A Deepness in the Sky

I really want to rate this 5 stars. As it is my rating should be 4.5.

What made this book special for me was that I had no idea where the story was going. I read a lot and I often find that after reading 20-25% of a book I have a basic idea about the general outline of the story. This often makes reading a bit boring. But with this book I had no idea, mainly because there were so many options. There were some brilliant twists and a tiny remark at the end which cleared up what was a rather big question for me.

So why isn't this a 5 star rating? I think the ending was a bit too pat, and a couple of what should have been major issues were not addressed. But overall this is a rather minor problem. Definitely one of the best sf books I have read. ( )

DNF at page 122.

A prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep set some 30,000 years prior, this is a work of hard scifi with a strong military feel as two human civilizations come into conflict over a planet which home to a sentient alien species. Unlike the first book, which greatly intrigued me with the culture of the pack-minded Tines, this one presents aliens that are essentially quite human but with a lot more arms. Furthermore, the pace dragged to the point of tedium and presenting all times in seconds was disruptive to the reading experience. ( )

I’ve read two of Vernor Vinge’s other books – the space epic A Fire Upon the Deep and the near-future thriller Rainbows End – both of which would be included on any list of my favorite sci-fi stories of all time. A Deepness in the Sky is a distant prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, following the adventures of an expeditionary merchant fleet as it travels to the celestial anomaly known as the OnOff star, a distant solar system home to a pre-flight species of intelligent arachnids dubbed the “Spiders”.

This is one of those instances where I think reading the books in chronological order would have been superior to reading them in the order they were published. A Fire Upon the Deep is a true epic – the characters traverse vast interstellar distances, technology has been pushed to further extremes, their adversaries are malevolent superintelligences from the galactic halo, and the fate of the universe may well be at stake. A Deepness in the Sky, while no less enjoyable a story (and actually a fair bit more readable), is of a distinctly more local scale. The reader follows the actions of a few ships around a single planet. There are mysteries to uncover, but nothing quite approaching the eldritch monstrosities of a few millennia later. It is by no means bad, but it is a very distinct shift in tone.

The reader will nevertheless notice the parallels between the stories almost immediately. As before, a spacefaring civilization has come across a more technologically primitive alien planet, and begins manipulating them to their own ends. The Spiders, unfortunately, come up a little short in comparison to the Tines. The aliens of A Fire Upon the Deep are, in this one’s humble opinion, some of the best-written extraterrestrials in all of fiction – a medieval-era race of intelligent canines that use ultrasonic sounds to pool their consciousnesses, forming gestalt individuals out of pack of individual bodies. So much of the fun of Fire was exploring the entirely alien civilization of the Tines, how culture and society would develop on a planet where a chunk of your personality can literally get up and leave. The Spiders, by comparison, are practically human. There’s an admittedly clever literary device where it’s strongly suggested that all the scenes depicting the Spiders – the ones seeming to be from a third-person omniscient narrator – are in fact retellings from a human translator, retellings that have thoroughly anthropomorphized even the most alien of behaviors. For the purposes of the story it works fine, though I kept catching myself visualizing the aliens as two-legged humans instead of two-foot spiders. Apart from a few details – and a minor subplot involving the “perversion” of Arachnid children born out of the usual mating cycle – they’re about as alien as your average denizen of Jabba’s Palace. (Which is to say: not really) The technological uplifting isn’t quite as much of a ride, either. There’s no equivalent to vicariously experiencing the Tines’ discovery of radio waves; the Spiders develop satellites and fiber-optics and ICBMS practically as afterthoughts.

One of the really fun things about the book, though, is the way the humans behave almost like the stereotypical aliens of 20th century science-fiction. They sneak down to the Arachnid planet to steal books about their languages, sabotage their satellites to remain hidden in a Lagrangian point, mess around with their radio signals to meddle in domestic politics. It’s almost cute, getting to play as the grey aliens for once.

Probably the most interesting concept in Deepness is that of “Focus”. Early in the book, the mercantile Qeng Ho fleet is conquered by the Emergents – a human civilization that had nuked itself into the Dark Ages and only recently re-emerged into space. While laggards in many eras (certainly when it comes to morality), the Emergent have a critical edge over the Qeng Ho, who they encounter en route to OnOff – Focus. Developed from a virus that nearly wiped out their civilization, Focus releases neurotoxins into the brain that, when stimulated via MRI, send the victim into a state of literal hyperfocus, causing them to devote themselves mind, body, and soul to the subject of their intellectual specialization. The Emergent use this technology to create the most effective slave caste in history – one which never rebels, never dissents, and wants absolutely nothing to do but devote themselves to their conqueror’s cause.

