A Fire upon the Deep

This book comes highly recommended by Redditors and several "best of sf" lists. However, seeing that Vinge is a scientist I did not expect much from this book, some cool, believable sf concepts at the most. The book did not start well for me with silly names like "Wickwrackrum" popping up and a

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confusing first chapter. However, once I begin to follow the book (about 30 pages in) Vinge really surprised me with his talented authorship. He has the ability to create characters worth caring about and rooting for, some of them are not even human (love those Skroderiders). Then there is his wonderful world creation and general sf skills, he is so great at this I wonder if the author has * transcended*. The Tines are some of the most imaginative aliens I have ever read about, the details of their biology and culture are beautifully worked out; yet Vinge has managed to imbue these creatures with personalities. I haven't even gone into the cosmic plot involving singularity and the god-like Powers yet and I'm not going to because I could spend all day extolling the virtues of this book and never get anything else done.

TL;DR: This is a definite must-read for any connoisseur of quality sf!

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Very well crafted; not particularly compelling.

My reaction to reading this book in 1992. Spoilers follow.

A great book, excellently paced -- particularly riveting at the end.

While I didn’t like it quite as well as his Marooned in Realtime, the latter book didn’t have the wonderful alien Tines though. They are very well-done, well worked out

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culture of aliens: group minds with sonic communication that functions almost as telepathy, personalities that shift over time with replaced members, very bright aliens to whom crowding and sex are mindless. Replacing members in the group mind offers the scientific minded Flenser, Mr. Steel (both great villains) and Woodcarver the chance to mold their own and others’ personalities. Flenser and Steel find the opportunity for a sort of biological fascism in this, custom building personalities for the mediaeval state. However, I didn’t quite buy the premise that the Tines are held back by their inability to rationally work in close quarters. What about writing, libraries? Scientific progress doesn’t always require work at close quarters though it would to build lab apparatus and engineer things -- so maybe Vinge has a point.

Vinge has always had a fantasy element in his sf -- rationalized via superscience. His True Names had god-like powers via computer link, and fantasy worlds created via computer. Marooned in Realtime had transcedence via the unknowable singularity. Here Vinge creates the nifty conceit of the Zones of Thought -- different regions of space which gives high-tech (well nigh god-like civilizations and vaguely described entities like the Blight) worlds of faster than light travel, nanotech, and artificial intelligence and Worlds of the Unthinking Depths and Slow Zone (no AI or ftl).

I found the novel most impressive in its thematic treatment of the related themes of intelligence (and its nature as cooperative and individualis), transcendence, cooperation, and possession. Groupmind Tines compared to single mind humans compared to the linked minds of Pham Nuwen/Old One and the Greater Skroderiders. Transcendence of Tines via human contact compared to the transcendence of Pham Nuwen by the Old compared to Skrod transcendence via the Riders. Possession of dictator Steel by a schoolteacher’s soul compared to Pham Nuwen’s possession by the Old One compared to Skroderiders’ possession by the Blight. Cooperation of group mind Tines compared to humans of a vengeful fleet and Ravna.

I also liked the known Net messages, full of address, the “Where Are They Now” and “Great Secrets of Creation” Interest groups’ bizarreness, Alliance for the Defense’s genocidal propaganda, and the arrogantly detached, philosophical society for Rational Investigation. The latter first arrogantly chides people for sending messages complaining of the destruction of worlds and murder of billions. Then, in the end, pleads for a reply as the Known Net is fractured and ripped apart in the apocalypse of the Slow Zone’s expansion. In fact, this novel makes much of good from evil, evil from good. The Blight is stopped but several civilizations die when the Slow Zone expands. The evil Blight creates the noble, interesting Riders. Flenser’s evil is blunted and produces peace and his evil gives the Tine world some of its first science.

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“They sat for a time, human looking out to the sea, Rider looking he wasn't sure quite where, and a pack looking in most all directions.”

In “A Fire Upon the Deep” by Vernor Vinge

A galaxy divided into Thought Zones, in which higher and higher levels of organic and artificial intelligence can

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be achieved by moving away from the center. On the outer edge of the third zone, which is not yet inhabited by non-divine or posthuman entities, a human empire awakens a multi-billion-year-old power that then neatly begins to engulf more and more of the galaxy. Some escape, all the way to the bottom of the zone, where wolf-like creatures with a shared consciousness live in a medieval world. And this refugee ship has something to stop the evil (?) power. An expedition is launched from the top of the zone to rescue the two surviving children.

