the Humanity of Aliens
Review: The aspect I found the most fascinating about this novel was how Vinge manages to make the reader identify with the aliens almost more than with the humans. His central insight seems to be that if your life spans thousands of years of planetary time and hundreds of planets, you're bound to have a very different outlook on life than planet-bound, real-time beings. In contrast, the aliens, being planet-bound and gifted with a quite limited lifespan, seem very human in their intensity to accomplish something in their lifetime. The book is an excellent read, but it does seem a bit too long. I suspect that I would have given it 5 stars if it had been about 200 pages shorter.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Science Fiction
Review: This is an excellent book, with realistic characters set in a distant future. The universe that Vinge crafts is a believable one, dealing with many of the issues commonly present in science fiction(Empire, travel through space), but dealing with them in a way different from most. The cultures are crafted and controlled in a universe where interstellar empire is next to impossible, where faster than light has not been achieved. The implications of not having discovered that technology are dealt with in depth. This book also introduces a unique culture in the Qeng Ho, a group of interstellar traders that manage to maintain a coherent culture. These things alone would make me want to pick the book up, take a spin around a universe not so different from our own, yet unique in its own ways. But they are not what make the book good. What makes the book good are its struggles with concepts like democracy and slavery and machines versus humans, its action sequences and its characters that are real and developed enough that you will find yourself actually caring about them(I found myself liking the alien 'spiders' with their strange culture more than I liked many of the human characters - it takes a lot of skill to make aliens understandable and believable as people). The drama and action sucked me in, and the characters kept me reading.
Rating:
Summary: "Traditional" Science Fiction Doesn't Get Much Better
Review: This is, technically, a prequel to A FIRE UPON THE DEEP (a magnificent but possibly less involving book). If you haven't read AFUtD, I suggest that you do so--but only because it is a very fine book, not because it is necessary in order to enjoy A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY. Vinge's talent for grand scope and the orchestration of events is at its best here--over the years, Vinge has improved about as much as any writer I can think of, and he started as a fairly talented storyteller. I can't tell you the best things about this book; there are surprises and twists here that are meticulously established but stunning when they come nonetheless. Vinge's aliens are very nicely realized and contain a miniature homage to science fiction in disguise, I believe. His talent for characterization has improved to the point that he can make a fairly abstract moral dilemma (and goals that at first glance seem megalomanical) gripping and intense--in a dazzling array of scientific pyrotechnics and political machinations he makes a single man's struggle for his soul the compelling center of the action, and it isn't the (too often see) false human interest inserted to keep the non-techophiles reading. All in all, A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY is one of the year's best science fiction novels, and probably destined to become an enduring classic of the genre.
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