A Fire Upon The Deep
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4.1 • 22 Ratings
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale.
Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit 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 the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue mission, not entirely composed of humans, must rescue the children-and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.
A Fire Upon The Deep, which began the Zones of Thought series, is the winner of the 1993 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Customer Reviews
Good story but poor written characters and incoherent settings
This might be the first once since a long streak of scifi books that I enjoyed the overall storyline but don’t have any affinity to any characters.
The overall settings and narrative are interesting. net with million lies is quite on point. Medieval aliens are okay, though I’m still not sure why they fought each other. Humans are mostly much less intelligent in comparison for some reason, as a relatively extremely advanced species. The two younger human characters are even more like animals compared to real aliens, if we follow Dune’s standard.
The characters were constantly making bizarre decisions. Even the main antagonist became a moron in the final moment. Furthermore, i really don’t get the purpose of the two younger characters, except for them being pushing the plots forward.
Some of the technology settings are purely plot devices, they don’t make sense at all. One specific thing that makes me so angry is that: a bunch of civilizations that have FTL, don’t have any sensor to see through regular smoke. And the whole arsenal of a spaceship is just a side mounted laser gun with no optics, like those from side of a Blackhawk.
Some other things causing facepalm like technology can be advanced so fast if someone receives books and tutorials. This is like ignoring the hardest and most fundamental factor in manufacturing: processing method. Even anyone knows the recipe of black power and other explosives, to mass produce it without blowing up is painstakingly hard, check Nobel’s story for example.
Interesting
Very interesting