A Deepness in the Sky: Vernor Vinge (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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As much as I liked A Fire Upon the Deep, its hard-science-fiction tropes never quite cohere, and the story and characterization suffer as a result. Their struggles against ignorance and obsolescent traditions are coloured with oddly human-like descriptions and nomenclature, prefiguring some major plot revelations towards the end of the story. The combined Emergent/Qeng Ho fleet now negotiates with the Spider civilization as a trading partner.

The "Focus" is one of the most chilling forms of slavery I've seen in fiction--one where with your mind enslaved, your body follows. It rang so false for me that she wouldn't be more deeply affected by losing years of her life as Nau's plaything.

The book is extremely strong, but it is hard to read it in one go; it clearly benefits from a reread. Vinge excels at thinking about primitive alien species, and much like the telepathic dog packs in A Fire Upon the Deep, he devotes lots of pages to describing their society in depth.

In any case, although there are plenty of unanswered questions Vinge has left after two books in his Zones of Thought series, the reviews of the third book Children of the Sky are fairly negative, so I’ll try something more promising instead. With new knowledge of the effects and victims of Focus, Pham is forced to admit the cost is too high, and the two reach an agreement and continue their plotting.During these events, a concurrent history of the Spider civilization unfolds – mainly through the picaresque, and then increasingly political and technocratic, experiences of a small group of liberal-minded and progressive Spiders.

However, his understanding of Pham's ambitions for Focus technology leads to a confrontation between them over the future use of Focus by the Qeng Ho. The lightest of wear at limited points on unclipped jacket; faint crease on hardcover's spine beneath. Published in 1999, the novel is a loose prequel (set twenty thousand years earlier) to his earlier novel A Fire Upon the Deep (1992). Initially they seem to be people living in a simple small-town existence in an unnamed place not entirely unlike 20th century planet Earth.It's this sort of realistic, hard science fiction that promises us no easy answers and makes me wonder if humans are really meant to live in space. A brilliant scientist, Sherkaner Underhill, spurs a scientific renaissance that culminates in the Spiders staying awake through the Dark. Perhaps the only difference is their different attitude toward death, which seems to be more imminent due to the dangers of the sun cycling down.