Vernor Vinge

After a spaceship crashes in unknown and unfriendly territory, two young children, the only survivors, are left to fend for themselves, but with time being of the essence, a rescue plan must be put into place quickly before the clock runs out on their lives. Reissue.

A Fire Upon The Deep

Coleman McCormick

This is one of the most creative and original stories I've ever read. In a genre with so many stories, concepts, and ideas, it's rare to run across something that feels novel. Something that doesn't leave the feeling of "I remember that from Star Trek / the Twilight Zone / Some Other Book". There's a lot to like here for the science fiction fan: the world-building, the galaxy's history without the over-explaining, the curiosities of the author's "Zones of Thought" and what other stories might be set here.

That said, I found it hard to follow for about the first third of the novel. I finally came around and began to put the pieces together about halfway through, and as such ended up tearing through the rest of it. It might be that it's one of those stories ripe for re-reading and extra enjoyment the second time around, or maybe it was the "too many ideas" syndrome that can plague some sci-fi. There are so many original and wild constructs set up in the first act: hive mind pack creatures that function as single entities, rogue AIs destroying solar systems, plant-like aliens that ride on trucks strapped to their bodies. As I said, done in a very interesting and clever way, but I felt overwhelmed with too many ideas too fast.

I've read great things about part 2 in the series, A Deepness in the Sky. The first one was plenty good to hook me for the next entry.

Gavin

Deeply satisfying space opera. I thought of The Fifth Element and the Culture throughout, it is as stylish as these while being more serious. Software permeates the book in a way it unforgiveably doesn't in most scifi. Vinge is a master of dramatic irony - the reader wriggles with knowledge of treachery for hundreds of pages. 

His cool, medieval dog aliens are less interesting to me than the space opera bit, but you have to admire the craft involved in them. The big bad is genuinely unnerving. An elevation of plotfests.

A fire upon the deep

Gillian Rose

Extremely dense. I had a hard time with this one. Couldn't connect with the characters and then when I finally did, one of them died. Rough book.

Now with a new introduction for the Tor Essentials line, A Fire Upon the Deep is sure to bring a new generation of SF fans to Vinge's award-winning works. A Hugo Award-winning Novel! “Vinge is one of the best visionary writers of SF today.”-David Brin Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. 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. Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. Tor books by Vernor Vinge Zones of Thought Series A Fire Upon The Deep A Deepness In The Sky The Children of The Sky Realtime/Bobble Series The Peace War Marooned in Realtime Other Novels The Witling Tatja Grimm's World Rainbows End Collections Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge True Names At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Janice Hopper

Rereading this for SFF book club.

I read this ages ago. I really like the Tines as an alien species. The book is still good, but it's really long.

It's probably been a couple of decades since I last read this.

ETA: in my SFF group discussion, someone described the Skroderiders as "potted plants on Roombas". I laughed so hard I had to leave the discussion for a moment. #perfect

Ivan Vega

Very interesting concepts but not explained in a coherent order in my opinion.

Luke Kanies

Very enjoyable. It did an especially good job of creating a very new universe (solving the faster-than-light travel problem, kind of) and making that universe interesting enough and believable enough. I especially liked the use of the network.

Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space - from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these 'zones of thought', but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artefact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence. Fleeing the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines - an alien race with a harsh medieval culture - and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue party, not entirely composed of humans, must free the children - and retrieve a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.

A Fire Upon the Deep

Pam Sartain

I had started this book once before, and just stopped as I found reading it at night wasn’t working. It’s quite a complicated beginning, with lots of new names and concepts that you need to be properly concentrating for, and reading a couple of pages at night just wasn’t working for me.

Vernor Vinge thought up a whole new way of thinking about space, with different areas being capable of more or less advanced technology, and you can advance through these areas at increasing speeds (space ship dependant), or go in to the slowness, which is where the Old Earth is in.

The aliens were all different, and I thought he had really original ideas, but I don’t want to spoil anything!

I read this for Sword and Laser book group, and I do love doing this, because I read books that I would never normally pick up!

If you enjoy science fiction with a tinge of space opera, you’ll probably enjoy this!

Marie Rogowski

Wonderfully written Scifi - even though this is normally not my Favorite Genre, i enjoyed it immensely. Great book!

Ben Nathan

This is a very well written book full of excellent ideas. Incredibly interesting story and world with great pacing. Why four stars? Well, it was rather dry (even for hard SciFi) and the characters were interchangeable unless they were clearly on different sides of the good/evil spectrum. I will probably read more Vinge at a point

Alex Deee

Wow. Unbelievable. This book totally snuck up on me. I knew it was part of the SF cannon but found it kind of slow going to start. Then it became riveting and beautifully mind expanding. The Tines, the Skroderiders, the Zones and the Blight: each alone would have been a rich enough idea for a single book. Together it was like brain candy.

Adam

In NPR's top 100 Sci-fi/Fantasy list this was one I'd been wanting to read for a while. The ideas presented in it were inventive and elaborate, but my difficulty in following them kept me from fully enjoying the story. After reading the wiki synopsis of the book upon completion, I realized how many small things I'd missed. Vinge doesn't talk down to his readers -- he lets them discover things for themselves -- but unfortunately I didn't read between the lines on a number of concepts, leaving me confused for far too long. I have a feeling I would enjoy this one a lot more on a second reading.

A Fire Upon The Deep

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