The story runs on two threads, one of which is actually a battle between two kingdoms of a fantasy world, which Vinge makes it sound crazy by starting it off with a technological competition (It is typical of the world of the book that the rapid technological development of worlds that have fallen back into the dark ages is a separate discipline at universities. But my favourite is applied theology, which deals with entities with quasi-divine power – even beyond the outer zone.) On the other thread, the topic is the preparations for the expedition, and then the increasingly exciting race. Real SF ideas are mainly in this part, and Vinge builds up very well the functioning of the entire world, the interaction of technologies, civilizations, and species.

At the beginning of the story, we get an interesting point of view. I've always loved writing that tries to portray humans from the perspective of an alien being, especially if Humans are totally different from the Aliens, not only in appearance, but also in our perception of the world.

I admit, the fantasy line rather bored me back in the day when I first read it (and for a while the SF line was also moderately interesting), but halfway through the book the story really starts to spin, and from then on there is no escape. This balances out the slightly flat first part, so overall I would say it is a very fair industrial work (4 stars).

The backstory of one of the book's characters is contained in the book “A Deepness in the Sky”, published in 1999, which is also an award-winning novel, and “Children of the Sky”, published in 2011, is the direct sequel.

Still 4 stars after all these years.

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Much of my early adolescent reading years were taken up with science fiction and fantasy, from Tolkien to Asimov. I pretty much abandoned fantasy soon thereafter, but have returned time and again to the science fiction genre, sometimes with good result and sometimes not. I would have to say this

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was a “not”.

Several years ago, after a long hiatus, I sampled several of the new generation of science fiction writers who crafted highly original, new science fiction (such works as The Windup Girl, Anathem, River of Gods and The Reality Dysfunction). At the same time, I made it a point to go back and read some of the prior winners of the Hugo Award. I must say, that while I found some good reads in the older work (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Gods Themselves), by and large I was disappointed with many of the winners (Ringworld, Gateway, Startide Rising, Paladin of Souls). In many ways, this Vernor Vinge work fell into this latter category.

While it would be a mistake to claim that there was nothing original in this story, much of it was stereotypical and hackeyed as it related to alien life forms. It is the nature of the beast to imagine alien life forms in constructs with which we are familiar, hence the almost never ending “insect” and animal like aliens that make appearances in almost every such story, this one being no exception. While I understand the difficulty in thinking outside the box in this regard, it either works or it doesn’t. A reader either “buys in” or is left wincing and shaking his head. The writer’s product is either believable or just plain silly. The Tines and Skroderiders in this work were silly.

As it relates to many stories in its genre, it was perfectly readable, but when compared to others (even from the same time period) it was mediocre at best. When compared to some of the more recent, highly original work, it suffered greatly by comparison. If this were the first science fiction book you read, you might be satisfied, but after reading dozens of others previously, you’ll find little to differentiate or recommend it.

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Zero stars.: This book, always mentioned with breathless awe on Slashdot and other geek-oriented sites that I frequent, joins a very small number of books that are so truly horrid I haven't even bothered to finish reading them. I made it about halfway through before giving up in disgust.

In a

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nutshell, this book seems to me to be what you'd get if you'd give a group of average fourth-graders the assignment to write a science fiction novel. It's poorly written and juvenile. The "plot", and I use the term loosely, is really a semi-random mechanism for connecting poorly-drawn and disjointed vignettes. The characters are the shallowest sci-fi stereotypes imaginable. The author clearly has no understanding of basic physics or astronomy and instead just makes stuff up as he goes along.

This just may be the worst book I have ever tried to read. And I've read a lot of books.

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Overall I must say that I was quite entertained. However, Vinge's writing does not completely do justice to his ideas. I've enjoyed others' prose much more. Oh, and he throws relativity right out of the window, but that's not so unexpected.

It is also worth noting that Vinge is a (now retired)

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professor of computer science at the San Diego State University. His work with computers comes out plainly in his writing from characters who code in their spare time to jargon such as "fell apart like a cheap star topology network." Some of his references are also dated by now. For example, his characters devote a large part of their time to reading newsgroups. And yes, he really means Usenet newsgroups!

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Space Opera on a grand scale, describing a galaxy richly populated with alien species - a galaxy in which humans are bit players. Most sci-fi has at least one "big idea", but this has enough of them to put other books to shame.

One of these ideas - the concept of separate "zones" in space, regions

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in which the laws of physics change substantially - serves as a usual device for allowing FTL travel and communication, while also abstracting away the unexplainable strangeness of truly superhuman intelligence.

I loved this, and will now have to go seek out more by this author.

