A Deepness in the Sky

by Vernor Vinge

Other authorsBob Eggleton (Cover artist), James Frenkel

Hardcover, 1999-03

Status

Available

Call number

PS3572.I534 D44

Series

PFAF (90)

Zones of Thought (1)

Genres

Science Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Tor (New York, 1999). 1st edition, 1st printing. 608 pages. $27.95.

Description

The story of the Spiders, inhabitants of a planet where the sun regularly stops shining for periods of 200 years, during which they are frozen in ice. The novel picks them up emerging from their most recent hibernation in a frenzy of activity and innovation to make up for lost time. By the author of A Fire upon the Deep.

User reviews

LibraryThing member ben_a

Re-read this while standing in the aisles of Harvard book store. Among the best science fiction ever written, and something of a education in what I would call -- lacking a better term -- Vinge's political philosophy. Vinge is a Baconian, he sees how the universe can be opposed against us, and

believes in understanding the world and mastering it . Yet his orientation towards change is not blind: he is keenly aware, as so few futurists are, of just how horrendous the natural state of man is, and how demonic man's natural motivations can be. Few techno libertarians understand humanity well enough to make plausible a monster like Tomas Nau. Just when you think he can't get worse -- well...

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LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C

I loved this and was up all night finishing it. That's rather rare with science fiction, at least hard science fiction. Few science fiction writers--hell, few writers--have Vinge's sense of pacing and ability to create suspense. That's because you care about his characters intensely, human as well

as alien. Not something you find enough in Hard Science Fiction--and Vinge brings off some mind-blowing concepts without ever falling into infodump or other awkward constructions. I thought I had read this novel before--I know it had been sitting on my shelves for years, even somehow had a rating, but I couldn't remember anything about it--for good reason--I'm sure I hadn't read this before--I would have remembered.

This is a prequel to the first book of the Zones of Thought trilogy, but not only can this stand alone, I think it might be best to read it first. It involves the most memorable and vibrant of the human characters, Pham Nuwen and his time among the trading fleet, the Qeng Ho. It's notable though that in A Fire Upon the Deep, what got mentioned in my review and made the greatest impression were the alien characters, the dog-like Tines. This book also features aliens--a Spider-like race. Like the Tines they are memorable and striking both as a species and in their individuals. I found the Tines a bit more endearing--but not by much. But in this book I found the human characters as strong or stronger than the aliens. Part of that is Pham Nuwen, who is central here. But the dystopia here--and Fire has one too--is a human one. The "Focus" is one of the most chilling forms of slavery I've seen in fiction--one where with your mind enslaved, your body follows. So the story of the "Emergents" versus the Qeng Ho was every bit as interesting as what was happening on Arachna. Vinge shifts between points of view and that in itself ups the tension--I was never impatient to get past a section, but at the same time I'd be left worried about what was "happening" to others while our attention was elsewhere.

The next and last of the trilogy was published only about two years ago and is a direct sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep and starts two years after the close of events there. I'm sorry to say goodbye to Pham Nuwen and the other characters of A Deepness in the Sky, but I'm already excited at the thought I'll soon be back with my old friends among the Tines.

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LibraryThing member IdeasWIN

I consider this to be one of th best SF novels I''ve ever read. This is not a comment made lightly nor a thought from a casual sf reader. My personal library numbers over 4000 volumes, of which about 60% is speculative fiction.
A Deepness in the Sky is one of those books I could not put down and yet

did not want to end. A wondeful paradox. Vinge has created a strong engaging story with a tremendous depth of background. This is a first contact story, a tale of underdogs striving against overwhelming odds, of war and oppression, of misguided good and of ultimate evil.

But it is much more than that. Vinge has written what every really great novel is in truth - a story about people. Well drawn characters in the throes of indecision, battling evil in themselves while they fight external enemies and conditions. This is the stuff of delight for a reader.

Don't take my word for it - get the book!

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LibraryThing member paradoxosalpha

I am reading Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought novels in publication order. This second book is set earlier than the first. It does not engage the "Zonological" ideas introduced in A Fire Upon the Deep. It is structured very similarly, however, with two parallel and converging narratives, one of

which is cutting-edge space opera featuring (the original, in this case) Pham Nuwen, and the other of which takes place in a radically non-human planet-bound society.

