A Fire upon the Deep

Not since reading Hyperion have I felt this divided about a work of SF. There's no way that I would be able to cover the plot of A Fire Upon the Deep in an appropriate amount of time, but I'll cover the basics for posterity's sake.

The Milky Way is split up into concentric rings radiating out from the galactic center that define the upper limit of thought and technology. At the core, in the Unthinking Depths, there is no rational thinking, no civilization, no sophonts of any kind. On the outskirts of the galaxy, in the Transcend, intelligent species become what essentially amount to gods. It is here, at the edge of the Transcend, that a group of human researchers discover an ancient, forgotten data archive. It is here that they show more unknowingly awaken something called the Blight, a virus in the data that is capable of spreading and assimilating all life into a corrupted hive mind. Some of these researchers escape with a potential antidote to the Blight, and flee to the lower levels of the galaxy in an effort to escape it. Their shuttle crashes on a world of medieval technology inhabited by the Tines, a species of intelligent weasels/dogs that function as a collective intelligence; 4-8 individual members that are otherwise only semi-conscious combining to create one whole individual. The plot centers around these humans as they struggle to survive and understand the Tines, and another group's desperate attempt to find and recover the antidote; to prevent the destruction of the galaxy.

Like I said, it's a lot. That's just the bare bones of it. And what sweet, delicious, dopamine filled bones they are. A significant portion of Vinge's ideas give me the adrenaline rush of creativity and newness that I think is stereotypically associated with SF. I love the Zones of Thought. I love the Tines, their collective intelligence, the philosophical questions about the soul that they raise. I love the skroderiders and their adaptation to long-term versus short-time memory. I love that the galaxy feels vast and unknowable in the quantity of intelligent species. I love the implied billions of years in history that sits under these transient cultures. The richness and sheer quantity of ideas in A Fire Upon the Deep make it super memorable.

Surprisingly enough, I even enjoyed the ending, which is not something I can say about many of these sweeping space operas (or to be frank SF in general). The motif of oceans, waves, the inter-tidal space was quite striking. It is often in the messy and violent spaces between two disparate things, where they meet and cohabitate, that some of the most unique creatures and ideas can come from. As this is true of the ocean and the shore, such is true of the contact points between layers of the galaxy. Much like the ocean, the galaxy also follows a cyclical pattern of events, like the tides or the discrete repetition of an individual wave on the shore, that have massive effects on the species that call that place home. Even though the effects may indeed be world ending on a small scale, the system as whole continues to function, and will provide refuge for new individuals, species, and ideas in the future. I enjoyed how Vinge tied the Skroderiders and Tines into this broader analogy.

Where Vinge fails miserably is in the details: in the moment by moment execution of these ideas and the plot that holds it together. Battle sequences are often muddled, confusing, and poorly drawn. The plot follows several side tangents for far too long, which is ultimately one of the factors leading to its undeniable bloat. The actions of the Blight always happen the background; we barely get to see one of the coolest things in the whole book. Most of the characters are tossed off and shallow in their portrayal. The main Tinish villain is not just intellectually stupid, but cartoonishy so. The love interest between Pham and Ravna was completely unnecessary. Too often Vinge's writing is amateurish and beneath his true capabilities, because infrequently he throws in a line or two that actually have some artistry to them.

None of these flaws are a death sentence on their own, but totaled together they make for a nasty quagmire of quicksand that Vinge frequently dives headfirst into. There's also the dated idea of the Net, that all intelligent species communicate on. Perhaps in 1992 this was forward looking, but today it's a hunk of limestone amongst glittering diamonds. Are we really meant to believable that the best communication that the galaxy can muster is a 4chan forum?

Unfortunately, what I am left feeling is that; had these concepts and ideas been given to a better writer, this could've easily been one of the best books I've ever read. Vinge's capabilities as a writer acted as an anchor dragging everything down. I also fear that much of my enjoyment derived from the novelty and unknown of the zones of thought. Were I to re-read this novel, I wouldn't have the newness to balance out the drudgery. More than most books, A Fire Upon the Deep benefits from a blind reading. Even though the first hundred pages were by far my favorite, I still understand why it has the massive reputation it does. show less

Hard to overstate how wild and fresh and breathtaking this was when it first came out. Also hard to overstate that decades later it is still one of, if not the, towering works of space opera. Not only does it situate itself in a vast teeming galactic stage, it also manages to encompass that setting from its top to its lower depths with gripping drama and amazing vistas, and even if part of that setting is medieval, undeveloped cultures beingg changed through meeting a more advanced culture is a staple of space opera, it still manages to strike awe in its alien group-mind species, the Tines, to say nothing of the Skroderiders.