One of the things Deepness does well is toy with just how tempting this technology would be, particularly through the perspective of Pham Nuwen. Pham was sort of a middlingly-interesting character in Fire, where there’s almost a throwaway line that he was once rescued from a Dark Age world and spent centuries traversing space as a sort of barbarian prince. It’s a neat bit of characterization, but not actually all that relevant to the plot. Deepness really gives him his due.

A recurring theme in both works in the Zones of Thought series is the ephemerality of civilization. Humans populate a planet, colonize the nearby stars, descend into despotism, and inevitably nuke themselves back to a pre-spaceflight tech level, sometimes for millennia. In the time of Deepness, humans are still limited by the speed-of-light, making any attempt to coordinate across the interstellar expanse of humanity a futile endeavor. Even the Qeng Ho merchant fleets survive only because they are more a way of life than a proper civilization. This is something Pham Nuwen dreams of changing, breaking the cycle of history that humanity has seemingly locked itself into. The discovery of Focus, coupled with a few tricks up his own sleeve (above all, the technology for truly pervasive surveillance), tempt Pham Nuwen into dreaming that he can achieve the impossible dream of ending the cycle of violence.

And there is a temptation on a personal level, as well. While there are certainly horrible costs to Focus, this one suspects that many readers will at least flirt with the question of what it would be like to have hyperfocus on demand. While it costs them their free will, many of the “Focused” individuals (referred to ubiquitously as “zipheads”) are some of the brightest minds humanity has ever produced. It is what allows the Emergent to decipher the language of the Arachnids, to penetrate and manipulate their information systems, to create unrivaled mastearpieces of art.

And, most importantly, to maintain internal security. For me, the most fascinating character in the book is Anne Reynolt, the Emergents’ “Director of Human Resources”. It is in her that I have to draw a parallel to a character in another of Vinge’s other works, namely Alice Gu Gong of Rainbows End. Colonel Gu is a legendary American spymaster, working to protect 21st-century Earth from all manner of near-future horrors like rogue AI or synthetic bioweapons. Gu’s secret is that she benefits from ‘just-in-time training’ (JITT), a sort of neural hack where information can be downloaded Matrix-style into a subject’s mind. While most participants can be JITT’d only once or twice – and often with serious negative repercussions, like being stuck speaking Mandarin when stressed – Gu alone can be JITT’d again and again, making her an expert in everything from Bahasa to biosecurity auditing. Reynolt, in many ways, is Gu’s mirror darkly reflection. Reynold is a ziphead slave of the Emergents, but unlike every other ziphead, she retained her organizational and people management skills – holdovers from when she was “The Frenkisch Orc”, the head of an extraordinarily effective insurgency. While throughout Deepness she is, for narrative purposes, probably the most dangerous antagonist (imagine the despot you are trying to subvert was competent, rational, and entirely unrelenting in their pursuit of you) , she is ultimately an exceptionally tragic figure, an anti-villain of circumstance.

I feel like this review may come across as harsher than I intended. I really did enjoy the book, but it’s just outshone by its predecessor. If you enjoyed A Fire Upon the Deep and want a bit more adventure, with a bit lower stakes, then you’ll definitely enjoy this. ( )

Really enjoyed the story that we got, but can't help feeling that the story we were promised, regarding the On/Off star never eventuated. It ended up as an odd prequel to "Fire," that blew-out into an otherwise very interesting novel. ( )

For eight-thousand years humanity has been spreading out into space. Thanks to cold-sleep and interstellar ramjets, humans have colonized planets and founded new civilizations. Unfortunately, like their predecessors on Old Earth in the Dawn Age, these civilizations fall into decay, often ending in the near annihilation of life on their planets. Then slowly, the cycle repeats itself. Pham Nuwen, one of the founders of the Qeng Ho traders, has a dream. Can the Qeng Ho become more that interstellar merchants? Can they save humanity from itself by intervening before a nuclear apocalypse ravages a planet or a solar system?

One-hundred-sixty years after their fleet departs, the Queng Ho arrive in the system of the mysterious OnOff star and its sole planet Arachna. They discover an emerging technological civilization of spider-like creatures. The spiders are only the third intelligent alien species that humans have encountered. But the Queng Ho aren’t the only humans there. Another fleet, the Emergents, have also arrived. Unlike the Queng Ho, the Emergents aren’t interested in trade. They’re interested in conquest and pillage. For the most part, their technology is less sophisticated than that of the Queng Ho, except in one critical area. The Emergents have a way to condition the minds of their slaves, making them useful tools.

Vinge has created an exciting space opera filled with memorable characters, both human and arachnid, with realistic heroes and villains in each species. Decades of espionage, subterfuge and tense action are played out against a backdrop of deep space as the author explores the social conflicts that arise from commerce, conquest, individual liberty, authoritarianism, and the desire to dominate and control the actions of others individually and collectively using computer technology. ( )