It really is the book that has everything. Galaxy spanning civilizations! Thousands of kinds of aliens! Low bandwidth speculation across lightyears! Low tech development of a medieval planet! Female point of view characters! A universe where computation and FTL travel are physically different in different places! An ancient evil from before the dawn of time and a quest to defeat it! A librarian, a hero, two intelligent pot plants, a brother and sister lost among aliens, and a curious mind split between four bodies. And the stakes keep going up and up. The Slow Path: In A Deepness in the Sky, Thomas Nau spends no time in hibernation, so he ages faster than everyone else. Translation Convention: The spider sections of A Deepness in the Sky are written by human researchers, using this.

How long must a fish study to understand human motivation? It's not a good analogy, but it's the only safe one; we are like dumb animals to the Powers of the Transcend. Think of all the different things people do to animals— ingenious, sadistic, charitable, genocidal—each has a million elaborations in the Transcend. The Zones are a natural protection; without them, human-equivalent intelligence would probably not exist." She waved at the misty star swarms. "The Beyond and below are like a deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We're so far down that the beings on the surface—superior though they are—can't effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper levels with poisons we don't even understand. But the abyss remains a relatively safe place." She paused. There was more to the analogy. "And just as with an ocean, there is a constant drift of flotsam from the top. There are things that can only be made at the Top, that need close-to-sentient factories—but which can still work down here. Blueshell mentioned some of those when he was talking to you: the agrav fabrics, the sapient devices. Such things are the greatest physical wealth of the Beyond, since we can't make them. And getting them is a deadly risky endeavor." Plot [ edit ] A Fire Upon the Deep was a favorite of mine after I first read it years ago, and it still holds up pretty well after a second visit, this time in audio. Vinge is a former computer science professor turned writer, and the guy responsible for popularizing the concept of a technological singularity. In the galaxy he imagines here, such singularities have been occurring for eons, technological races or their constructs transcending into godlike artificial minds. However, in this universe, there's a catch: faster-than-light travel and communication only work beyond a certain distance from the galactic core. Thus, the outer darkness is home to unimaginably advanced beings, while the inner "slow zone" protects newly-started civilizations from interference from above. In the jostling middle known as "The Beyond" lives everyone else, including humans, connected by a vast and ancient galactic internet (as envisioned from 1992, when it was still the age of newsgroups and slow image uploads).Woodcarver excels in several form of fine arts and basically invented the scientific approach, revolutionizing much of Tines' culture. On top of that he/she is a competent politician and military leader, and apparently was a badass warrior in his/her younger days. Playing with Syringes: A Deepness in the Sky gleefully teeters on the fence between invoking this and playing it straight. In the Dénouement, while negotiating over what to do with the human POWs, the Spiders insist on keeping Ritser Brughel, unarguably the worst of the surviving war criminals, to themselves. When the humans concede that it would be fair to give him to the Spiders to be punished, the Spiders' response is something along the lines of, "Punish him? Oh, no. We just need a live experimental subject to help our studies of human physiology. Any 'punishment' would be strictly incidental."

The novel is set in various locations in the Milky Way. The galaxy is divided into four concentric volumes called the "Zones of Thought"; it is not clear to the novel's characters whether this is a natural phenomenon or an artificially produced one, but it seems to roughly correspond with galactic-scale stellar density and a Beyond region is mentioned in the Sculptor Galaxy as well. [4] The Zones reflect fundamental differences in basic physical laws, and one of the main consequences is their effect on intelligence, both biological and artificial. Artificial intelligence and automation is most directly affected, in that advanced hardware and software from the Beyond or the Transcend will work less and less well as a ship "descends" towards the Unthinking Depths. But even biological intelligence is affected to a lesser degree. The four zones are spoken of in terms of "low" to "high" as follows: Walton, Jo (June 11, 2009). "The Net of a Million Lies: Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep". Tor.com.

