A Deepness in the Sky
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
The prequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, this is the story of Pham Nuwen, a small cog in the interstellar trading fleet of the Queng Ho. The Queng Ho and the Emergents are orbiting the dormant planet Arachna, which is about to wake up to technology, but the Emergents' plans are sinister.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this prequel to his Hugo Award-winning space opera, A Fire upon the Deep (1992), Vinge takes us to an era some thousands of years in our future, when humanity has just begun its exploration of intergalactic space and has as yet no inkling of the complex physics that rules the galaxy. Although human beings have settled on dozens of worlds and created societies ancient enough to have achieved greatness and collapse several times over, only the most limited traces have been found of alien cultures. Now, however, the Qeng Ho, a band of human interstellar traders, have discovered the Spiders, an alien race poised to enter its own space age. Unfortunately, the Qeng Ho must compete with another, less beneficent spacefaring human culture, the Emergents, who are bent on conquest rather than trade. The Spiders have just come out of a two-century-long suspended animation made necessary by the fluctuations of their erratic sun. Their culture is entering a period of explosive growth that could end in tragedy, due in part to a dangerous nuclear arms race and in part to the Emergents' desire to enslave them. Vinge, a professor of mathematics and computer science (at San Diego State), is among the very best of the current crop of hard SF writers, producing work that is not only fast-paced and intellectually challenging, but also stylishly written and centered on carefully drawn characters. This long, action-packed novel should fully engage any SF reader's sense of wonder, and likely will win the author his sixth Hugo nomination.
Customer Reviews
Really good, maybe a bit long
I just read this in almost one go, on holiday in 2 days. I really liked it, though at times it felt a bit overstreched. Ok, the setting demanded that the story took about 30-40 years, but that neccesitated that quite some plot elements became simewhat moot. For example, the devices Pham Trinli uses to control everything are on the one hand ultra powerfull, but then he doesn't use their power for 30 years while his oponents chip at their code structure for all that time searching for his control interfaces, but not finding them. All this while those coders are said to be superhuman all the time.
Compared to Ken MacLeods "Learning the World" I liked his description of technology better, and also the reaction of the aliens to the technologically advanced humans and how that inspired their technological progress. This book has more character development, but I'm not sure I like it better.