The space story involves grappling between two human spacefaring societies. The Qeng Ho are Nuwen's mature interstellar mercantile culture, while the Emergents are the totalitarian development of a more local society whose hypostasized Emergency has resulted in an innovative form of enslavement. Simultaneous missions to contact the nascently industrializing aliens of Arachna erupt into catastrophic conflict, leaving the two competitors in a lopsided symbiosis full of intrigue.

The business on the world of Arachna is translated for the reader using conventions later rationalized as the work of the humans surveilling the planet from space. Although the denizens are quasi-arthropod "Spiders," they are characterized with Hobbitsy sorts of English names and traits, such as Sherkaner Underhill and Victory Smith. Since their technological level is a better match for our own, these creatures actually come off as more "human" than the either of the human cultures, at least during the first three-quarters of the book before the first in-person meetings between humans and Spiders.

I found it interesting what a mature figure Pham Nuwen is in this book, "resurrected" at its start in a more figurative manner than in A Fire Upon the Deep, but still with an enormous prior history. Despite a serious character arc within the scope of the current story, and some significant retrospectives to flesh out his character and motivation, Vinge has left many centuries to play with if he should ever want to compose a pre-prequel using Nuwen as the connective thread.

Big ideas that are central to this book include the coercive management of human attention, and the epistemological weaponization of networked information technology. These both feel more topical now than they would have been when the book was first published in 1999. Vinge also seems to have put a new turn on Ibn Khaldūn's theories of civilizational growth and decay, and the practical superiority of organized merchants to wealthy despots. These notions become intrinsic to the premise that a sufficient "industrial ecology" is needed to support productive interaction with interstellar travelers, who cannot carry such an ecology themselves even at the scale of a fleet. But the industrialized civilizations are necessarily finite in duration, acquiring vulnerabilities with their efficiencies.

Like the other Zones of Thought books, A Deepness in the Sky is long--eventful, characterful, and thoughtful--and it took all my reading attention for a couple of weeks in order to get through it. Looking back at my review of A Fire Upon the Deep, I find myself in the same position of being glad to have read it and being unwilling to charge on to the next one without a significant pause to recover. And I already own a copy of The Children of the Sky.

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LibraryThing member antao

“So high, so low, so many things to know.”

In a “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge

“A Fire Upon The Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” are very similar: a beautiful comparative analysis study could be written about them. It would be worth reading “A Deepness in the Sky” if

you insert at least one other book between the two novels, then perhaps the repetition is not so boring. What bothered me the most is that the evil character, Tomas Nau, looks a lot like Lord Steel from “A Fire Upon The Deep”. Sanos was only one of the brilliantly created evil character types in Talon, and it made it to both novels which was unfortunate.

SF nowadays reveals an extensive problem in the genre and the people defining the genre. Many of these people suffer from the Dragon Ball Z problem of continuous one-upsmanship. The impulse is to continue pushing the slider further and further into the extreme to define new territory and they rarely seem to ask whether there isn't an intriguing new way of looking at it which doesn't require pushing the utter furthest extent in order to out-do the previous effort. Of course they're lobbing around gods; there's no place else to go in that direction and none of them have really seen a fresh way to tackle it yet. I think there are some other answers that still need exploring. Some of Vinge, Brin and Reynolds' best works are confined to remarkably low tech or fairly confined, non-cosmic locales. Vinge's “Zones of Thought” story was all in the low-tech extent, despite that burp in the middle where the zones shift —a phenomenon that failed to impact the story, infuriatingly— and "Deepness in the Sky" was also all slow zone and confined to one world. Maybe a part of the problem is the preconception about what it should be, and trying to measure against that. I suppose people like Asimov and Clarke had the benefit that they were early in the field and not competing with a world that already remembers their work, forcing them to try to out-do it.

Vinge’s language is not simple due to the many peculiar expressions and abstract ideas, and the deciphering is not always there, but it seems that Vinge intended things to be thought-provoking. The plot is twisty and fascinating enough but several times I felt that I had lost the thread (or the desire, momentum), but then in these parts I finally found something that kept the interest going, and even later, things became more significant in the light of the overall picture.

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LibraryThing member RandyStafford

My reaction to reading this novel in 2000. Spoilers follow.

