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Vernor Vinge, a scientist who can tell a good yarn, another anomaly among genre writers, the other anomalous authors being China Miéville and David Brin, and they are all bald! Makes me want to shave my head, I bet Patrick Stewart can write amazing books if he wanted to, make it so Pat!A few months ago I read A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge's first "Zones of Thought" novel, it quickly barged its way into my all-time top 20 list. A Deepness in the Sky is not going to dislodge another book from that l...
I was imagining a movie version while I was reading this one. half of the movie would be animated and would feature adorable spider-aliens. love those aliens. but I don't know what I'd do with the other half, and the endless cycle of rape and mind control that happens to a particularly sympathetic character. I don't think I'd want that in my movie.
In the 'The Sixth Sense', the character Malcolm tries to tell a story. Unfortunately, it's a bad story, which Cole immediately picks up on, and comments, "You have to add some twists and stuff."I tend to think that the essence of a well-crafted story is the unexpected. A good story has unexpected tragedies, unexpected joys, and unexpected crowning moments of awesome. Yet, there are a surprisingly few good writers that are also good story tellers. In fact, when it comes right down to it, I think
This is a ‘hard’ space opera, with speed of light limit on communication/travel, quite unusual for the genre. While this is a prequel/sequel (the story happens earlier, but the novel was written later) to award-winning A Fire Upon the Deep, it can be read as a standalone, even if in this case you’ll miss the tragedy (warning: spoilers). I read is as a Buddy read in May 2020 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group.The story has an amazing start, that sets the scope of the novel: “The manhunt e...
This is a fantastic story. Books like this are why people read science fiction. Sure, it's got aliens and spaceships and technology that you have to use your imagination to understand, but at the core of it is a series of characters who are undergoing struggles that are truly timeless. I love this stuff.I probably never will get tired of a well-written story where people are struggling against a ruthless tyrant. This is represented well here by Tomas Nau, the Emergent Podmaster, in control of hi...
Vernor Vinge has hit a home run twice in a row. A Deepness in the Sky had all the fantastic alienness mixed with human drama and far future sci-fi awesomeness that made A Fire Upon the Deep one of my favorite SF novels ever. I've become a lot pickier about my sci-fi, but A Deepness in the Sky has held up even better than the first book in the twelve years since it was written.At its heart is a conflict between two starfaring cultures: the Qeng Ho, a culture of interstellar traders who take the l...
An interesting variation on a science fiction theme I am especially fond of, the first-contact story. In this case, the monstrous alien invaders are the humans, conspiring to foment nuclear war among a race of unsuspecting intelligent arachnoids. To make things more interesting (and give us some anthropomorphs to cheer for), the humans are also divided up into good guys and bad guys.Of course, the above variation has already been explored in SF. Frederik Pohl's Jem springs to mind; indeed, Pohl
A Deepness in the Sky: Might have been interesting at half the lengthOriginally posted at Fantasy LiteratureA Fire Upon the Deep was a big success for Vernor Vinge, winning the 1993 Hugo Award. Seven years later, he followed up with A Deepness in the Sky, set 20,000 years earlier in the same universe, and this captured the 2000 Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Award. I came to both books with high expectations and was eager for a big-canvas space opera filled with mind-boggling technologies, exot...
4.5 stars. First--This is one of the best books I have read in a very long time, and, despite the fact that it doesn't quite earn a 5 star rating from me (more on that later), I would highly recommend the book to anyone who's remotely interested in science fiction. It's a testament to the book that I managed to finish it while in the midst of an extraordinarily busy semester. Vinge really hits the balance of "science" and "fiction" almost perfectly--and, even though the book weighs in at a hefty...
