{"id":2702,"date":"2005-03-09T20:45:22","date_gmt":"2005-03-10T01:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/03\/09\/2702.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:48:08","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:48:08","slug":"book-report-a-fire-upon-the-de","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/03\/09\/book-report-a-fire-upon-the-de\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: A Fire Upon the Deep"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/a>’s Hugo-winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep<\/I>. And read it, too.\n

It’s difficult reading a ten-year-old book that was tremendously influential. It’s not as full of clichés as, say, Hamlet<\/I>, 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<\/I> won the Hugo in 1993, I’ve read ... let’s see ... um, six of the Hugo winners. Seven if you count The Doomsday Book<\/I>. 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<\/I> 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<\/I> books that haven’t been so obviously influenced look old-fashioned. Which, since Deep<\/I> wasn’t as deeply influenced by Deep<\/I> as later books could be, makes Deep<\/I> look old-fashioned itself. Y’fallah?\n

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.\n

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<\/I> they have so-called medieval technology or why<\/I> 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?\n

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.\n

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One nice thing about the library\u2019s 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17331,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702\/revisions\/17331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}