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

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Insignificant Little Blue Planet: In A Fire Upon the Deep, humans have been out in the galaxy so long that Earth is merely a legend; the origin planet most humans feel emotionally attached to is called Nyjora — meaning New Earth. Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Ultimately, despite all the suffering and sacrifices, closer to the idealistic end of the scale. Vinge, Vernor (1992). A Fire Upon the Deep (1st mass marketed.). New York: Tom Doherty Associates. p. 62. ISBN 0812515285. LCCN 91-39020. Vinge’s readers in 1992 would almost certainly recognize his accomplishment, for he managed to model a galaxy free of the real-science constraints ordaining, for instance, that faster-than-light travel was nonsense, and that, as the Drake Equation argued, other intelligent life in the galaxy was astronomically unlikely. He was not alone. Writers like Iain M. Banks and Greg Bear and C. J. Cherryh and Dan Simmons and Gene Wolfe (a bit earlier) had also been revamping and supercharging the old space opera form, complexifying the old Heroes with a Thousand Faces into more problematic beings (compare Vinge’s multiply discombobulated Pham Nuwen with Larry Niven’s Ringworld predecessor Louis Wu from 1970), rebuilding the old tinkertoy galaxies into labyrinths that seemed turtles all the way down: compare Vinge’s galaxy (see below) with E. E. Smith’s pre–World War Two Lensmen world. As befits writers in the Silver Age of a form, Vinge and his peers were, in other words, deeply playful and dead serious, as were some of those who began to publish a few years later, like Stephen Baxter, or Linda Nagata, or Alastair Reynolds, or Charles Stross. Each of them excelled in one way or another (Banks’s post-scarcity universe retains all its initial transgressiveness), but of them all only Vinge, I think, gave us a galactic architecture truly fit for stories to be told within. Space Nomads: In A Deepness in the Sky, the Qeng Ho traders are a loose collective of interstellar traders that travel via slower-than-light ramscoop-powered sleeper starships. The Qeng Ho hold that if they start to use the local time system (days/months/years) instead of their UNIX-time based system (seconds, kiloseconds megaseconds, etc), they've been in the system for too long.

In A Fire Upon the Deep, the Blight gets hoisted on a galactic scale by Countermeasure with the help of two Straumers, whose clumsy conspiracy it had written off as beneath its notice. Moreover, this only becomes possible because the Blight decides to murder the Old One just in case, when the latter was about to let it mind its own business. Lord Steel's army is defeated despite its vastly superior weaponry, because he had grown excessively reliant on intelligence from Vendacious, who got caught and was forced to lead Steel into a trap; then he is done in by Flenser!Tyrathect, whom he considered wholly inferior and safe to use, due to containing merely 1/3rd of former Flenser. Properly Paranoid: In A Deepness In The Sky: Being worried that aliens are getting to you through the internet isn't usually a good sign of mental health. It's discussed at one point in A Fire Upon the Deep that if the Zones shift and the Out of Band II finds itself in the Slow Zone, where Faster-Than-Light Travel is impossible, the crew will most likely end up stranded alone in interstellar space for the rest of their short, uneventful lives — even if it happens in the middle of a firefight. The distances involved in close ship-to-ship combat are still so great that without FTL, they would suddenly be separated by centuries or millennia of travel. 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. A work crew is seemingly cooked alive as soon as OnOff enters its 'On' state. Qiwi remarks, "I should have been there."I do not know how narrators are chosen to read for an author, but if Vernor had some decision in the process, then NO, I would never listen to another book by him again. This book is probably better to have read physically than to listen too. Children of the Sky isn't quite as dark as its prequels, but still makes it clear that its characters still have some very dangerous foes and obstacles to face in the near future; there are also some bittersweet partings. Recognizing the danger of what they have awakened, the researchers at High Lab attempt to flee in two ships, one carrying all the adults and the second carrying all the children in " coldsleep boxes". Suspicious, the Blight discovers that the first ship contains a data storage device in its cargo manifest; assuming it contains information that could harm it, the Blight destroys the ship. The second ship escapes. The Blight assumes that it is no threat, but later realizes that it is actually carrying away a "countermeasure" against it.