The only possible aesthetic objection, on a science fictional level, to this novel is that its aliens, the so-called Spiders, are not all that alien apart from hibernating in the centuries when their sun powers down, seeing across a

spectrum wider than human eyes do (which complicates and inhibits the development of their version of tv), being seemingly smarter than humans, and, of course, their appearance. While Vinge creates some captivating alien characters in Sherkaner Underhill, Victory Smith, their children and Hrunkner, they are not as strange as the Tines in his A Fire Upon the Deep to which this is a prequel (his “The Blabber” also belongs to the series).

In every other respect – speculation and literary craftsmanship – this novel succeeds very well. Vinge introduced the idea of the Singularity in his Marooned in Realtime, and it was taken up by other sf writers as well as futurists. The notion here that seems to be new is, perhaps, not as startling but perhaps more probable: the idea of a Programmer-Archaeologist. Humans, particularly the Qeng Ho, use computer systems, programs, and languages that have accreted for centuries. Some programs date back to before humanity’s venturing into space. Programmer-Archaeologists are just an extreme example of some of the tasks of modern programmers who try to determine exactly what a program can do, not do, and possibilities for modifications.

This is quite a political novel, specifically a novel with libertarian/tragic conservatism themes. This is not surprising from Vinge. His “Conquest By Default” examined anarchism, and his The Peace War examined an authoritarian state created by intellectuals (specifically scientists) who think they are fit and capable to rule the world. Here the Qeng Ho represent a civilizing (particularly after Pham Nuwen starts the Qeng Ho interstellar net broadcasts which preserve technical knowledge so planetary societies can rebuild themselves after their inevitable collapses – collapses usually prefigured by authoritarian and totalitarian states) force, civilizing and helping humanity via trade. The Accord society of the Spiders is also rather libertarian – a society which can vote to temporarily grant their constitutional monarch emergency powers. The villains of the story are the Emergents, a group that derives their name not from some notion of future transcendence or evolution but to that old incubator of tyrants, the Emergency. Russian history, as in A Fire Upon the Deep, seems to have provided some inspiration here. (That novel, the sequel to this one, featured a Tine called Steel who in both name and behavior is reminiscent of the Man of Steel, Stalin.) Thomas Nau, in his acceptance of Qeng Ho free market activity and private trade (as opposed to community property) is a bit like Gorbachev – both believe in the validity and workability of the authoritative system they’ve inherited and think a few minor reforms will make the system more efficient without threatening their authority.

The Emergents have a powerful tool in Focus, a guided infection by a bacteria that boosts production of specified neurotransmitters in specific regions of the brain. Emergent propaganda (like the Soviet state, the Emergents rule by a combination of terror and propaganda) argues that this is just an institutionalization of the often obsessive individual behavior that advances art and science. Here the obsession is done for the good of the community and to a specified end. Vinge explores how Focus would work in practice – Focused ignore personal hygiene, develop idiosyncratic jargon with Focused working in the same area, and the drifting of attention to odd, obsessive ends. Focus brings human flexibility to largely automated research and administrative systems.

Besides libertarian notions, the novel evokes a sense of tragedy important to modern conservatism. Vinge expresses a technological version of the concept of inherent limits in man’s existence: the Era of Failed Dreams (specifically general nanotechnology assembler, artificial intelligence, and immortality) that centuries of human science and technology have not achieved. (Of course, Vinge has it both ways here. Arachnea, the Spider World, has mysterious origins and remnants of alien anti-gravity technology. This sets the stage for A Fire Upon the Deep and “The Blabber” which feature some of these technologies, made possible by Man’s escape from the Slow Zone which renders them impossible. Presumably Pham Nuwen ventures beyond the Slow Zone since he’s a character in A Fire Upon the Deep. More important to the concept of inherent limits is the changes in the political dreams of Pham Nuwen. He dreams of breaking the wheel of planetary civilizations (needed by spacefaring cultures) rising and falling. Even Earth has been repopulated at least twice. Old rescuer/tutor/partner Sura says his dream of sustaining planetary civilizations, protecting them from collapse via trade, intervention, and broadcasts of Qeng Ho library material is unworkable and she sabotages it. Pham Nuwen, a disguised member of the expedition to the on/off star, thinks he can use Focus to build his stellar empire that will preserve civilization. He may well be right, but he ultimately swears off its use and is unwilling to condemn a few to a slavery of mind control in the hopes of saving millions.