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I've been pretty tardy getting around to this lauded novel from the early 1990s, despite my efforts in recent years to "get current" with respect to science fiction. (My Other Reader read it in 2005.) This doorstop space opera is full of great ideas, not the least of which are the premises of

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"zonology" and "applied theology." According to the first of these, important sf technologies such as faster-than-light travel and superhuman artificial intelligences are only possible in the outer reaches of the galactic volume. The second is concerned with "Powers," i.e. the results of sapient races transcending into relative omnipotence from advanced positions in the outer zone of the Beyond.

Zonological conditions facilitate a galaxy-spanning communications network, and the novel updates the larger context with bulletins in the form of news posts to this network. At that scale, the story concerns the awakening of a malefic power (the Blight), and the ensuing wars and persecutions. Humans are peripheral at best to the larger galactic polity, but because it was humans who unleashed the Blight, they are rather central to this episode.

A parallel plot concerns a backwater "medieval" world populated by pack sophonts: dog-like creatures that maintain their human-or-greater intelligence on the basis of four or more acoustically-interlinked pack members, who are each of merely high animal intelligence, without reflective consciousness. Humans fleeing the initial outbreak of the Blight chance to crash on the world of these creatures, and there is a contest among the natives for possession of the human technology that the pack factions hope to use in their ongoing rivalries and intrigues.

Ultimately, these plots converge because the crashed ship houses the "countermeasure" usable to defeat the Blight. The end of the book has very little to offer in the way of revelations or surprises, but it does provide reasonably satisfying closure to the long story. The plot is perhaps the weakest aspect of the book, while characters (particularly various non-human sophonts) are better realized, and most significant of all are the inventive concepts informing the space opera setting.

While far less imposingly styled (and commensurately more accessible) than M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract books, I felt like this earlier work had a similar grasp of the ultimately contingent quality of human culture and consciousness, even if we should transcend our solar system. Vinge has since written two more books in this fictional universe, and I will probably read them someday, but I feel no urgency about tracking them down. This one has taken a big chunk of my reading bandwidth lately!

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A truly imaginative vision, where the laws of physics change gradually the farther one is from the galactic core, underpins this saga. The familiar Vinge fascination with networks and communication plays a central role in a tale involving transcendent 'Powers', interstellar traders, ancient

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civilizations, humans, and puppies. Disparate threads involving space-faring cultures that leap light-years in the blink of an eye and a medieval world that knows only blades and arrows slowly come together as a small group makes a desperate dash across the technology gradient to save the galaxy as they know it. Fast-paced and engrossing.

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Well deserved Hugo winner for best novel. Mr. Vinge has some wonderfully imaginative ideas here mixed with a galactic usenet. Totally original and very engrossing.

This book is grand in scope and idea, but loses something in execution.

I found myself interested in the story, and yet it took me nearly two weeks to read - an unusual span of time. Something about the structure of the story and it's jump from place to place just lost me between the time when I

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closed the book and the time when I opened it again.

The aliens are fantastic - some of the most /alien/ of aliens I've read. The characters are decent, if not especially noteworthy. The concept of space is really interesting - that different laws apply to different physical areas. But ultimately, it's all tied together in a kind of awkward package, like Vinge's ideas are bigger than his ability to thread them through a compelling and well-crafted story.

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Awesome. Very awesome. This one gets all the stars. It's got old school medieval intrigue and machinations and it's got new school crazy nano future technology and it's got some touching emotional stuff going on too. Highly recommended.

What I liked most about this is the notion of a far flung technic civilization existing for Millions of years, yet always churning.
And best was the thought that just because a civilization may be dead doesn't mean you should poke at it. Sometimes, old things need to be left where they are.

Not for nothing did A Fire upon the Deep take home a Hugo. There are just so many things about it that are good. The universe within which the story takes place is carefully crafted and very interestingly conceived. Several alien races are presented, two of them in detail, one of which (the Tines)

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had been very elaborately created. The story is huge and compelling, while the writing draws you onward. And the Usenet-like communications setup is an interesting concept.

Probably one of the things that stands out the most in this book is the structure of the Tines. Vinge does a good job of explaining by showing, and the details of the race were enough to make my head hurt as I imagined their ramifications.

The writing was well-paced. It's a long book, and some parts felt slow-moving compared to others, but they were never uninteresting. During the more active parts, especially the climax of the book (and the other climax right before it) I was so immersed in it that I couldn't stop reading. And the image at the end was echoingly haunting.

Simply put, buy this book. It's eminently worth it.

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Brilliant! A wonderful read and a completely new take on space travel/communication.

