A Fire Upon The Deep

by Vernor Vinge

Mass Market Paperback, 624 pages

English language

Published Feb. 15, 1993 by Tor Science Fiction.

ISBN:: 978-0-8125-1528-2
OCLC Number:: 221602076

(15 reviews)

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.

14 editions

technicat@bookwyrm.social reviewed A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge

Imaginative, epic, with some of the best non-human characters in sci-fi.

5 stars

I started reading Children of the The Sky, third and final in this trilogy but really a sequel to this book, so I just reread the beginning as a refresher (and coincidentally extolled its virtues to my neighborhood barista). This wasn't my first Vinge book, I'd read Marooned in Realtime before, which I enjoyed, but this is a far grander story, from the overarching framework of its universe down to the protagonists, including, especially, the non-human ones. The plot sort of drove me nuts with the why-can't-they-see-they're-being-fooled (now that I think about it, that's how I feel about the electorate), but the introduction to this edition ably spells out all the Hugo-winning virtues of this book, and let me just add: puppies.

Rob reviewed A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (Zones of Thought, #1)

Fantastic sci-fi epic

5 stars

Fantastically deep and original sci-fi epic. Picked this up on a whim and can't recommend it to others enough. The various species are really well developed and the intertwining plots are both incredibly interesting in of themselves. May have taken me some time to get though as it isn't a short book, but enjoyed every moment I was reading.

Kevin B. O'Brien reviewed A fire upon the deep by Vernor Vinge (Zones of thought series)

A Masterpiece of Science Fiction

5 stars

This is a masterpiece of a book, deservedly considered a classic. It starts with a group of human scientists re-awakening an AI, but everything goes pear-shaped very quickly. From there two plot lines proceed in parallel, one concerning a family from the group that worked on the AI, the other concerning a group of mixed human and alien beings that are trying to deal with the menace unleashed on the galaxy by this AI. The greatest fascination of this novel is the alien races. They are very disctinctly different, but Vinge makes them believable at the same time. The plot line of the escaped family takes them to a world inhabited by beings with group consciousness. They are like small mammals, but an individual of this species is not even conscious or intelligent. It is only when they they join together in groups of 5-8 that they become intelligent entities. This is a very interesting idea, and Vinge develops it beautifully and in great detail. In the other plot line, one of the alien races is derived from aquatic plants/animals that get around on motorized carts, and might be the dominant race of the galaxy. Then there is the idea that in this universe the closer you get to the core of the galaxy the slower you travel, creating concentric zones where the speed possible varies.

What ties the two plot lines together is the possibility that the ship that took the family away may have the answer to defeating the rogue AI, so the ship with the mixed human/alien crew has to get there ahead of the AI. This novel has an impressive set of ideas that are fascinating. This is a book you have to read if you are a fan of science fiction.