Vinge, Vernor: A Fire Upon the Deep

[rachelmanija]

After bouncing off this for years, I got trapped outside someone's house for an hour with nothing in my purse with it. So I read it. I was able to read it in an hour because I ended up skimming heavily. That's why this is not a real review.

A long, long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far away, some humans mess with a library of sorts and create an AI (I think) which kills most of them for reasons that maybe were explained in some part that I skimmed. The ones who escape land on a planet inhabited by the Tines, doglike creatures whose packs of four to eight share a single consciousness. More or less. It's complicated.

The Tines kill all but two of the humans, a kid brother and sister, who each end up with two of the Tine factions. Everything involving the Tines and their weird ways-- they can recreate their selves and alter their personalities by adding or subtracting new members-- is just fascinating, and I loved those parts.

Unfortunately, there is a whole other story, or perhaps several, which bored me to death, involving a librarian and some aliens and a guy named Pham who gets resurrected, and, if I was not hallucinating, messages on usenet. That was the part which I skipped due to unreadability.

Does Vinge ever return to the Tines? I'd happily read a book just about them.

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The messages on the galactic, alien-containing equivalent of Usenet were hysterically funny, because they were exactly like messages on Usenet/LJ/Fark/whatever.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

exactly like messages on Usenet

Including posts by kooks and trolls. All of that was a lot of fun. -"Hexapodia as the key insight!"-

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

And of course everyone picked up the Hexapodia line to use as a sig. Meta much?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

* And, although A Deepness in the Sky was published after A Fire Upon the Deep, it's set previous to AFutD, and if you'd read them the other way round, you'd have seen some interesting connections. Well, provided you hadn't skipped them.

[chomiji]

Except Deepness in the Sky had some just icky icky stuff happening (the stuff the villain was doing with the naive young woman's mother ... I was so squicked by it that I haven't been able to make myself re-read it, so I don't remember any of their names).

And the spider critters in Deepness aren't nearly as cool as the Tines.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

You can (quite effectively) read the book as two separate books. One is the story of the librarian reading "usenet", finding out about the disaster that the kids escaped from and that they escaped and heading off to rescue them. The other is the story of the kids and the Tines. Both stories eventually hook up, and there are details in each one that the people in the other story *really* need to know, and don't. It should read fine tho if you just want to read about the Tines :)

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should add that if you skip the librarian story you're skipping the *other* really cool aliens.

[tharain.livejournal.com]

I read that. I didn't really completely get it. It was one of those "Read this it's a classic," and I read it and thought "Huh."

So I can't answer for ya, I'm afraid.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

I have a vague notion that Vinge is, indeed, working on a novel featuring the Tines.

[chomiji]

I actually thought that a lot of it was very cool, despite the rather unlikely McGuffin about the zones of the galaxy. But the Usenet-ness of the big web and the Tines gets me to re-read it maybe every couple of years. There's also the self-improving, self-replicating counter-program to the Blighter virus, which seems to have based itself/themselves on Joanna and Jefry's parents - I'm a sucker for that, because it's hopeful and makes their sacrifice not in vain and so on.

I haven't seen anything about a Tines sequel, but I'd love one.

(I don't like the "prequel," A Deepness in the Sky, very much. It contains some deeply misogynistic violence with a particularly squicky emotional twist, and the aliens aren't nearly as cool.)