A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought)

Book was recommended by a friend, we wanted to buy it on the cheap, so we ordered a used book. It arrived in good condition, in good time and at a good price. Weird book, but no complaints about how order was handled.

Well thought out - deep - keeps your attention.

I often look for authors who delve into scientific realms that stretch the imagination and are not afraid to stretch the envelope and write in-depth. A great way to relax or shift your mind to a mode where all things become possible.

A captivating second entry in the Zones of Thought series. Vinge does an impressive job of crafting a slow-burning and simultaneously tense plot that reveals the history of the founder of the Qeng Ho Empire set against the backdrop of an alien world at the dawn of an industrial revolution. As the inhabitants of Arachna enjoy an age of progress, the Qeng Ho and the Emergency wait and watch from their deepness in the sky.

The concept of "focus" was perhaps the most unique idea presented in this overly-long space opera. However,the mechanism of attaining focus was a bit of a reach from a biologic standpoint. This book had engrossing characters. I especially enjoyed the concept of a mind that could be an Einstein, an Edison, a Teller, and a Skinner all wrapped up in one head, The book could have used a bit stronger editing to tauten the story line and pick up the pace.

This book is a decent read, but not anything particularly impressive. The story is alright, but this book is far longer than it needs to be and the second half of it quickly becomes a chore.

The author invents several terms with no definition ever provided and refers to things bizarrely. The units of time in the book are seconds, Msecs, Gsecs, etc and it is maddening trying to figure out what these units are as they seem vague concepts at most. The constant reference to software as automation is annoying. In essence, you don't really get a clear understanding of what is going on until the last quarter of the book.

This book is a decent read, but not anything particularly impressive. The story is alright, but this book is far longer than it needs to be and the second half of it quickly becomes a chore.

The author invents several terms with no definition ever provided and refers to things bizarrely. The units of time in the book are seconds, Msecs, Gsecs, etc and it is maddening trying to figure out what these units are as they seem vague concepts at most. The constant reference to software as automation is annoying. In essence, you don't really get a clear understanding of what is going on until the last quarter of the book.

Eight thousand years into the future, the humankind has undergone "The Age of Failed Dreams". There is no "strong AI", no complex nano-machines or general assemblers, and no faster than light travel or communication. Yet humans travels between the stars, terraform planets, have encountered two (and are about to encounter the third!) intelligent species; medical advances, suspended animation, and relativistic time dilation aboard Bussard Ramjet ("ramscoop") equipped ships has drastically expanded lifespans. Since hardware has not advanced much in recent times, programming rarely involves writing new code, but rather adapting layers and layers of centuries old code (some going back to "The Old Earth") to new tasks and environments. There are positions such as "programmer-at-arms" and "programmer-archaeologist".

The Qeng Ho (pronounced "Cheng Ho", after Zheng He -- a Ming Dynasty Chinese seafarer who has ventured with enormous fleets to the coast of Africa, Arabia, and the Malay Archipelago) is a relatively liberal human culture that trades between the stars and uses the UNIX epoch as its time system. Qeng Ho undertakes an expedition to the On-Off star (named so as it periodically turns itself on for 35 years, and then turns itself off for the next 215 to relight again in a highly predictable manner) 50 light years away from their starting point, the biggest wonder of the universe close to the known Human Space. Decision to undertake the expedition is made when they discover (by capturing spark-gap radio signals in Morse-like code) the only planet in its orbit is home to a civilization of Spider-like creatures who live in a world not dissimilar from the human twentieth century (they hibernate when the On-Off is off, so progress is interrupted by 215-year "darks").

On the way there, they are (as expected) met by the "Emergents", a totalitarian human civilization that has recently emerged from a dark age (a major theme in the book are civilizations losing advanced technology including space travel and falling back into barbarism) and uses "Focus", a particularly nasty combination of mind control and slavery. Emergents ambush the Qeng Ho and are able to Focus many of them, but as a result of the Qeng-Ho Emergent conflict, neither the Emergent nor the Qeng Ho ships are capable of traveling back to their home worlds. They must now await the time that the Spider civilization advances to the point where they can repair their ramscoops.

There are several lines in the story: the lives of Qeng Ho and Emergents in orbit around the On-Off star and preparing for contact with the Spiders; the story of a liberal-minded group of Spiders centered around "Sherkarner Underhill", who is a (quoting a character in the book) "von Neumman, Minsky, Einstein..." in one. Finally, there is the back-story of the Qeng Ho and human progress in space, told by Pham Nuwen. Pham Nuwen -- also a character in the earlier Fire Upon The Deep -- was born a medieval prince on a fallen colony world, but has become a Great Man of the Qeng Ho and a founder of its modern incarnation.