An excellent hard sci-fi novel in the tradition of Banks and Simmons, with Vinge's unique style. The galaxy is under attack by an ancient enemy, long forgotten, but not yet dead.

A phenomenally good story, with some of the most interesting aliens I have seen.

"Play? By themselves? Yes... I see how natural that would seem to you. To us, it would be a kind of perversion..."

Excellent high-concept space opera. Vinge has created some of the most alien of aliens you could hope to imagine. The Tines, with their intermingling pack minds, are fascinating. As are

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the Skroderiders, who evolved without mobility or short-term memory. But it's the Tines who are the heart of the book, as we follow them through their fraught first contact with advanced civilizations.

If there's a problem with the book, it's in the vast scale of the galactic community Vinge depicts. When an ancient destructive power is woken, and begins rampaging through the galaxy, some characters shrug it aside -- "Another civilization destroyed? Oh, well, these things happen." Some of this apathy rubs off on the reader. What should be catastrophic is at once too big to comprehend and too small to matter.

There are a number of nice touches too. The changing nature of spacetime is a clever conceit. The interstellar newsgroups filled with spam and nonsense in the face of destruction are all too believable.

It's the Tines that, in the end, make this book stand out. Through the course of the novel their characters become more rounded, and understood, but they continually take you aback with their sheer otherness. An impressive creation.

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Full of many unique concepts. Zones of slowness in the universe that dictate what level of technology will operate. A species of alien with a pack-mind. God-like singularities meddling (or not) in the lives of intelligent beings.

Good stuff.

Great stuff! I admit that I skipped over really understanding some of the science parts. Good plot with interesting aliens. I also appreciate that it has a beginning and and end in this book, no need to go read 3 sequels right away.

Of course I read this book when it first was published. I was blown away then by the amazing constructions of this far future universe -- galaxy wide information nets (including spam), multi-bodied intelligences, and variable technology levels via physical limitations. Even on second reading it is

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enthralling, even when most of the plot twists are known. Some of writing is less than elegant and some of the characters are thinner than cardboard, but the ethical, physical, and technological problems that the characters face are still engaging. I'm sure I will enjoy reading it again in another ten years.

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I think i would have liked this book even better had I read it first instead of A Deepness in the Sky. It was still a great book, but I think the universe he creates is a little more fleshed out in A Deepness in the Sky. It would have seemed more natural starting with this book, but that's my fault

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not the author's.

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I liked A Fire Upon the Deep. This is a tale on a truly galactic scale, concerning the fate of dozens - maybe hundreds - of civilizations. Vinge worked in some nice original ideas, which is (for me) what SF is all about. His CS background shines through in his formulation of some of these ideas.

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The book is set in the Milky Way and postulates different Zones delineated by concentric rings or spheres about the galactic core. The laws of physics change as a function of distance from the centre. At the core are the "Unthinking Depths," where higher intelligence itself is impossible. The next layer is the "Slow Zone," which contains Earth. This is followed by a gradient or layers of "the Beyond" where increasingly greater technology and intelligence are possible, and finally the "Transcend," inhabited only by godlike beings. This is an interesting concept and a useful plot point, but it nags a bit at me. Different physics in different parts of the galaxy is pretty far-fetched. We lowly human beings down here in the Slow Zone have actually devised ways to test for different physical laws elsewhere in the universe and we get a null result every time.

Another big, original idea is the group minds of the Tine packs. I thought of this as cluster computing due to Vinge's background. Biological Beowulf clusters? Neat-o! BUT… fast, high-volume connections between nodes are crucial to cluster computing. Vinge posits ultrasonic communication between individuals for the Tines. Sorry, but again I find this hard to swallow. Each individual Tine brain would need to simultaneously send and receive to five other units *and* process that information, in addition to the regular duties of managing its own body. When you see evidence of the processing power of a single Tine node, you can’t help but think the packs would have to be too short on both bandwidth and processing power to function as group minds. I suppose this could be explained away if the Tine packs only functioned in higher zones, but they don't appear to suffer any loss of function at all when they are clearly in the Slow Zone.

To include these concepts that are not faithful to real science is one thing, but to have the plot hinge on them entirely makes the "hard sf" appellation questionable (if you care about that sort of thing). Suspending disbelief, I found it an enjoyable story with high stakes and characters I cared about.

One last thing: To provide exposition and add depth to his universe, Vinge inserts usenet-like text (and occasionally video) posts from a galactic BB service. Some reviews are critical of this, saying it dates the story. I disagree, partly because I found these sections to be an enjoyable callback to 80s and 90s computing and besides, bandwidth could conceivably be a serious constraint in FTL communication. I buy it.

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