JUNE READ - SPOILERS - A Fire Upon the Deep

It's waiting for me at the library. I should be able to pick it up in the next day or two.

I'm reading it. It's confusing as heck, but I'm getting through it. It's pretty interesting. Slow read though. I'm about 100 pages in.

Great, book, keep at it!! Its really worth it.

I'm only a few pages in and am intrigued. Peregrine and his people are some of the most interesting aliens I've ever come across. It's hard to get my head around their exact nature, but it is fascinating.

About halfway through, I like the aliens, less enthusiastic about Jeffri's "rescuers".

They seem fairly naive or unconcerned about the consequences of their technology transfer, and intercultural contact in general.

It would have been one thing to see them deem that dropping gunpowder and telecoms on the head of some primitives and the ensuing predictable mayhem is an acceptable price to pay for easier recovery of information that could save many other worlds.

But the topic just doesn't ever directly enter the picture despite both Pham Nuwen (his constructed persona at least) and the skroderiders' race having had to deal with similar issues in the past.

Thanks to some long quiet evenings at work, I finished this recently. I found it very engaging, and enjoyed all three plot lines. At one point it did feel like Ravna's story was being put into a holding pattern while events on the planet got themselves into the right place for things to intercept, but it was actually all relevent in the end. I loved Vinge's aliens - the wolfpack-like Tines and the treelike Skroderiders, which were fascinating to read about. And Johanna and Jefri were good child characters, with realistic reactions for their age but not getting annoying. Like @Jarandel, I thought that Ravna was too trusting, never even wondering if Jefri might be being manipulated to win her sympathy; I think she should have had at least a few questions about what she was being asked for. Pham was a little bit suspicious, but not as much as he should have been. But all in all, a really good read.

I thought this book deserved its classic status - the ideas and how the strata of technology created the 'set up' for the fall of civilizations - and what happened from there - were concepts way ahead of their time, and amazingly applicable today. The intricacy of the extrapolation and the projection of such a future was outstanding, and while the story was good, it was the conceptual thinking that outshone everything else. I'd consider it a 'must read' for SF, and way ahead of its time.

Was at chapter 25 in >5 Jarandel:, the topic actually gets some discussion in chapter 26 and the rescuers do get somewhat more suspicious toward the end of their journey. Also, some extra developments do take place with the skroderiders' own "gifted" skrode technology.

Good book overall, though the first half feels like some quite logical topics or issues were somewhat swept under the rug until they're conveniently pulled out from under it in the second half, and the end felt a tad grandiose and out of nowhere.