This summary does very little justice to the book as is each chapter is laden with fascinating ideas. Dr. Vinge is a Computer Scientist and a mathematician and there is the above-mentioned discussion of what programming would be like in the future. Sensor networks and distributed systems / networking in general play a huge role in the story and are portrayed realistically (I say this as a developer working close to that space). It is quite possibly a true work of "Computer Science fiction". Vinge has popularized the idea of The Singularity, yet through a plot device introduced in "Fire Upon The Deep" The Singularity does not happen in the section of the Galaxy that contains the Qeng Ho space and our Earth. The Spider story-line is just plain fun to read at times, as it harkens back to our stories of greater inventions and scientific progress during what future humans depicted in the story call "The Dawn Age". Humans remain humans and Spiders are deliberately depicted in a humanized way: love is a strong part of each of the sub-stories.

One thing to keep in mind is that the book is rather dark in places. The author rightly avoids glorifying totalitarianism: we don't see philosopher kings, instead we see sadistic, compulsively lying, and brutal apparatchiks of tyranny who own human beings and plot against each other, all while claiming to be working for the "common good". Slavery is depicted in its full brutality and not in a "Gone In The Wind" matter: we see brain damage from Focus, humans being given as gifts, and being reduced to machines. The aliens in the story may literally resemble giant spiders living in dark (to the human eyes -- the spiders can see UV) quarters, but the most grotesque monsters depicted are human. In all, the graphic nature of Emergent cruelty is not hidden, which at times makes the book difficult to read (I would not recommend this book to younger readers for this reason). However, the graphic and realistic portrayal is justified as a welcome and refreshing balance to much of the fiction that glorified totalitarian societies from Ancient Sparta to today's tyrants. Some reviewers objected to such a "one-sided portrayal", but it matches closely the actual narrative told by victims of totalitarianism.

In all this is one of the books that demonstrates clearly how text can show what no motion picture can: while the plot could make for a great movie or a movie series, much of what is describes would be nearly impossible to properly convey on a screen.

The story unfolds slowly, you read through most of it getting a mesh of names, things that happen, and background feel.

You arrive to the "climax", and start to grasp what is happening, suddenly people make sense and the story unfolds.

Both there is little to this story to make it more than an interesting idea.

Sorry I didn't have fun reading this book, I kept reading as I like the author, and I was hoping things would change.

Too bad it didn't.

Hope you enjoy it more than I do.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary has a great set of definitions for PONDEROUS: 1, of very great weight; 2. unwieldy or clumsy because of weight and size; and 3 .oppressively or unpleasantly dull. That pretty much sums it up. It was randomly selected for our books club but none of us had managed to finish the book. Most of us stopped no more than a quarter of the way in.

Decent premise. But the length of this book was 350 pages too long. Do yourself a favor and skip every other page.

At the end, I was simply hoping all the characters ended up in a black hole as the "anti matter" took hold.

The author needs a decent editor in the worst way...

Read primarily if you're interested in feeling what it's like to die of boredom. No one cares about giant, anthropomorphic spiders, but you'll be reading about them for pages upon pages upon pages.

Admittedly the hard sci-fi concepts are slick, but they are few between.

Yup, as many other user-reviewers state, one of the not-to-be-missed sci-fi novels of the last 30 years.

It's long. See if you like Fire upon the Deep first.

I think some of the best writing I have ever read in ANY field. Certainly some of the best plotting in ANY genre of novels. Especially if you are a writer yourself, you will know how challenging it must be to tackle a project with THREE races, three plotlines which all have to pay off. I have never seen three plot lines woven together more skillfully or effectively.

I was amazed at the lack of character stereotypes. Each person feels real and acts real. This makes their action engaging and also not predictable.

I imagine Vinge challenging himself: 'Let's see, I need a new sympathetic alien race. What would be an interesting challenge for me? I know! I'll make spiders seems appealing, this is a worthy challenge.' Indeed, what we end up with in the first 2-3 score of spider entries is a Wind in the Willows--Spider version. Amazing.

Some people have bad days. Others have bad years. These people learn what it's like to have bad decades. And to make matters worse, it turns out the spiders are smarter than they are. Hence is life in Vinge's universe. What fun!

Set years and years before "A Fire Upon the Deep" (and with nary a nod toward that novel's "Zones of Thought"), this one features two sets of human civilizations in slower than light ships venturing across the galaxy toward a planet that has a non-human intelligent civilization, unfortunately hamstrung by the fact their star decides to turn off for a chunk of a cycle, forcing the many-legged inhabitants to undergo a form of hibernation to survive. However, they are figuring out ways around it and everyone is salivating at the prospect of making first contact and reaping the multitude of benefits, most of which are concerned with making people rich. The two groups, the Qeng Ho (the nicely bohemian and free trader types) and the Emergents (the mean Bad totalitarian types) arrive at almost the same time, but a meet and greet proposed by the Emergents winds up being the cover for a rather unpleasant ambush. A bunch of ships are wrecked in the process, basically stranding what's left of everyone else but to make matters worse this is the point where the Emergents decide to unveil their creepiest trick: by mastering a virus that once almost killed them called "mindrot" they are able to force people into Focus, where they become enslaved and horribly obsessed with a single task. It makes them terribly efficient, in the same way that your refrigerator is. Now the remnants have to wait the years out, rotating everyone but a small sliver into suspended animation for years at a time, as the aliens down below are starting to figure out how to make technology awesome and maybe give the humans a way out of this mess. And make someone rich.

