Review: A Fire Upon the Deep
A friend of mine was talking up later books in this series and when I checked the library, A Fire Upon the Deep was listed first. The completeist in me signed up for the first one first and I’m glad I did.
I like the stuff I’ve read by Vernor Vinge, but it’s been so long that none of it has been reviewed on this blog. I know I read True Names and other Dangers because he was definitely playing with early ideas of online collaboration. I liked his take on it then and I still do now.
I’m going to praise all kinds of structural features and speculative bases in this book that I loved, but if you are looking for an answer to the question “is there an ominously powerful galactic threat that can only be defeated by two marooned human children and the complex medieval society of intelligent dog packs they’re trapped with if a team of kinda intelligent swamp reeds, a research librarian, and a cut rate Space Opera hero can get to them in time?” the answer to that is yes. Enjoy. It’s thrillingly executed.
To make that work, Fire does some ambitious world building. There are lots of SF settings that are meticulously laid out but that still boil down to “it’s the Age of Exploration with starships” or something similar. Fire posits a spatial topology based objectively on the level of communication and technology of the inhabitants. Kind of. There’s considerably more to it than that and Vinge does a great job just telling you what you need to know at the moment without showing all the cards. I come away with the feeling that it probably coheres but in a way that hinges on parts of it being clearly labeled as “beyond human ken.”
It works for this story and gives the reader the feeling that they never know everything that’s in motion.
And as a fellow who has a personal interest in and detailed knowledge of communication networks, it is extra delightful to me how much of this cosmology is based around communication speed and connectivity. It pervades the work once you look for it, but if you don’t look that’s fine, too. The fundamental social and professional networking feels directly based on 1990’s era USENET to me and that’s an additional joy. While the way we express ourselves on modern networks has changed, Vinge has captured a lot of the fundamental lessons that continue to express them selves in modern network communication.
The writing is uniformly great as well. The situations and characters come on at a pace that brings the reader in comfortably. The threat introduced in the first few pages gathers speed throughout the story in a way that feels exponential. There are hints and hints and then without realizing how much faster the pace has gotten, there’s no longer any way to slow down.
I understand that the next couple books are only loosely connected to these events, which seems fine to me. This stands alone very well.
A must.