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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. One of my all-time favourites - this book brought back the "sense of wonder". The zone concept is very interesting, the aliens are truly amazing and the story is fast-paced. (  )1   dread_dragon | Oct 21, 2009 |  One of my all-time favourites - this book brought back the "sense of wonder". The zone concept is very interesting, the aliens are truly amazing and the story is fast-paced. ( ) dread_dragon | Oct 21, 2009 | Read this several years ago and loved it. I still remember some of the alien characters fondly. ( ) abbie47 | Oct 17, 2009 | 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 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. iayork | Aug 9, 2009 | Wonderful range of ideas: zones with different laws of nature, lots of overlapping back history, interesting aliens. Swapping PoV and settings worked well to hold interest but overall his writing and characters tended to flat and two dimensional (  ) ablueidol | Jul 11, 2009 | 
 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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