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. ( )

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. ( )

Read this several years ago and loved it. I still remember some of the alien characters fondly. ( )

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.

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 ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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.

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 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. ( )

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. ( )

Multi-bodied wolf people and nasty alien intelligences. Strange mix, but it seems to work well, when you throw a ship full of human scientists in trouble from perhaps meddling where they should not have.

Not as good as a Deepness in the Sky, but interesting enough in its own right. Hard to go wrong with Vinge, really.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2006/12/fire-upon-deep-vernor-vinge.html ( )

Multi-bodied wolf people and nasty alien intelligences. Strange mix, but it seems to work well, when you throw a ship full of human scientists in trouble from perhaps meddling where they should not have.

Not as good as a Deepness in the Sky, but interesting enough in its own right. Hard to go wrong with Vinge, really.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2006/12/fire-upon-deep-vernor-vinge.html ( )

Multi-bodied wolf people and nasty alien intelligences. Strange mix, but it seems to work well, when you throw a ship full of human scientists in trouble from perhaps meddling where they should not have.

Not as good as a Deepness in the Sky, but interesting enough in its own right. Hard to go wrong with Vinge, really.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2006/12/fire-upon-deep-vernor-vinge.html ( )

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) 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. ( )

One of the best SF books I have ever read. ( )

http://tinyurl.com/4lrkvt

It's been a long time since a 600+ page book took that short a time to read. Vinge sucks you into his "Zone" world where we live in the "Slowness" and all the higher beings have "transcended." I know, it sounds a little dorky, but there is something about the beings he creates and how he allows them to interact that is unique to his storytelling.

I particularly like the Skroderiders-- frondy fern-like beings used to spending their time in the surf who now ride around on little stick-um wheeled carts. Besides, a major plot point (which you will not see coming) relies on how these beasties came to be.

I'm surprised no one has thought to make a movie about this. In my mind's eye, I could clearly see the light-year hopping, the angry butterflies, the gray-skinned hero, and the castles ruled by dog packs. See what I mean? This is why you need to read this book. ( )

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.

The audiobook is good also. ( )

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) 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! ( )

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. ( )

Excellent high concept sci-fi with two great interwoven plot lines. Best sci-fi I've read in years. ( )

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 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. ( )

Very well crafted; not particularly compelling. ( )

Link to a review on my personal website. ( )