A Fire Upon the Deep: 1 (Zones of Thought)

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In A Deepness in the Sky, the effects of relativity, advanced medicine and prosthetics allows people to live hundreds or thousands of years. Pham Nuwen, constantly travelling, is possibly the oldest of the Qeng Ho, living hundreds of years from his perspective and much, much longer from most other reference frames. That, and he shows up in A Fire Upon the Deep— over thirty thousand years later.

The first grand SF I've read in ages...Vinge is one of the best visionary writers of SF today.” — David Brin, author of Earth In A Deepness in the Sky, this is how humans look to the Giant Spiders, and they think it's unspeakably cute. The humans resemble baby Spiders, who only have two eyes. When they mature, most of their carapace becomes one large visual sensor. Even very hard-bitten, cynical Spiders were hard-pressed to resist that effect. A Fire Upon the Deep. While most of the good guys survive, and so does the planet on which most of the novel unfolded, an enormous area of High Beyond is converted to Slow Zone. This destroys the Blight, which is dependent on High Beyond technology for its survival. It is also the deathblow for trillions of beings and countless civilizations across a huge swath of the galaxy, whose existences depended on FTL and the same advanced tech as sustained the Blight.Exposition Beam: "Godshatter" is basically a really intense Exposition Beam, except that when God puts everything he knows inside the brain of a Puny Mortal, it tends to turn out unpleasantly for the mortal. The Slow Path: In A Deepness in the Sky, Thomas Nau spends no time in hibernation, so he ages faster than everyone else. Ritser Brughel's final fate in A Deepness in the Sky. At the end he's the only human at the disposal of the Spiders, so they're going to keep him alive as long as possible to run tests on him. And he's arachnophobic.

Vernor Steffen Vinge is a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels A Fire Upon The Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999) and Rainbows End (2006), his Hugo Award-winning novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004), as well as for his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences. Tyrathect claimed to be a school teacher, but somewhere in her (him? gender preference wasn't entirely clear yet) was a killer. Faux Affably Evil: Master villains can be distinguished by ability to be charming and polite up to the moment the Cold-Blooded Torture starts, and maybe even after, while inferior underlings and pretenders have trouble hiding their true nature.The plot of the novel describes the ambitious activities of Straumli Realm, a human civilization that lives in the highest part of the Beyond Zone, near the Transcend Zone. They are taking part in an expedition to investigate a data archive but become compromised by the release of an ancient superintelligent power known as the Blight. The Blight begins to take over the High Lab where the Straumli Realm is doing their research. The humans attempt to escape in two ships, one for adults and one for children. The one for adults ends up being destroyed by the Blight but the children survive. The next Zone beyond the Slow Zone is called the Beyond, and this is where artificial intelligence dominates. Travel and communication both happen here faster than the speed of light. There are some human beings in this zone, but all originate from a single Norwegian ethnic group that managed to arrive from the Slow Zone. The Hugo judges that is. Why is this book still so popular? I just finished part one, and I'm honestly considering calling it quits. I read maybe 20 or so new (to me) SF books a year and I haven't given up on one in about 2 years, and that was the second ringworld book. The language is repetitive, the characters have all the depth and complexity of a bowl of oatmeal, and the dispatches sound as childish as the dialogue featuring literal children. The Blight expands, taking over races and "rewriting" their people to become its agents, murdering several other Powers, and seizing other archives in the Beyond, looking for what was taken. It finally realizes where the danger truly lies and sends a hastily assembled fleet in pursuit of the Out of Band II. Benevolent Alien Invasion: Inverted in A Fire Upon the Deep, where humans are the aliens invading the medieval Tines planet and changing its culture to benefit both species. Granted, the invasion wasn't intentional (a cargo ship carrying children in stasis crash-landed on the planet and the humans only expected to stay long enough for rescuers to find them, but things got much more complicated), but by the end of the book, the humans have upset the political balance of a large part of the planet. By the start of The Children of the Sky, the sole adult human has become co-ruler of the most powerful nation on the planet, is working to advance the Tines' technology beyond Space Age levels within a century, and the human children are intermingling with the native Tines and creating a social revolution almost unintentionally.