Vinge writes a gripping story. Everybody is smart so obvious plots and ploys aren’t enough, plans are seldom secure or unanticipated (except for the big revelation that Sherkaner Underhill has suborned the Focused translators), the implications of ideas are seen by all. His characters are all interesting; the aliens are intriguing as are Ezr Vinh, Anne Reynolt (a rare Focused individual who can deal with people and manage fellow Focused, she turns out to have a surprising history as a tough opponent of the Emergents before Focused). It is her plight that causes Pham Nuwen, about to kill her, to swear off the use of Focus. Qiwi Lin Lisolet reminds Pham Nuwen of himself as a youngster. At first, the novel seemed to be about Ezr Vinh and his love for Trixia Bonsol – and his history is important.

But the novel really centers on Pham Nuwen, his life, and his changing vision. He is the most interesting character by far – in no small part because he combines two of my favorite character types: the man who pretends to be a fool but is far from it and the double agent. He also represents another variation on some previous Vinge character types. Like Tatja Grimm from Vinge’s “The Barbarian Princess” and Grimm’s World, he comes from a primitive, barbaric environment and, through curiosity and prodigious intellect, he builds a technologically sophisticated empire. His treachery against his Emergent captors also reminded me of the vengeful dwarf of Vinge’s “The Whirligig of Time”. Vinge skillfully unveils the details of Pham Nuwen’s life slowly, changing our views of him. At first, we see an old, bitter man in hiding on a planet and found by a centuries’ old covert search. We do not know he’s Pham Nuwen. When the Emergents betray the expedition, we know he is a clever armsmaster skeptical of the Emergents and who escapes their ambush to almost defeat them before entering their captivity. They do not know he fought them. We don’t know he’s Pham Nuwen. We only know Pham Nuwen as a legendary Qeng Ho, indeed, as their founder. Thomas Nau worships him as an empire builder he hopes to emulate and surpass. Eventually, Pham Trinli, boastful, slightly incompetent armsmaster, is revealed to us and, later, to Ezr Vinh, as the legendary Pham Nuwen, once thought dead but very much alive. We learn of his early lifeas he was sold into slavery at a young age, how a starship captain named Sura took pity on him, how he soaked up the high tech knowledge of the Qeng Ho and became Sura’s lover and how the two invented the trading culture of the Qeng Ho. But, whereas Sura sees only improved trade, Pham Nuwen thinks he can build an empire in space, break the wheel of planetary civilizations’ rise and fall. Sura is unwilling to devote the resources to what she views as an impractical goal and tricks Nuwen. He sees only stark betrayal though she allows him to save face and take an exploratory fleet of ships. Nuwen not only works for years undercover (eventually with Ezr Vinh, possibly a descendent of his – cryonic sleep means lives lived across centuries) to defeat the Emergent. But we learn that Pham Nuwen and Thomas Nau are alike in wanting to build an empire though the former’s goals are more virtuous since he wants to end the slavery and death and misery when planetary civilizations decay). Ezr Vinh is disturbed to learn that Pham Nuwen is willing to use the abhorrent tool of Focus, to which Ezr loses his love Trixia for good, to retrieve his dream. Eventually, though, he bows to Vinh’s stubborn morality.

Vinge ends the novel with several open threads for farther stories though I doubt we’ll get them given Vinge’s low level of production and that Pham Nuwen’s story is partly taken up again in A Fire Upon the Deep. Specifically, here we have Reynolt and Nuwen’s upcoming war against the Emergent civilization and the mysteries of Aracha’s existence and fossil technologies.

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LibraryThing member clong

I found A Deepness in the Sky to be slow going at first, and I had a hard time finding much sympathy for any of the human characters. But, I stuck with it and by the end had come around to thinking it is one of the great recent science fiction novels.

The Emergents are truly creepy and despicable

bad guys; Vinge does an effective job of gradually revealing more and more reasons to hate them. I felt ambivalent about the other human faction in the book, the Qeng Ho, who had both good points and bad points; it was only as I understood the depravity of the Emergents that I started really rooting for other side.

