A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought, 2)

Set twenty thousand years earlier than A Fire Upon The Deep , Vernor Vinge's second book in the Zones of Thought universe shares little and requires nothing of its companion volume. It's action alternates between the inhabitants of an alien world and human observers concealed in orbit above. The Spiders have developed pre-space flight technology and struggle with the 250-year freeze-and-thaw cycle of their planet's On/Off variable star. The orbiting humans consist of two factions. The Qeng Ho have goals of trade and communication. The Emergents have the more direct agenda of conquest and domination. As the book proceeds, we watch the Spiders develop technically and socially. Simultaneously, the more advanced Emergents and Qeng Ho intrigue, fight, integrate, intrigue and fight. It all works out much better than it should. Like Vinge's other fiction, this book is host to a number of "big ideas" that take the stage along with the actions and inactions of the characters. They include: An alien species--the Spiders--that seems far less alien than they really should. What seems like bad writing through much of the book is given a reasonable explanation in the end. These creatures are interesting and even--heaven help me--cute. A variable star turns on and off at regular intervals. The possible explanations are intriguing as are its effects on the evolution of life on its planets. A tailored "mindrot" virus produces various neurological effects, including an exaggerated ability to concentrate called "Focus." The virus is both a disease and an altered state that makes workers diligent, productive and savant-like. It has uses and abuses, not always easy to distinguish. A flexible, self-organizing network technology constructed of large numbers of simple processors massively interconnected. The security and flexibility of the resulting "mesh networks" are explored by their Qeng Ho and Emergent users. If you plan to also read A Fire Upon The Deep , then read it first for the most enjoyable experience. That said, this book can stand on its own and is good, enjoyable space opera. The story has its darker elements, but is well-worth a persistent reading. With good justification, it is considered one of science fiction's classics.

*Spoilers* It's a bit disappointing that a book in the Zones of Thought series takes place entirely in the Slow Zone. The other zones are not directly referenced even once in this book, as the characters simply do not know they exist. There are some things that the reader can draw conclusions from, having read A Fire Upon the Deep. We know why the "limitations" exist, why the Failed Dreams were never realized, and it's because they live in a region of the galaxy where they aren't possible. And some of the amazing discoveries on Arachna... well they probably didn't originate in the Slow Zone. Vernor Vinge does not spoon feed his readers, you've got to figure some things out on your own. Which is nice if you enjoy that, and I do. I was also initially kind of baffled at the book centering around Pham Nuwen's past. In AFUtD he was an "okay" character; I didn't find him hugely compelling. He was kind of two dimensional, though his role as the godshatter was interesting, but I didn't really care about his past. When I first realized the book was about his Slow Zone days, I admit I rolled my eyes. Let me tell you that changed. I had no interest in Pham Nuwen's past, and I was wrong. His character is really fleshed out in this book, much beyond what I expected, and it's very well done. For the most part, the book is very well written. The characters are smart, complex, and for the most part aren't just massive cliches. Some of Vinge's libertarianism comes through a bit heavy-handed though. One of the trader good guys' ships is called the Invisible Hand, one of the space communist bad guys' ships is called the Common Good. As soon as I realized this I groaned. But it doesn't come up often enough to be obnoxious or really detract from the story. There is plenty of "trade is good, excessive government is bad" stuff throughout, though, if that kind of thing rubs you the wrong way. It is much more reasonably presented than say, a frothy Fox News pundit, and not as in your face as an Ayn Rand book, but it's there.

I've always loved SF, I grew up on Asimov, having finished all the Foundation books by age 14, and am still re-reading the Hitchhiker books at least once a year. Not to mention Clark, Heinlein etc. Sometime in the past 10 years I stopped reading SF and went to pure science and a lot of history. Then I came back to SF and for about 2 years have been searching for some book to fall into again. Then I found Vernor Vinge. I first read A Fire Upon the Deep and it was good. Very good. The physics of the universe Vinge creates, and the role of information flow and societal structures was really amazing to me and I was sorry he didn't delve deeper into those issues, but focused almost completely on the plot, which I felt wasn't that great. But this book is completely different. The plot is thick, and a lot is going on, but for me it was secondary. Vernor Vinge has managed to create a completely believable universe millions and millions of years from now, which is just incredible to me. SF seemed to me to always be split into two - Those that had Faster-Than-Light travel and galactic empires (by making up some new physics), and those that were centered on our star-system and were all about nano-tech, gene-tech etc. But here, Mr. Vinge is able to span Galaxies while still remaining in the constraints of non-FTL physics. The implications of galactic civilizations that are for all intents and purposes completely detached from one another are dealt with marvelously in this book. The idea of a traders guild that is the only real link between thousands of civilizations, and its having undergone thousands of years of technological evolution to the point where technological archeologists are necessary to de-bug systems, is ingenious in my opinion. Of course I've said nothing about the great characters and the interesting plot. This is a truly remarkable book, and I cant wait for more Pham Nuwen.

