A Deepness in the Sky

An excellent science fiction novel written by Vernor Vinge, a prequel to the Hugo-award-winning A Fire Upon the Deep. It's hard to summarize the plot of a nigh-on-800 page book, but I'll try anyway. It's a story about a group of traders (members of a larger group known as the Qeng Ho) who take on a joint mission with a culture known as the Emergents. They are subtly betrayed and enslaved, many of their people being placed under a form of mind control, and must find a way to free themselves and save an entire newly discovered race from the same fate.

It's not nearly as cheesy as it sounds, either. Go read it, it's worth your time.

Vernor Vinge is a slow writer, juggling being an author with a full time professional career as a computer scientist. However, his books are always worth the wait. Quality seems to be on an exponential progression. His previous book "A Fire Upon the Deep" was dazzling in its ideas, though perhaps a bit lacking on the characters front. "A Deepness in the Sky" keeps the wonderful inventiveness, while upping the depth of the characters. It deservedly won him a Hugo award in 2000. At this rate I expect Vinge will be collecting the Nobel Prize in 2007.

Vinge's work is hard science fiction of a quality more or less unique at the moment. His major currency is in gadgets and "Big Ideas". Postulate some unusual technology or situation, and then follow its logical consequences upon a society. Well done, it makes for excellent reading, and Vinge does it very well indeed.

"A Deepness in the Sky" is officially a prequel to " A Fire upon the Deep", although the connection is tangential and reading the first book isn't strictly necessary, though some events are more significant when read in light of the earlier book. The main plot concerns a reverse first-contact between a group of interstellar human traders and an arachnid race of about 1940's level development. As the traders are preparing to make first contact, a third group, the Emergents, show up, and an interesting power struggle begins. Full of surprises and striking ideas, I think I'll leave you to discover the rest of the story yourself...

For all the enjoyment I got from the story itself though, for me the most fascinating thing about "A Deepness in the Sky" is its backdrop. It takes as its premise "What if all the big dreams fail?" - What if our present understanding of physics is essentially complete? What if we can never have those SF staples - No faster-than-light travel, no anti-gravity, and most importantly no AI. What kind of civilization can we build for ourselves among the stars given those constrains? Although this only forms a backdrop to the story, it deals with these ideas with the insight and skill more or less unequalled in science fiction. I honestly felt I was reading something comparable to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" in terms of its understanding of the workings of a society.

Most SF writers don't capture that feeling of the sheer vastness and complexity of time and space as well as Vinge does here. The ending is particularly... romantic, hopeful and sad, especially to those who have read A Fire Upon the Deep and know its bitter-sweet tang in light of future events.

Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

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"So high, so low, so many things to know."

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Interesting Factoid 1: The Trader's dating system starts counting on 1-Jan-1970 GMT. They believe this to be the date on which a human first set foot on another planet, but it is in fact the zero date on the clock of a certain operating system.

Interesting Factoid 2: Vinge used emacs to write the story!

Thanks to szap of Slashdot for these factoids.

This is the second Vernor Vinge book I am reading. I enjoyed it more than the first but I still was not wowed. It was, however, an enjoyable and worthwhile read. As Alzaman said, it is a prequel but its relationship with the sequel is just that one character appears in both. He is more likeable and more fully fleshed out here.

The book is driven by 2 main cultural conflicts. Among the space faring humans, there is a culture clash between the democratic, humane, liberal Qeng Ho and the brutal, sadistic, autocratic Emergents. The conflict is plausible and relatable. It also placed constraints on the characters that produced a nice tension in the story. In my review of the first book, I wrote that the antagonist characters had no depth. They were evil because they were evil. This book was better. The bad guys are not bad by their own lights. Their evil can even be rationalized as being necessary for the greater good. It reminded me of this story by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The second conflict was among the aliens. They had a normal political conflict and a cultural one. The cause of the cultural conflict was a voluntary biological adaptation the breaking of which was a quasi-religious taboo. This also made the story interesting. However, it is based on an assumption - that the aliens are like humans - which I discuss in the next paragraph.

One thing I noticed and I liked in both books is the way the author introduces his aliens. He introduces them as people first and then gradually reveals their strangeness. While it makes the characters relatable, it is also anthropomorphic. It is a bit like how families in Disney movies are usually just an idealized American family dressed up as prehistoric people or space people or animals always including a pet that behaves like a dog. It is not a bad technique and it probably makes the story more acceptable. It might also be a human limitation - whatever we imagine is based on what we know, so we might as well go with what we know best.

I disliked 2 things about the book. The first is use of language in a lazy manner. This is something I first noticed in Tipping Point, a TV game show where contestants select which slots in a machine to drop counters. When choosing, the contestants would say "I am going to go for...". Why not just say "I will go for..."? In this book, the author uses the phrase "going to" ad nauseam. I began to dislike it so much that I began mentally replacing it whenever I saw it. The overuse of the phrase made the writing clumsy and so I am surprised that Alzaman compared the book to Gibbon. Because in terms of style, the style of 17th and 18th century authors has a quaint loveliness and gravitas that if done today might seem pretentious. Further, Gibbons' work, though rather judgmental was rather impartial to the characters. Here, the author's bias for or against characters was plain. Finally, in terms of big ideas, I really wasn't impressed with the biggest idea in the book - that of a human empire spanning vast distances. I was more impressed with the alien social structure. They are some sort of spider and the society had gender equality. Unlike books where it seems forced, here it was mentioned in passing and it helped move the story along. The males are the carers for the children. The females were aggressive and seemed to dominate the military. I wonder if this was a subtle nod to Rudyard Kipling's poem The Female of The Species or based on how some spider chicks eat the males after sex.

The 2nd thing I disliked was the ending. All the human bad guys got their just desserts and all the human good guys got babes and lived happily ever after. I think grown up books ought not to have fairytale endings.

The last major thing, which I both liked and disliked is the long time the humans stayed in space. Based on current knowledge and technology, there's a limit to how long we can survive in microgravity. However, it is most likely that is a solvable problem. The humans stayed 40 years in space waiting for the spiders to develop technologically because a planetary base is needed for the level of technology a space faring civilization requires. This makes a lot of sense. It reminded me of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, a well written imaginative story that (for me) was spoilt by the impossibility of not only rebuilding the human race but human technology on barren rocks in space.

This was an enjoyable book. I didn't see much hard science fiction in it, but the author has some intriguing ideas. I doubt I'll look for more of the author's work, his writing style detracts from the quality of the story.