One nice thing about the library’s perpetual book sale is that it does, on occasion, have a book that I have been wanting to read, or perhaps just wanting to have read, and there it is for a quarter or fifty cents. I think that’s a good thing. Anyway, I picked up Vernor Vinge’s Hugo-winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. And read it, too.
It’s difficult reading a ten-year-old book that was tremendously influential. It’s not as full of clichés as, say, Hamlet, but there are places where it seems old hat. To Mr. Vinge’s credit, however, those places are a small portion of the book. Perhaps that’s actually because I am so poorly read in specfic of the last ten years; since Deep won the Hugo in 1993, I’ve read ... let’s see ... um, six of the Hugo winners. Seven if you count The Doomsday Book. Perhaps it’s clearer if I say I’ve only read two of the Nebula-winning novels since then, and those were the ones that won the Hugo. The other five Hugo winners I’ve read were two fantasy novels, and two time-travel books that might as well have been fantasies, and a Vorkosigan book (set in a universe that predates Deep by several books). From what I hear, much of the specfic that I haven’t read is so obviously influenced by Vinge that post-Deep books that haven’t been so obviously influenced look old-fashioned. Which, since Deep wasn’t as deeply influenced by Deep as later books could be, makes Deep look old-fashioned itself. Y’fallah?
Oddly enough, though, none of that stuff struck me as very interesting. In particular, the way he deals with his concept of Singularity struck me as time-wasting, dull and needless exposition. The whole bit about the different Zones was a fine plot device, but once defined as such held no theoretical interest. Neither did the details of the various kinds of software which were described in such tedious detail. Nor the limitations of the hyperspace jumps. Etc. Etc.
Now, it’s fair to say that most books that I gripe about in that manner are simply not to my taste, and they will go their way, and I will go mine. The thing about this book—probably the most impressive thing, from my perspective—is that I enjoyed the plot, the characters, the aliens and the worlds despite feeling like the editor had inserted a chapter from somebody’s dissertation every few dozen pages. I mean, here are the Tines, right? Very cool. And here’s Your Humble Blogger, not giving a crap about why they have so-called medieval technology or why the humans who are coming are being delayed, but digging the whole scene of humans funneling high-tech to the bad guys as fast as they can transmit it. Oops! How are we going to get out of this one?
Now, I disagree with those people who said it was engrossing, or riveting, or compelling, or (in grand Kirkus self-parody) unputdownable. I put the thing down several times, on occasion having actually decided not to bother picking it back up again as it wasn’t worth the wading, but after all, it was pretty much the only book I had to hand for a few days, and really I was enjoying quite a bit of it quite a bit. So I got to the only-moderately-satisfying end, and I’m glad I did. I can’t say I’m even considering reading the prequel anytime soon, but then perhaps in five or six years I’ll come across it in a library book sale.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
You know, almost everyone I’ve talked to has about the same impression of Fire Upon the Deep as you give here: one of the most interesting alien species ever written driving a reasonably suspensful narrative line, broken up by tedium and undermined by an emotionally flat ending.
Among all those same people, there’s a general consensus that A Deepness in the Sky is a far superior book, maintaining most of the strengths of Fire while paring down the ambitious scale and technical exposition.
I’d have to know your tastes in “hard SF” a little better before asserting that you’d love Deepness. Regardless, I think you’d probably enjoy it quite a bit more than Fire. I’ve heard some people say that it errs in the opposite way as Fire, being a little bit too oblique about aspects of the invented technologies and sociologies. Personally, I think there’s sufficient foreshadowing to justify all of the surprises. Not to mention that realizing the double (triple?) meaning of “deepness in the sky” is quite satisfying in and of itself.
Wandering through your journal for the first time in a while, and wanted to comment on this.
I read A Fire Upon the Deep not long after it first came out, and my memory is that I liked it a great deal. I had two problems with it, neither serious:
1. I rolled my eyes at 1990-era Usenet culture and technology transplanted almost without change to interstellar space. It seemed to me likely to make the book dated very quickly.
2. I was mildly grumpy that he portrayed an alien group mind composed of only semi-sentient parts before I could get my sentient-seaweed story published. (An idea several of us developed at Swat when we were talking about writing a set of shared-world stories; I don’t remember if you were around for that. Later, I ran into other high-profile stories by big-name authors that were even closer in concept to the sentient-seaweed thing.)
At any rate, I rather liked the discursiveness on the technologies and so forth; perhaps this was due to the kind of thing you’re talking about, with Fire being influential on later books I hadn’t read yet, or perhaps I’m just more interested in the details of how tech works than you are, but I thought Vinge did a good job with it. (Note, btw, that this wasn’t his first exposition of the Singularity, but I think Fire did take the idea further than had been done before.) Vinge is one of the few hard-sf writers whose work I still like; I think he often does well at balancing exciting science/tech ideas with exciting action and compelling emotional interaction. (On the other hand, I’m not nearly as fond of his shorter work as of his novels.) …Actually, I guess I would classify both Fire and Deepness as space opera rather than hard sf per se.
Re Deepness: I don’t think it’s as successful from an action/adventure/space-opera point of view as Fire, but I find the sci/tech/sociology/sf ideas in Deepness much more interesting. It should be noted that one leftist friend of mine was put off by what he saw as a strong libertarian bias in Deepness, and another commented on its political preachiness; but it should also be noted that even though political preachiness often annoys me, and even though it’s quite clear from the book that Vinge is a libertarian, I wasn’t bothered by that at all in this particular case.