Hive Mind: A whole species consisting of micro- Hive Minds in A Fire Upon the Deep. The Tropical Choir in The Children of the Sky is an enormous, but very scatterbrained example. A tale that burns with the brazen energy of the best space operas of the golden age. Vinge has created a galaxy for the readers of the '90s to believe in...immense, ancient, athrum with data webs, dotted with wonders.” — John Clute, Interzone 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. 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. In A Deepness in the Sky, Tomas Nau is done in by Qiwi, remembering for one final time her mother's rape and murder.

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I mean sure, the zones of consciousness and shared consciousness ideas are fun, and must have been very unique when the book came out. But why is it still getting recommended? There has got be something a little more updated that isn't so cloyingly "novel". I want to like where it's going but not only do I dislike all the characters and their ridiculous sex lives, I can't even get invested in my dislike for them. Emperor Scientist: Woodcarver is a benevolent version, his/her former disciple Flenser is a malevolent one. Alternate Number System: The Tines have two different number systems: one where they count "by legs" (in base 4) and one where they count "by fore-claws" (in base 10). Confusion between these two systems leads to the accidental meeting of two of the major characters in A Fire Upon the Deep. Amdiranifani is housed in room 33, Jefri is supposed to be imprisoned in room 15 (33 in base 4), and the guard who's taking him there uses the wrong numbering system. Two Aliases, One Character: A justifiably partial example occurs in The Children of the Sky. What's left of Steel is disguised as Screwfloss using fake dyed pelt-markings, but when one of his members is killed, he loses some cognitive capacity, which causes him to be lax in keeping the disguise maintained. 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:

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. Giant Spider: A Deepness in the Sky features a whole race of them, and they think humans are absolutely adorable. Our big, googly eyes remind them of their own children. In Children of the Sky, "They're Rider larvae, Jef," revealing Tycoon's "cuttlefish" as Skroderider larvae. Very shortly thereafter, she realizes that Greenstalk is among the adult Skroderiders in the colony, making it a double Wham Line. Oddly, this changes the plot not at all, save for one key thing: keeping Ravna and Jef out of Vendacious' claws. A race of plantlike beings with fronds that are used for expression. The riders have no native capacity for short-term memory. Five billion years ago, someone gave the species wheeled mechanical constructs ("skrodes") to move around and to provide short-term memory. It is later revealed that their "benefactor" was the Blight, and it is able to corrupt and remotely operate the Riders via their skrodes.A Deepness in the Sky has a classic example in the Spiders, which are somewhat arachnoid, but in no way related to real spiders. In this case, it's somewhat justified; the humans needed to call the Spiders something, and the Spiders' own language is The Unintelligible, so using their own word for the species isn't possible. 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." 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.) In A Deepness in the Sky it's the collision and canceling out of Pham Newen's and Sherkaner's Batman Gambits, which results in the destruction of Sherkaner's home, and ultimately (?) Sherkaner himself.

Tyrathect claimed to be a school teacher, but somewhere in her (him? gender preference wasn't entirely clear yet) was a killer. 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 ] Besides the normal print book editions, the novel was also included on a CD-ROM sold by ClariNet Communications along with the other nominees for the 1993 Hugo awards. The CD-ROM edition included numerous annotations by Vinge on his thoughts and intentions about different parts of the book, and was later released as a standalone e-book. [2] [3] Setting [ edit ] An ancient, malevolent super-intelligent entity which strives to constantly expand and can easily manipulate electronics and even organic beings. Space Opera seems to be like Soap Opera, watch on Monday and Friday, skip through the week cause nothing new is going to happen. There are too many good books out there for me to beating myself in the head waiting on something to happen that I care about.

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Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Averted with distance, and the aversion is one of the biggest reasons why civilizations in the Beyond avoid going anywhere near the Slow Zone. An expedition from Straumli Realm, an ambitious young human civilization in the high Beyond, investigates a five-billion-year-old data archive in the low Transcend that offers the possibility of unimaginable riches. The expedition's facility, High Lab, is gradually compromised by a dormant superintelligence within the archive later known as the Blight. However, shortly before the Blight's final "flowering", two self-aware entities created similarly to the Blight plot to aid the humans before the Blight can escape. 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.