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Fantasy World Map: A Fire Upon the Deep has a map of the galaxy done in fantasy style. It includes a delineation of the "Zones of Thought", which regulate FTL travel, as well as the path the protagonists' ship takes. In Children of the Sky, Vendacious is defenestrated from his own airship by those he tortured and used most mercilessly — Mr. Radio and Amdi.

It's not shown in A Fire Upon the Deep, but in The Children of the Sky, Tines are shown to have such sharp hearing, and such precise control over the sounds that they can emit from their tympana, that they can use surprisingly fine echolocation as long as the surroundings are sufficiently quiet. This makes up for their poor low-light vision. The outermost layer, containing the galactic halo, is the Transcend, within which incomprehensible, superintelligent beings dwell. When a "Beyonder" civilization reaches the point of technological singularity, it is said to "Transcend", becoming a "Power". Such Powers always seem to relocate to the Transcend, seemingly necessarily, where they become engaged in affairs which remain entirely mysterious to those that remain in the Beyond. Starfish Aliens: At least one species in each book, with extensively thought-out biology and culture. Still weirder beings are hinted at in A Fire Upon the Deep. In a partial subversion of the common use of this trope, despite extreme differences in physical makeup, all encountered races can understand each other and coexist. Only hyperintelligent Powers are truly different, and even they are only hyperintelligent, not truly transcendent and ineffable. Vinge’s treatment of Homo sapiens as special-case victims of Arrested Development builds from predecessor tales like Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave (1954), in which our solar system finally exits a vast region of space where “electromagnetic and electrochemical processes” had been hampered from time immemorial, making morons of us all, and preventing our escape into the larger universe. In A Fire upon the Deep, this slightly arbitrary escape is reconfigured into a three-dimensional geography of the galaxy itself, which Vinge divides into four zones. The inner galaxy, a region containing almost all its mass and star systems, is known as the Unthinking Depths; here, Andersonian impediments are so profoundly crippling that sentience is almost impossible, and escape inconceivable. Surrounding the Depths is the Slow Zone, where atomic interactions are faster, though faster-than-light travel is still impossible, and self-conscious AI’s deeply unlikely; it is here that Homo sapiens had very slowly evolved, finally escaping some millions (or maybe billions) of years before the era of A Fire upon the Deep. The region of space that became our home is known as the Beyond, which circumambulates the Slow Zone. AIs can gain consciousness here, and faster-than-light speeds are possible. The Beyond is the vast heart of the Vingean playground. It has served as a home for millions of species for billions of years, where they are born, thrive, grow senescent, die ( Homo sapiens is an ageing species in this immense arena, and humans do not dominate the action of the novel). Beyond the Beyond lies the Transcend, a region so free of the dirt of the galaxy that gods—or creatures we easily confuse with gods—can be born there, and thrive. The aspirational thrust of the Vinge universe theoretically impels an outward and upward urge (though the plot of A Fire upon the Deep moves, dangerously, in the other direction; in one chapter a spaceship carrying Cargo from the Transcend deep into the Beyond is caught terrifyingly in the Slow Zone, but escapes), and whole civilizations from the upper Beyond have a habit of transcending, disappearing from the realms of story beneath them. (Banks made use more than once of the same topos, which he saw more negatively than Vinge does.)

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The Hive Mind nature of the Tines means that an individual can incorporate new members as old ones die off, maintaining a continuous consciousness for many times the lifespan of an individual. Although it's not given how long a member would live, Woodcarver is over 600 years old and has seen glaciers advance and retreat over his/her lifetime. It eventually extracts a terrible price, though, as the only way to maintain one's identity after enough years is inbreeding within one's own members. In A Fire Upon the Deep it's the total extermination of Sjandra Kei, with Ravna helplessly watching aboard the OOB II. Gambit Pileup: In A Deepness in the Sky, Sherkaner Underhill and Pham Nuwen accidentally steamroll each other with their simultaneous Batman Gambits, giving Nau an opening to execute his own plan and nearly kill them all. He fails, but at the possible cost of Sherkaner and his wife's life, as well as many of his friends and staffers. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought", but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence.