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Loading... A Deepness in the Sky (1999)by Vernor Vinge
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I am reading Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought novels in publication order. This second book is set earlier than the first. It does not engage the "Zonological" ideas introduced in A Fire Upon the Deep. It is structured very similarly however, with two parallel and converging narratives, one of which is cutting-edge space drama featuring (the original, in this case) Pham Nuwen, and the other of which takes place in a radically non-human planet-bound society. The space story involves grappling between two human spacefaring societies. The Qeng Ho are Nuwen's mature interstellar mercantile culture, while the Emergents are the totalitarian development of a more local society whose hypostasized Emergency has resulted in an innovative form of enslavement. Simultaneous missions to contact the nascently industrializing aliens of Arachna erupt into catastrophic conflict, leaving the two competitors in a lopsided symbiosis full of intrigue. The business on the world of Arachna is translated for the reader using conventions later rationalized as the work of the humans surveilling the planet from space. Although the denizens are quasi-arthropod "Spiders," they are characterized with Hobbitsy sorts of English names and traits, such as Sherkaner Underhill and Victory Smith. Since their technological level and social challenges better match our own, these creatures actually come off as more "human" than the either of the human cultures, at least during the first three-quarters of the book before the first in-person meetings between humans and Spiders. I found it interesting what a mature figure Pham Nuwen is in this book, "resurrected" at its start in a more figurative manner than in A Fire Upon the Deep, but still with an enormous prior history. Despite a serious developmental arc within the scope of the current story, and some significant retrospectives to flesh out his character and motivation, Vinge has left many centuries to play with if he should ever want to compose a pre-prequel using Nuwen as the connective thread. Big ideas that are central to this book include the coercive management of human attention, and the epistemological weaponization of networked information technology. These both feel more topical now than they would have been when the book was first published in 1999. Vinge also seems to have put a new turn on Ibn Khaldūn's theories of civilizational growth and decay, and the practical superiority of organized merchants to wealthy despots. These notions become intrinsic to the premise that a sufficient "industrial ecology" is needed to support productive interaction with interstellar travelers, who cannot carry such an ecology themselves even at the scale of a fleet. But the industrialized civilizations are necessarily finite in duration, acquiring vulnerabilities with their efficiencies. Like the previous Zones of Thought book, A Deepness in the Sky is long--eventful, characterful, and thoughtful--and it took all my reading attention for a couple of weeks in order to get through it. Looking back at my review of A Fire Upon the Deep, I find myself in the same position of being glad to have read it and being unwilling to charge on to the next one without a significant pause to recover. And I already own a copy of The Children of the Sky. Great world building, so-so story. Vernor Vinge proves once again that he's a master in thinking sci-fi concepts. This story has some very solid yet unique sci-fi ideas. Even if he ignores the (brilliant) main concept of "zones of thought" in this one, ideas like the "Focus" are equally powerful given how plausible they sound. This is a concept that will stay with me for a long time! Unfortunately, he also shows once again he's just an ok storyteller, in my opinion. One-sided characters, goofy happy endings, and absolutely unnecessary loose ends marred this one a bit for me. “So high, so low, so many things to know.” In a “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge “A Fire Upon The Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” are very similar: a beautiful comparative analysis study could be written about them. It would be worth reading “A Deepness in the Sky” if you insert at least one other book between the two novels, then perhaps the repetition is not so boring. What bothered me the most is that the evil character, Tomas Nau, looks a lot like Lord Steel from “A Fire Upon The Deep”. Sanos was only one of the brilliantly created evil character types in Talon, and it made it to both novels which was unfortunate. SF nowadays reveals an extensive problem in the genre and the people defining the genre. Many of these people suffer from the Dragon Ball Z problem of continuous one-upsmanship. The impulse is to continue pushing the slider further and further into the extreme to define new territory and they rarely seem to ask whether there isn't an intriguing new way of looking at it which doesn't require pushing the utter furthest extent in order to out-do the previous effort. Of course they're lobbing around gods; there's no place else to go in that direction and none of them have really seen a fresh way to tackle it yet. I think there are some other answers that still need exploring. Some of Vinge, Brin and Reynolds' best works are confined to remarkably low tech or fairly confined, non-cosmic locales. Vinge's “Zones of Thought” story was all in the low-tech extent, despite that burp in the middle where the zones shift —a phenomenon that failed to impact the story, infuriatingly— and "Deepness in the Sky" was also all slow zone and confined to one world. Maybe a part of the problem is the preconception about what it should be, and trying to measure against that. I suppose people like Asimov and Clarke had the benefit that they were early in the field and not competing with a world that already remembers their work, forcing them to try to out-do it. Vinge’s language is not simple due to the many peculiar expressions and abstract ideas, and the deciphering is not always there, but it seems that Vinge intended things to be thought-provoking. The plot is twisty and fascinating enough but several times I felt that I had lost the thread (or the desire, momentum), but then in these parts I finally found something that kept the interest going, and even later, things became more significant in the light of the overall picture. Belongs to SeriesPFAF (90) Zones of Thought (1) Belongs to Publisher SeriesSF Masterworks (New design) Is contained inThe Zones of Thought Trilogy by Vernor Vinge (indirect) AwardsNotable Lists
The story of the Spiders, inhabitants of a planet where the sun regularly stops shining for periods of 200 years, during which they are frozen in ice. The novel picks them up emerging from their most recent hibernation in a frenzy of activity and innovation to make up for lost time. By the author of A Fire upon the Deep. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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[Audiobook note: narrator is meh.] ( )