So many individually brilliant ideas packed into one book: programmer-archaeologists, Focus, the consensus protocols needed to organize an interstellar empire, the effect of non-literal translation on our understanding of the alien, the physical, sociological, and evolutionary implications of a star that goes dark for hundreds of years at a time -- the list goes on. I'm pretty impressed with the gender politics in this book (esp being written in the 90s) -- mix of very well-developed, powerful, and technically compentent female characters, which unfortunately can be somewhat lacking in some sci-fi. This book also has somewhat flipped (though not quite) gender roles in the Spider society, which is a delight to read (e.g. the main female protagonist amongst the Spiders is referred to most frequently as "The General" and radio broadcasts might say things like, "...letting this perversion into our homes, into the ears of our husbands and children.") I think it's a very nice touch. My only complaint is that the sudden pairing off of so many of the main characters at the very end of the book felt pretty forced to me. It would have been nice to see some gay characters as well, but that isn't necessarily a deal-breaker for me. It's more that the pairing off felt rather like a forced happy ending that didn't quite work tonally, and the relationships didn't really feel earned imo. tldr: great book, but the first 50 pages or so will be pretty boring if you don't already care about the Qeng Ho.

Eight thousand years into the future, the humankind has undergone "The Age of Failed Dreams". There is no "strong AI", no complex nano-machines or general assemblers, and no faster than light travel or communication. Yet humans travels between the stars, terraform planets, have encountered two (and are about to encounter the third!) intelligent species; medical advances, suspended animation, and relativistic time dilation aboard Bussard Ramjet ("ramscoop") equipped ships has drastically expanded lifespans. Since hardware has not advanced much in recent times, programming rarely involves writing new code, but rather adapting layers and layers of centuries old code (some going back to "The Old Earth") to new tasks and environments. There are positions such as "programmer-at-arms" and "programmer-archaeologist". The Qeng Ho (pronounced "Cheng Ho", after Zheng He -- a Ming Dynasty Chinese seafarer who has ventured with enormous fleets to the coast of Africa, Arabia, and the Malay Archipelago) is a relatively liberal human culture that trades between the stars and uses the UNIX epoch as its time system. Qeng Ho undertakes an expedition to the On-Off star (named so as it periodically turns itself on for 35 years, and then turns itself off for the next 215 to relight again in a highly predictable manner) 50 light years away from their starting point, the biggest wonder of the universe close to the known Human Space. Decision to undertake the expedition is made when they discover (by capturing spark-gap radio signals in Morse-like code) the only planet in its orbit is home to a civilization of Spider-like creatures who live in a world not dissimilar from the human twentieth century (they hibernate when the On-Off is off, so progress is interrupted by 215-year "darks"). On the way there, they are (as expected) met by the "Emergents", a totalitarian human civilization that has recently emerged from a dark age (a major theme in the book are civilizations losing advanced technology including space travel and falling back into barbarism) and uses "Focus", a particularly nasty combination of mind control and slavery. Emergents ambush the Qeng Ho and are able to Focus many of them, but as a result of the Qeng-Ho Emergent conflict, neither the Emergent nor the Qeng Ho ships are capable of traveling back to their home worlds. They must now await the time that the Spider civilization advances to the point where they can repair their ramscoops. There are several lines in the story: the lives of Qeng Ho and Emergents in orbit around the On-Off star and preparing for contact with the Spiders; the story of a liberal-minded group of Spiders centered around "Sherkarner Underhill", who is a (quoting a character in the book) "von Neumman, Minsky, Einstein..." in one. Finally, there is the back-story of the Qeng Ho and human progress in space, told by Pham Nuwen. Pham Nuwen -- also a character in the earlier Fire Upon The Deep -- was born a medieval prince on a fallen colony world, but has become a Great Man of the Qeng Ho and a founder of its modern incarnation. This summary does very little justice to the book as is each chapter is laden with fascinating ideas. Dr. Vinge is a Computer Scientist and a mathematician and there is the above-mentioned discussion of what programming would be like in the future. Sensor networks and distributed systems / networking in general play a huge role in the story and are portrayed realistically (I say this as a developer working close to that space). It is quite possibly a true work of "Computer Science fiction". Vinge has popularized the idea of The Singularity, yet through a plot device introduced in "Fire Upon The Deep" The Singularity does not happen in the section of the Galaxy that contains the Qeng Ho space and our Earth. The Spider story-line is just plain fun to read at times, as it harkens back to our stories of greater inventions and scientific progress during what future humans depicted in the story call "The Dawn Age". Humans remain humans and Spiders are deliberately depicted in a humanized way: love is a strong part of each of the sub-stories. One thing to keep in mind is that the book is rather dark in places. The author rightly avoids glorifying totalitarianism: we don't see philosopher kings, instead we see sadistic, compulsively lying, and brutal apparatchiks of tyranny who own human beings and plot against each other, all while claiming to be working for the "common good". Slavery is depicted in its full brutality and not in a "Gone In The Wind" matter: we see brain damage from Focus, humans being given as gifts, and being reduced to machines. The aliens in the story may literally resemble giant spiders living in dark (to the human eyes -- the spiders can see UV) quarters, but the most grotesque monsters depicted are human. In all, the graphic nature of Emergent cruelty is not hidden, which at times makes the book difficult to read (I would not recommend this book to younger readers for this reason). However, the graphic and realistic portrayal is justified as a welcome and refreshing balance to much of the fiction that glorified totalitarian societies from Ancient Sparta to today's tyrants. Some reviewers objected to such a "one-sided portrayal", but it matches closely the actual narrative told by victims of totalitarianism. In all this is one of the books that demonstrates clearly how text can show what no motion picture can: while the plot could make for a great movie or a movie series, much of what is describes would be nearly impossible to properly convey on a screen.