Thus the plot chugs along, alternating between the Qeng Ho choking under the Emergent boot (or being Focused and not caring), the Emergent leaders bwah-ha-haing over everything or the rather charming Spiders, who are discovering ways around the fact that their sun decides to take a nap for good chunks of time. In the mix of it comes Pham Nuwen, who is in disguise on the Qeng Ho crew as Pham Trinli and rather desperate that no one figure out that he's a) thousands of years old relatively speaking, b) famous and c) rather interested in taking over the fleet himself. So he pretends to be a bumbling old man while plotting to overthrow everyone. Meanwhile the spiders have babies and they are cute.

For all the unstoppable Space Opera sophistication that characterized "A Fire Upon the Deep", this one comes across as almost endearingly old school. Vinge's eye for future technologies and the implications of them are in his usual good form, the details surrounding the concepts of Focus and localizers could probably power novels on their own and his look at the differing aspect of ship culture in deep space manifests itself in subtle way (the idea that they would mark time purely in seconds, because day and night and days are meaningless in space). The Emergents make fairly nasty villains and watching the Qeng Ho attempt to come up with some kind of counterplan while literally everything on the ship is watching them all the time (down to body language) makes for some interesting tensions as alliances are both carefully plotted and induced on the fly, while meticulously orchestrated plans are tossed to the wind and improvised in an instant. Meanwhile the Spiders have their own separate problems as their resident scattered genius keeps coming up with ways to outwit the planet and change the culture of a society in the process. It proceeds along itself nicely, with the alien and people plots seemingly not on track to come together at all except in rather explosive fashion, while along the way we're given various intersections of personalities and a slow merging of the human cultures due to necessity, even as the Emergents can't stop being all bwah-ha-ha.

Which is probably the biggest criticism one can make about the book. From a fantastically sciencey Space Opera level, the book is nicely epic while still retaining something resembling a human scale, thrusting humans to the edge of the unknown, colliding with alien cultures while bickering amongst themselves and nearly ruining everything in the process. The stakes are high and the rewards range from staying alive to having the tools required to perhaps take over the galaxy. However, the human scale remains somewhat lacking, which is not a unique problem to these types of stories. While he does his best to intermingle shades of grey, there is never any doubt at any moment who you're supposed to be rooting for. The Qeng Ho are good-hearted and full of Heinleinian freedom (and any working with the Emergents are coerced or misguided) while the Emergents are often hissibly evil in their motivations, proud of their enslaving ability and their naked lust for power, personified in two of their leaders who perform nearly every task on the "bad boys" checklist. This means that most of the characters come across as unavoidably flat and while the book is long enough to give changes of heart some heft and setup, often it lacks the impact that it should have (Pham Nuwen has a shift in motivation that changes the entire tone of the backhalf of the novel based on a single speech that isn't that amazing). Later two characters are literally told to fall in love, after the book has spent a good amount of time beating it into us. Subtlety is not always at play here.

The aliens are another thing entirely, coming across as disconcerting at first, almost too much so. They passages are so human-like in outlook and feeling that you almost immediately wonder if Vinge is slipping, or something else is up. As it turns out, it winds up being more of the latter, but in the process we get a rather interesting contrast to the big science mind control slave adventures going on in the sky, as the Spiders grow old and have kids and transform the entire planet. It all leads into a plot twist that still seems to come out of nowhere, even as I was keeping an eye out for it, coloring everything we learned about the Spiders. Yet even with that revelation they never come across as truly alien in the way we've come to expect later, mostly acting like people with extra hands and eyes. Having seen what authors like CJ Cherryh could do with making humanoid aliens seem honestly alien (and managing the reverse trick of making people seem like aliens as well), it strikes me as both the easy way out and a throwback to how aliens used to be in SF. Which, again, makes for some fairly traditional SF adventure reading but "A Fire Upon the Deep" pushed so many boundaries in its grandness that I was surprised to see Vinge retreating to something so safe, no matter how skillfully executed it might be.

And it is. I won't say that a seven hundred page novel is a page turner but it does manage to keep hold of a certain level of suspense along its length and just when you think its starting to go on auto-pilot we cut back to a Pham Nuwen flashback or another exciting Spider adventure and it provides a nice refresher before we dive back into the plans for revolution. Evoking the past just as much (or more) than the future, Vinge doesn't exactly scale the heights of that last masterpiece but manages to prove he can play in the same sandbox without repeating himself and even if the innovations aren't as cutting or the science as startling, the ride manages to be entertaining all the same.