Ambitious humans venture into the edge of space known as the Transcend and awaken a Blight, a terrifying threat show more that immediately overwhems them. An escaping family make it to a distant uncharted planet, carrying with them something that the Blight either fears or needs. A rescue attempt is dispatched, pursued by at least three fleets, so while the ship races against time, the survivors on the planet are trapped in the politics and machinations of the native Tines.

Honestly as fresh and exciting and mindbending as when I first read it way back when. show less

A Fire Upon the Deep is an action-packed space opera that also manages to be a fascinating exploration of radically different modes of thought, in a rich and surprising alien setting. Vinge's cosmology is based on an addition to the laws of physics, the Zones of Thought radiating out from the galactic: In the Unthinking Depths towards the galactic core, intelligent life is impossible. In the Slow Zone, physics works more or less like it does in real life (and in setting, Earth is buried somewhere in the Slow Zone.) In the Beyond, FTL, intuitive computers, and other sci-fi supertech work. And in the Transcend, vast and cool god-like intelligences live mayfly lives, lost in their own contemplation before leaving reality entirely, and show more occasionally sending artifacts and emissaries downwards. The action starts when an human expedition into the Transcend opens a 5 billion year-old archive, and instead of building a God, unleashes an ancient demon called the Blight. Two ships flee, and one is destroyed while the other jumps to an uncharted planet at the bottom of the Beyond, crewed by a family and 150 odd children in cold sleep. They have the bad luck to land in the territory of a local dictator, Lord Steel, and the parents are murdered in an ignorant attack on their ship. The children are separated and captured, 8-year old Jefri taken by Lord Steel and 14-year old Johanna rescued by travelers and taken to the more liberal realm of the Woodcarver. Meanwhile, up in the transcend, Ravna, a human librarian apprenticed to a major interstellar communications firms, puts together a rescue mission with the help of Pham Nuwen, a legendary hu,am hero reconstructed from a spaceship wreck by a Transcend Power, and two Skroderider traders; aliens descended from a sea anemone-like creature, and given mobility and short-term memory through the use of carts. They escape an attack by the Blight by the barest of margins, and it's a chase for the highest stakes.

The break-out stars of the books are the Tines, the alien species that Lord Steel and Wordcarver belong too, which captures Jefri and Johanna. The Tines are a dog-like group intelligence. A single Tine is a pathetic creature, but four or six of them together form a mind as intelligent as any human, using ultrasonic 'mindspeech' to create a coherent identity. Vinge explores the implications of Tine biology with both ease and depth, avoiding lengthy info-dumps while clearly laying out an alternative course of development. Because Tines think in the ultrasonic, pack-minds must stay fairly close together, and two packs can't mingle without losing all conscious control. The gestalt intelligence that is a Tine can be stable for centuries, adding new members as older bodies fade away, but inbreeding limits the successful lifespan. Much of the political conflict on the Tine's world is between Woodcarver's slow scientific experimentation, and the radical and unethical efforts Lord Steel and Flenserists to remake minds entirely, using torture and novel architectures to create Tines with singular capabilities never before seen on their world.

Johanna and Jefri are thrown into this mess and exploited to advance Tine technology, starting with gunpowder. Ironically, Johanna fights against Woodcarver, and the more or less benign Peregrine and Scriber, while Jefri is complete taken in by Lord Steel. Since Lord Steel has the starship, and the communication link to Ranva, he gets actual how-to guides for kickstarting a stagnant tech base, including breech loading howitzers and radios.

Meanwhile, in the Beyond, Ravna gets to see how dangerous the universe is close up. The Beyond culture expects things like a Class 2 Perversion to show up from the Transcend every thousand years or so and turn a few planets worth of sentients into tele-operated zombies, but the Blight is a threat of different level, and human polities are utterly destroyed by a combination of the Blight an opportunistic genocidal aliens. Pham Nuwen is an uncertain ally, either a true hero or an elaborate fraud constructed from a few strands of damaged DNA and memories faked up from adventure stories. The Skroderiders are revealed to be unwitting agents of the Blight, their billion-year old species containing backdoors that enable them to be mind-controlled.