This novel is a prequel to "A Fire Upon the Deep," though really they are sufficiently unrelated that they don't have to be read in any particular order. This one involves more traditional space physics with sublight travel, which puts some interesting limitations on the characters and presents unique challenges. It is, essentially, a novel of competition over a bizarre star system called "OnOff," where the star has periods of normal star-like behavior followed by long "dark" periods. The major actors in the starfaring segment of the book are humans, as few true extraterrestrial intelligences have ever been found by human society so far. OnOff Star is thought, however, to have a sophisticated, possibly industrial society on it that somehow survives its star's long cold periods. It's thought that this life must be starfaring, or once was, because the cyclical nature of the heated periods make it seem as if life could never have originated there. So, two interstellar powers, the "Qeng Ho" merchant syndicate and the mysterious, malevolent "Emergents," compete to contact this nascent civilization. In the process there is betrayal, secrets are revealed, and uneasy alliances are formed. Every character, from the youngest Qeng Ho to its most ancient hero, has some kind of agenda to help bring about their goals. The Emergents, likewise, are fully-formed, if often disturbing, characters. Then there are the aliens themselves, who live on the planet below. They are spider-like and for reasons that are well explained in the book, have a society that is remarkably similar to industrial, pre-spaceflight Earth society. This can be jarring at first, but soon we learn that the alien scenes are understood through the language of metaphor and a rather liberal "translation" by several of the human characters. This is a very moving novel with a lot of struggle for all the groups of humans and aliens. Vinge is brutal to his characters, and they grow for it. It's difficult and not as lighthearted as A Fire Upon the Deep can be at times, but the experience is very fulfilling. A few key differences to note are that the large, diverse alien society of A Fire Upon the Deep isn't in this book. The interstellar information networks composed of many different sophontic races are absent. There's just humans and the spiders, struggling. And there's a lot of history of how the Qeng Ho came to exist. It's worthwhile and a lot of fun, but if you're looking for a continuation of the same experience you got in A Fire Upon the Deep, this isn't quite it.

Deep, riveting, well writen intense sci-fi. Truly an enthralling journey with Pham and his crew. To the byond.Buy. Read. Reread.

A Deepness in the Sky is, hands down, the best Sci-Fi book I've ever read. My first read-through was about 4 years ago, and it's one of the rare few books that I've bothered to read for a second time (I do read a lot of books, though the vast majority are going to be read only once in my lifetime). If there are better novels out there please point me in their direction. World building, civilization building, and character development take the forefront in this novel. Sorry there is only one epic space battle, and only a handful of loosely heroic deeds....but is that not the point in a universe where there are no superheroes? What matters is how small actions by individuals, across planets, across species, across sometimes centuries of time, all coalesce together to create an intricate story in the end, and the story here is beautiful.