A Hugo award-winning Novel! “Vinge is one of the best visionary writers of SF today.” –David Brin Thirty-Thousand years before A Fire Upon the Deep, humans stand on the verge of first contact with an alien race. Two human groups: the Qeng Ho, a culture of free traders, and the Emergents, a ruthless society based on the technological enslavement of minds. The group that opens trade with the … minds. The group that opens trade with the aliens will reap unimaginable riches. But first, both groups must wait at the aliens’ very doorstep for their strange star to relight and for their planet to reawaken, as it does every two hundred and fifty years. More than just a great science fiction adventure, A Deepness in the Sky is a universal drama of courage, self-discovery, and the redemptive power of love.
Tor books by Vernor Vinge
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
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A Deepness in the Sky will always be near and dear to my heart for many reasons, but foremost for the idea of the “programmer archaeologist”. The Qeng Ho, a group of intergalactic human traders we follow for much of the book, ply their trade between the stars in ships powered by millennia of computer systems built on top of each other. Anyone who’s seen the sort of tangled computer systems humans have been able to build in less than a hundred years might begin to appreciate the travails of a ship’s officer tasked with changing code that was built over the course of the rise and fall of civilizations.
This book is Big Idea Sci-fi in pure form: human relationships and worlds changed by travel at near light speed, cosmological mysteries, truly alien aliens, and some fairly dark explorations of free will and slavery. It’s set very roughly in the same universe as A Fire Upon the Deep (also a favorite of mine!), but the two are only tangentially related and can be read in any order.
One of my all time favorite books. I highly recommend this to anybody who enjoys space opera set in the far future. I give this book 6/5 stars.
Vinge created a science fiction masterpiece that struck me to my core with A Deepness in the Sky. This loose prequel to one of my other favorite books, A Fire Upon the Deep, is both haunting and meaningful. I went into Deepness completely blind (as I had with Fire) and found it to be yet another one of my favorite reads. The Emergents are terrifyingly casual about brainwashing victims to use as human-computers, some with menial, wasted tasks. There are some deeply disturbing images involving Qiwi and her mother’s fate, so I want to mention it as a trigger warning. Throughout its length, the characters clutch onto hope that they will one day prevail, and it’s something to respect as a reader. I will miss these characters, and the world Vinge has made for them. If you enjoyed Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time recently, you may want to pick up Deepness In the Sky, which I even consider the grand-daddy to Children of Time. Both involve humans working sidelong with a race of developing spider civilizations.
Deepness is a great, haunting, important book. A masterpiece.
A marvelous space opera that extends several current technological trajectories into the distant future and delivers another tale of one of the great characters of science fiction, Pham Nuwen.
Almost too many ideas in here. People being treated worse than animals figures as the primary source of tension, which I did not enjoy.
Mind bending SF in the classic mode.
What are weakly god-like artificial intelligences -really- like? And, by the way, why haven’t they taken over the universe already? Great science-fiction, with clever answers, a confusing romance and a heart-rendingly heroic plot, besides. If you like Norwegian culture, really, really read this book.
This is my top Vernor Vinge offering, although I also love Marooned in Realtime and A Fire Upon the Deep! Enjoy!