A Fire Upon the Deep

A Fire Upon the Deep
Vernor Vinge, 1992

Hugo Winner - 1993

Premise: The galaxy is a big place, full of old civilizations, ancient powers, and ancient traps. What are the lives of two children and a librarian worth in all the universe?

It took me a while to get through this book, and I'm not 100 percent sure what I think of it.

I was thrown off at the start, as it takes a lot of pages to introduce all the characters, factions, and situations. I started expecting one kind of story and ended up in quite another.

I think overall it's a good book, and an interesting one, but it's much more about world building than characters, so how much you enjoy that type of thing will probably dictate how much you enjoy this book.

To be fair, the worldbuilding is really neat. It questions the breadth of consciousness that might be possible across a diverse and strange galaxy. The major alien races include one who is more or less a plant augmented by technology, and a race made up of "individuals" which we might call small hive-minds.

The galaxy is divided up into zones in which different levels of technology not only predominate, but actually function or do not function. Amorphously identified Powers operate at the highest levels, and species can move, or be brought, up into broader levels of civilization.

The story, meanwhile, is good, but I wasn't compelled by it until rather late in the book. The stakes for some of the characters are immediate, but it's rather vague for the galaxy at large, despite lots of threatening description. The climax was viscerally satisfying, but I have little idea what happened.

3 Stars - A Good Book

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