One aspect of the book which I'm ambivalent on is the Net of a Millions Lies. While FTL communication is possible, the low bandwidth means it looks and works a lot like USENET circa 1993. The idiotic flamewars and misconceptions percolating through the Net Messages Ravna reads are entirely familiar even on the contemporary web. I'm not sure if it's great world-building (somethings never change), or edges on too-cute. Regardless, the great investigation of the minds of the Tines, and hints at the vast powers of the Transcend, along with a high-octane adventure plot, make for an ambitious book that succeeds at all of it's goals. show less

When I first read this book, years ago, I was blown away by the scope of the story and the intricacy and originality of the plot. Reading it again, I'm amazed at how well this book has weathered the years (it was written in 1992). Of the two parallel plot lines, the first time I read it I was more interested in the fate of the two children shipwrecked on the Tines' World among hostile, group-minded aliens and their complex and Machiavellian culture. This time, it was the story of the transcendent Power/Artificial Intelligence that is threatening to destroy the universe, and the small crew of four (one human female, one male human/puppet/zombie, two wagon-mounted kelp-like aliens) who are trying simultaneously to rescue the children and show more defeat the Power/A.I. Perversion. How these two stories tie together, and the deep history and culture of this far future galactic civilization, is an amazing and satisfying read. show less

Cartea se derulează în două planuri:
- unul space opera; mediocru și banal, pe alocuri de-a dreptul prost, cam 2,5/5; multă imaginație de formă (specii în diverse forme) dar aproape deloc de fond (o amenințare foarte meh și aventuri foarte ”seen those before”); o singură bătălie spațială, prost descrisă, personaje unidimensionale (Pham) sau practic lipsite de personalitate (plantoizii); l-am comparat constant cu Hamilton, și Vinge a pierdut de departe;
- unul ”first contact” excelent, 5 /5, cu o rasă originală ca idee și interesantă, cu intrigi, trădări și războaie bine descrise și captivante; cu personaje credibile, imprevizibile și complexe (Oțel, Pelerinul, Jupuitorul, regina - foarte bine create); show more m-a făcut mereu să mă gândesc la ”Shogun”, în sensul bun;
Per total, e undeva la 4 și ceva; am avut tendința să-i dau un 5, dar nu pot, pentru că m-au enervat foarte tare personajele care acționează stupid și orbește, credule până la tâmpenie (Ravna), sau fixate unidimesional doar pe-o obsesie (Johanna, Pham); de asemenea, telegramele mi s-au părut obositoare prin întreruperea constantă a ritmului și prin faptul că reprezintă o metodă foarte leneșă de a prezenta fundalul. O carte foarte bună, chiar și-așa, deci voi citi și continuările. show less

I first read this in the mid-'90s; I decided to return to it now and see how it's held up.

Quick take: I still love it.

Is it really one of the _Greatest SF Novels Ever_? Not really. It's got its flaws. It's also certainly not a good choice for fledgling SF readers.

However, it IS a riotously good Space Opera full of swagger, Big Concepts, galaxy-in-motion 'sturm und drang', and a cast of billions. You know, Cecil B. DeMille-level stuff, not indie film material. It takes your mind on a wild ride, and I enjoy it very much.

I liked A Fire Upon the Deep. This is a tale on a truly galactic scale, concerning the fate of dozens - maybe hundreds - of civilizations. Vinge worked in some nice original ideas, which is (for me) what SF is all about. His CS background shines through in his formulation of some of these ideas.

The book is set in the Milky Way and postulates different Zones delineated by concentric rings or spheres about the galactic core. The laws of physics change as a function of distance from the centre. At the core are the "Unthinking Depths," where higher intelligence itself is impossible. The next layer is the "Slow Zone," which contains Earth. This is followed by a gradient or layers of "the Beyond" where increasingly greater technology and show more intelligence are possible, and finally the "Transcend," inhabited only by godlike beings. This is an interesting concept and a useful plot point, but it nags a bit at me. Different physics in different parts of the galaxy is pretty far-fetched. We lowly human beings down here in the Slow Zone have actually devised ways to test for different physical laws elsewhere in the universe and we get a null result every time.

Another big, original idea is the group minds of the Tine packs. I thought of this as cluster computing due to Vinge's background. Biological Beowulf clusters? Neat-o! BUT… fast, high-volume connections between nodes are crucial to cluster computing. Vinge posits ultrasonic communication between individuals for the Tines. Sorry, but again I find this hard to swallow. Each individual Tine brain would need to simultaneously send and receive to five other units *and* process that information, in addition to the regular duties of managing its own body. When you see evidence of the processing power of a single Tine node, you can’t help but think the packs would have to be too short on both bandwidth and processing power to function as group minds. I suppose this could be explained away if the Tine packs only functioned in higher zones, but they don't appear to suffer any loss of function at all when they are clearly in the Slow Zone.

To include these concepts that are not faithful to real science is one thing, but to have the plot hinge on them entirely makes the "hard sf" appellation questionable (if you care about that sort of thing). Suspending disbelief, I found it an enjoyable story with high stakes and characters I cared about.

One last thing: To provide exposition and add depth to his universe, Vinge inserts usenet-like text (and occasionally video) posts from a galactic BB service. Some reviews are critical of this, saying it dates the story. I disagree, partly because I found these sections to be an enjoyable callback to 80s and 90s computing and besides, bandwidth could conceivably be a serious constraint in FTL communication. I buy it. show less