I loved this and was up all night finishing it. That's rather rare with science fiction, at least hard science fiction. Few science fiction writers--hell, few writers--have Vinge's sense of pacing and ability to create suspense. That's because you care about his characters intensely, human as well as alien. Not something you find enough in Hard Science Fiction--and Vinge brings off some mind-blowing concepts without ever falling into infodump or other awkward constructions. I thought I had read
An excellent book, that I don't love quite as much as "A Fire Upon the Deep" -- but it's still pretty amazing. The review to read is Jo Walton's: https://www.tor.com/2011/09/28/a-fini...Sample: "One of the things SF can do is show you characters with different mindsets. Anyone can write a character whose dreams have failed. Vinge’s writing people from whole societies whose dreams have failed over millennia. And yet, this is a cheerful optimistic book in which awful things happen but good wins ou...
I was yearning for the resolution of this story, but now I’m sad that the book is over!This top notch sci-fi novel revolves around two star-faring factions of humans that converge on a planet of interest and the spider-like aliens that inhabit said planet. The spiders are by far the most sympathetic, but every character is interesting and there is a lot of them. We follow some spiders through large parts of their life, and their stories sometimes left me in tears. I am very impressed by how Ving...
Unfortunately this book wasn't meant for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the first Zones of Thoughts novel, but this second one was too much of several things for me to care: too many characters, too much talking, too many (and too long) flashbacks.There are terrific ideas like the on/off sun and what this means for the evolution of a species, or the conflict of two human fractions with very different ideas of society.Even though it was handled a bit clumsily prose-wise the irritating view on the spide...
I honestly have no idea how to even rate this. Objectively, it's a very solid book. Vinge's prose is kind of dry and his habit of throwing a bunch of hints at you before really telling you what's going on is alternately effective and obnoxious.I found the first few hundred pages terribly hard to read, though. It's not a pleasant story, and Vinge doesn't pull any punches. If you're like me and triggered by deception, manipulation, and oh, rape with bonus memory-erasure... buyer beware. Vinge also...
When the spidey senses are tingling, better watch out for 8 legged surprises spinning towards your colonialists.It´s a shame that insects, reptiles, amphibians, plants, and fungi are always playing a secondary or superficial, not very detailed antagonist role, that no writer deems or wants to blow up genre conventions to mix up something new, to create a detailed vision of how a society with insectoid industrialization and culture would function, collaborate, what families, war, traditions would...
I had, it must be admitted, a hard time getting into this one. I'd pick it up and read a bit, but not make much real headway. Partly it's because other books that people had on hold at the library came in, or I needed to blast something through to be ready for my book club. These external factors, however, weren't all of it. Once I finally did get into the book, I really enjoyed it.Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can re...
8/10Following the superlative A Fire Upon the Deep that showed his vision of a far future, reminiscing something from the magic of the Golden Age’s best and crafting a space saga of grand-scope, Vernor Vinge goes in the Hugo Award-winning A Deepness in the Sky, the second novel of the Zones of Thought series, thirty thousand years into the past, taking us in a story of Traders, slavers and aliens, but also of exploration and exploitation, conspiracy and treachery, and conflict and survival; in a...
I love science fiction stories that incorporate novel concepts, and this one introduces several intriguing concepts. First, there is the variable sun that goes through a long on-off cycle. Second, there are the alien creatures living on a planet in the sun's system that have evolved to live through this cycle. They are called "spiders" because they are short and have multiple limbs. Then there are the Qeng Ho, a loosely organized human civilization whose culture is based on interstellar trading
I don't know about you, but I spend an inordinate amount of time meditating upon the far future of humanity. I don't just worry about the future of my generation, or the future of the generation after mine, or the future of a couple of generations down the line. I'm talking one-, ten-, fifty-thousand years into the future. Will humanity still exist—would we recognize it as humanity even if it does? How many times between now and then will civilizations rise and fall? Because if there's one const...
Have you ever read someone else's review of a book and thought, "Yes! That is exactly how I felt!" Well, Apatt has nailed this one for me. To the extent that I'm not sure what else to add.Seriously. Go read his review first, and then come back to hear me witter on if you're still interested...............So what can I add to that?My first experience with Vinge was Rainbow's End, which I did not get along with. I thought it was rubbish. I picked up A Fire Upon the Deep as a Hugo winner, with