The alien "Spiders" are the best thing about the book. For me, Sherkaner Underhill and his family were the true protagonists of the story, and very easy to root for. He is a brilliant alien scientist who has yet to discover much of what the secretly-orbiting-and-spying-down-on-them humans already know. His entire family plays a critical role in the political and military maneuverings on-planet and in the ultimate system-wide resolution when the humans finally act.

The pace eventually picks up and builds to an exciting climax and satisfying conclusion with plenty of surprises. It's only very loosely associated with A Fire Upon the Deep; I wouldn't really call it part of a series.

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LibraryThing member DaveSmeds

A true visionary author. He manages to be a great talespinner, too, this volume being perhaps the best example of that within his oeuvre.

LibraryThing member bclark

This review may contain what some consider spoilers.

A Deepness in the Sky is, at its core, a predictable book with very few fresh ideas. I am quite surprised by the amount of favorable reviews, and I would imagine that this book might be much more favorable by those that have not read a lot of

science-fiction.

It is my opinion that Vinge recreated 600 pages of Human history with the introduction of advanced technology. The Qeng Ho are very reminiscent of Europe's early colonial traders (in ideals and their wish to expand their empire). My opinion is that the author did not produce a world of beings that would undoubtedly be very different than the world we see in, for example, Star Trek and Star Wars. The descendants of Earth simply aren't alien enough for the time period of the setting.

During the author's introduction of the Qeng Ho and the Emergents (Humans), their history and the technology was somewhat interesting as it unfolded, but the author introduced very few fresh ideas about the possible Human condition in the far future and their technological advancements. For example, the method of star travel is what one might expect-- near light travel with very large ships; the ships' inhabitants are "frozen" on shifts due to the vastness between stars; Humans have returned to a form of slavery, albeit through technological, more direct means by altering the brain of their subjects; and the building of artificial environments in space was written in. Each of these, and others, once arrived, brought the question to mind, "How will Vinge handle this as other authors have in other science-fiction books?" The author should have asked this of himself, and steered away from those frequently used expectations.

Vinge focused heavily on each character, but his descriptions were somewhat rambling. It is as if he spent most of the time on the relationships between characters, but left the meat of the excitement just outside of the frame. Character building is important, but I felt Vinge used too many words to spell out what the reader should already know about these characters by what had been written before. Less is definitely more when it comes to this story; nothing at all was left to the imagination.

Key happenings are foretold, almost in passing, and the foretold events come and go without much narrative. For instance, only a couple of pages actually describe the invasion of the alien world. 400 pages build and build and build to first contact, and when we arrive to that point in the book, it goes off with a fizzle of excitement and still high expectations of revelations of something unexpected or new. Vinge didn't provide that sort of experience. In the end, the aliens were imagined as something alien but familiar: insects with technology and thought far too much like our own to be alien. The idea that the products of such an alien world could be anything remotely like us is, frankly, absurd. The result of this book is surprising considering that Vinge has been vocal about a possible technological singularity. This book could have been so, so much more.

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LibraryThing member faganjc

Huge universe and timescale. Enjoyable, but darker than I thought from the first few chapters (i.e. Qiwi Lisolet and the Brughel character). Not as innovative (IMHO) as Fire Upon the Deep. I'll probably read more Vinge, though!

LibraryThing member Farree

Nearly as good as A Fire Upon the Deep, this one deals with interesting aliens and even more interesting disease.

LibraryThing member bradsucks

Couldn't finish this one. I was a hundred pages from the end and just couldn't do it anymore. Just like Fire Upon the Deep (which I loved), it started out incomprehensible and then slowly came to make sense to me. But I didn't find the story or setting compelling and it felt like nothing was going

on most of the time.

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LibraryThing member JohnFair

This is a fantastic book - the Spiders are truly weird creatures though initially filtered through the perceptions of the humans watching their civilisation from deep space.

Vinge has managed to make the humans almost as weird as the Spiders, though, and in the Emergants, he's created one of the

few groups of people that have really scared me.

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LibraryThing member rakerman

I really enjoyed the creative ideas in this book.

LibraryThing member Karlstar

This is an epic science fiction novel, both in length and quality. Almost as good as A Fire Upon the Deep, this is really an excellent exploration of an alien culture, mixed in with the familiar universe of the other novel. This is long, but well worth reading.

