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Loading... A Fire Upon the Deepby Vernor Vinge
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I enjoyed both A Fire on the Deep and Vinge's follow-up, A Deepness in the Sky (which I read first). The ideas in both are fascinating, and worked out well and not all at once. They make both books worth reading. The plot too is not unexciting. But the writing is work—both could easily lose 1/3 of their bulk and be only the better for it. And it's hard to feel much for the characters. A Fire Upon the Deep has the more interesting ideas—the zones of thought, the Tines—but I didn't really care about the characters, human, Tine or otherwise. Mostly I wanted to see if there were any more interesting ideas, and even they have to slow to a trickle as the plot grinds along. I found A Deepness in the Sky somewhat more compelling on a character level, but the writing is no better. (  )timspalding | Apr 14, 2009 |  2   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 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. ( )Aerrin99 | Feb 26, 2009 | I adored the medieval world in this. I found myself entranced by the inhabitants and I loved seeing the children interact with them. They were my favorite parts of the book and I go back sometimes just to skim over them again. torbooks | Feb 18, 2009 | 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. (  )KevlarRelic | Feb 1, 2009 | What a ripping yarn! I can easily understand why so many people love this one, it's a truly emotionally satisfying piece of space opera. The aliens both Tine and Skroderider are wonderful and highly memorable. Vinge's prose can be a little problematic -irritatingly colloquial, and his descriptive capabilites seem to go a little south sometimes, especially during some intense action scenes, but utimately I feel rewarded for my reading efforts. It's a well told tale, IMO, with a number of moving, memorable scenes. It's such an emotionally warm book for a man to write. Sure there are sinister and murderous forces at work in the book , but one of the continuing subthemes of the novel is the importance of touch. Definitely worth reading. (  )arthurfrayn | Jan 21, 2009 | 0.053 seconds to build listing 
 Mr. Vinge writes what might be called thoughtful space opera. His setting is nothing less than the galaxy we call the Milky Way. I don't mean that he simply lets loose a few spaceships and has them chase one another among the stars to act out another old-fashioned shoot-'em-up plot. The human and nonhuman characters of "A Fire Upon the Deep" live in a complex galactic society that Mr. Vinge has worked out in admirable if economical detail, and the scope of his story is such that it requires just a background.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0812515285, Mass Market Paperback)In this Hugo-winning 1991 SF novel, Vernor Vinge gives us a wild new cosmology, a galaxy-spanning "Net of a Million Lies," some finely imagined aliens, and much nail-biting suspense.Faster-than-light travel remains impossible near Earth, deep in the galaxy's Slow Zone--but physical laws relax in the surrounding Beyond. Outside that again is the Transcend, full of unguessable, godlike "Powers." When human meddling wakes an old Power, the Blight, this spreads like a wildfire mind virus that turns whole civilizations into its unthinking tools. And the half-mythical Countermeasure, if it exists, is lost with two human children on primitive Tines World. Serious complications follow. One paranoid alien alliance blames humanity for the Blight and launches a genocidal strike. Pham Nuwen, the man who knows about Countermeasure, escapes this ruin in the spacecraft Out of Band--heading for more violence and treachery, with 500 warships soon in hot pursuit. On his destination world, the fascinating Tines are intelligent only in combination: named "individuals" are small packs of the doglike aliens. Primitive doesn't mean stupid, and opposed Tine leaders wheedle the young castaways for information about guns and radios. Low-tech war looms, with elaborately nested betrayals and schemes to seize Out of Band if it ever arrives. The tension becomes extreme... while half the Beyond debates the issues on galactic Usenet. Vinge's climax is suitably mindboggling. This epic combines the flash and dazzle of old-style space opera with modern, polished thoughtfulness. Pham Nuwen also appears in the nifty prequel set 30,000 years earlier, A Deepness in the Sky. Both recommended. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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