LibraryThing member michaeleconomy

This book is reallllllllly long. I think I really would have loved it if it was about half as long.The point of view of the spiders is kinda lame at times. While the luddite spiders were kind of an interesting dynamic, I didn't really love reading about them quite that much. I also go over the

spider babies really quickly. The author does dive a bit into speculative software design of the future, which you might expect from a Computer Science professor. I thought it was pretty cool, thankfully not at all like [author:Stephenson]'s frequent outbursts, but i expect some people who don't design software for a living might not 'get it' as much.I probably should have read fire in the deep first, I think thats his first book and people have told me that one is better.

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LibraryThing member ragwaine

Not as cool as -AFUtD- but still great. Could have dropped 100 pages but I can't think of a part that was really boring. Couple of excellent big ideas: Focus, Qeng Ho culture, on/off star etc...

LibraryThing member iayork

A truly great book deserving 6 stars!!: The Alien. A beautiful, strange world thriving in a uniquely alien climate. A totally alien sentient race, described in an evolving, and fantastically evocative, thoughtful manner. Problems of first contact language and societal issues are crucial to the

story, and handled amazingly well. The Human. Terribly cruel despotic rule, involving slavery, rape, bigotry, and "state-of-the-art" diplomacy and duplicity. Millennia spanning civilizations, hemmed in by extremely well-chosen scientific, economic, ecological and societal barriers.
Love is crushed, lost, rampaged and explosively rediscovered. Dreams are buried and reawakened.
Deepness in the Sky is one of those very, very few novels that encompasses all of the above, in a beautifully interwoven story. A civilization of millennium spanning space traders races to an astronomical anomaly, a newly discovered planet in an on/off-star galaxy. They are met there by another group of space travelers whom they had not previously encountered. Both groups are hoping to harvest huge profits from being the first to interact with the new non-human civilization just discovered on the planet. We learn about all three civilizations in detail, via big picture views/histories, and through many, many personal characterizations. This book manages to get us involved with, and caring about at least 12 major characters.
Vinge's amazing story is beautifully, tragically, magically, heartrendingly emotional, and at the same time mind-bendingly thoughtful on many levels. I cannot overstate how great this book is. The way he evolves our understanding of the alien civilization, until we can still care (strongly!!) about these beings as they are described not in translated human-conditioned terms, but rather in a true first-contact, "eye-to-eye" manner, is only one of the rare, and beautiful, back-shivering moments Vinge brings us to. Absolutely, read and enjoy this book!!
I do wish a sixth star could be found to rate books like this!! 5 stars are given for lesser books, because these are such rare finds.

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LibraryThing member phaga

I really enjoyed this book. I haven't read a lot of modern sci-fi but i'm starting to get more into it, especially after reading this. Very interesting and exciting new ideas. Very cool.

LibraryThing member Ed_Gosney

I loved this book, but not quite as much as A Fire Upon the Deep. Never-the-less, it was very entertaining and fun to read. The alien spiders were fascinating, as was the storyline with Pham. Highly recommended.

LibraryThing member suffe

Not quite as good as the other book in this losely knit series. Still, it keeps in the spirit of exploring the ideas of alien scocieties that differ from our own in some important way.

LibraryThing member name99

Every bit as good as A Fire upon the Deep with, once again, nicely alien aliens and a page-turner of a plot.
Not especially deep, but high entertainment.

LibraryThing member Miro

Like the other book I've read by him "A Fire Upon the Deep", this also has some interesting ideas. There, it was dog like creatures with a group mind + disembodied mind and time zones, and here it is "focus" (a kind of locking onto a subject) that isn't so convincing. All the same it's a good read.

LibraryThing member Farrelin

Vernor Vinge is a master at weaving complex plots and innovative concepts.

LibraryThing member joeyreads

I've read it at least three times, with varying experiences.

I think the first time I wanted more of ADOtD and didn't quite get it, but did get lots of other great stuff (particularly programmer-archaeologists who still knew about the unix epoch), and just want along for the thrill ride.

Second time

I was focused on the Focused, and got a bit blindsided at the ending.

Third time, I read it quite slow and found a lot of things I'd not found before, including the exquisite way the last quarter was put together.

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