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Highly, highly recommend Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky [0], which won the Hugo in 2000. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien,
by btown 5y ago
Highly, highly recommend Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky [0], which won the Hugo in 2000.
It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony over centuries of time (in many ways thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation is in helping people to understand foreign ways of thinking.
At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of philosophical antipositivism [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and description that's familiar to yourselves... even if in so doing this becomes more art than science? Is creative translation ethical if it establishes power dynamics that would not be there otherwise? There's a mind-blowing meta-narrative to this as well when you think about how the reader should interpret the book with that question in mind, though to say anything more would delve into spoilers. And lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope.
While technically it's a prequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Content warnings for mind control and assault (though they're handled thoughtfully IMO). With Asimov's Foundation being adapted for TV (also recommend, if for the visuals alone), if you want even more sci-fi that speaks to societal rise and decline, and the lengths to which people will manipulate others in the name of control and survival, this is a must-read.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355 https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism
- cdogl 5y ago+1. A Deepness in the Sky is one of the most underrated works of speculative fiction that I've read. It is a masterwork of plotting and character work. A Fire Upon the Deep has some great ideas and some characters that have stuck with me, but I think Deepness is a far superior work. Its brilliance is that it has the structure of a great work of fiction but you can basically just read it as straight pulp science fiction and have a fun time.
- miohtama 5y agoI rate it 6/5
- AdamHominem 5y agoI'd rate it a 5/7 book
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AdamHominem 5y agoI recently read Fire Upon the Deep and I think I'd agree that Vinge is great at speculative fiction. I hadn't looked at the publish/copyright date when I borrowed the ebook from my library. I was shocked just now to see it's a thirty year old book. Zero signs or hints of it, at least to me. The concept that computers/AIs can be affected by the region of space they're in is a nifty idea I don't think I've seen before, and one can find some parallels today (for example, Siri now on a sufficiently new enough iPhone isn't completely useless, but much more capable when within range of a data connection.) My only complaint about FUtD was that some elements of the plot, namely stuff going on in the planet, felt drawn out and slow. Thank you both for recommending another one of his books.
- int_19h 5y agoYou can kinda tell when FutD originates by the fact that it has, basically, a galactic Usenet. Granted, it's justified by the setting, but still.
- bradknowles 5y agoIt is a bit of a slow burn. But with these books, Vernor Vinge has now become one of my favorite authors, up there with Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, David Drake, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle (although I don’t care for Niven and Pournelle when they work together). Larry Niven has introduced me to some new authors that I’ve liked, through his “Man-Kzin Wars” series, but I haven’t read enough of their works to put them in my “favorite authors” category, at least not yet. Piers Anthony is also great, but I’ve only read his fantasy novels, so I can’t speak for where he would rate on the SF scale. I also wouldn’t consider Edgar Rice Burroughs to be SF. Same for Arthur Conan Doyle. And Orson Scott Card is just plain weird. I love his work, but I find it hard to recommend to others. James S. A. Corey is a pseudonym of two authors, so I don’t feel like I can include it on the top list above. But I do love what I’ve seen of their work. Ironically, while I love the Dune movie, I haven’t actually read any of Frank Herbert’s work. I look forward to seeing the new Dune movie as well, and then maybe I’ll go back and read some of the novels. I absolutely hated, loathed, and despised Aldous Huxley. The closest I ever came to suicide was while I was forced to read his book. The second closest was when I was forced to read “Madame Bovary”. Both were a result of a sophomore level English class I was forced to take in order to get my degree. I don’t think I’ve actually read any of Roald Dahl’s novels, same with Cory Doctorow, Harlan Ellison, and Neil Gaiman. And I think I’ll stop there. I’m seeing too many names that I recognize on the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science-fiction_authors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science-fiction_author... but which I don’t remember reading any of their work. So, I’ve got a few decades of reading to catch up on.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y agoHuh I just recommended that some do go forward with a deepness in the sky, but read a fire upon the deep first because of the aforementioned content warnings. I think if I didn't already have some faith in the author I would have just stopped because the theming is so dark
- joe-collins 5y agoIt was definitely dark, and before I was halfway through I was desperate for the alien chapters just because all of the humans were just so damned miserable.
- btown 5y agoIt’s almost like the way in which a society is described to you affects how engaged you are in their success… which is entirely the meta-textual point!
- Stratoscope 5y agoI am a little confused. Which of the books are you and GP talking about that is so dark?
- db48x 5y agoThey are talking about A Deepness in the Sky. The good guys lose pretty hard and suffer as a result.
- garmaine 5y agoSame here. I would have put down and thrown away Deepness if I hadn't read Fire Upon The Deep first and trusted the author. I'm glad I finished it because of the parts about the spiders and Pham Nuwen's past was really interesting. But the "present-day" emergents story line is dark... I did not enjoy reading those parts.
- Terretta 5y agoPulling this point to the TL;DR top: A Deepness in the Sky (1999) is a prequel set 20k years earlier than A Fire Upon the Deep (1992).
- EvanAnderson 5y agoDeepness introduced me to the concept of software archaeology. I won't spoil it, but there's a really fun bit when a character, digging deeply into the bowels of software systems in this far-future human society, makes an observation about the basis for timekeeping in the oldest systems. The "focused" remind me of the mentats from the Dune universe, but less general purpose-- more like replicating feedback-based control systems. I have a back-of-the-mind worry that our society will end up with a class of citizens working in "focused" roles powering "intelligent" systems.
- bitwize 5y agoThere's a meme phrase that applies quite literally to Focus, and has similar implications in the real world to those in the novel. That phrase is "weaponized autism".
- TeMPOraL 5y agoIf we're going in this direction, you might find enjoyable the book Echopraxia (and its predecessor, Blindsight). Without spoiling too much, it features a group of people that pushed their cognitive wetware and hardware to the point they can't even communicate with normal humans anymore.
- garmaine 5y agoAlso along similar lines is Alastair Reynolds' Diamond Dogs short story.
- maxerickson 5y agoThe character in Blindsight didn't push anything, they lost half their brain to a bioweapon.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoI wasn't talking about the protagonist.
- jvanderbot 5y agoNot only is Deepness one of the best sci-fi stories I've read, it's also immensely better than Fire Upon the Deep. I read it first, and it's basically essential sci-fi in my book.
- ak217 5y agoA Fire upon the Deep is more flawed and uneven, but correspondingly more ambitious and thought-provoking. To me both are easily among the top 5 sci-fi novels ever written. I wish Vinge would keep writing more about Pham Nuwen's adventures. And to the grandparent poster's point, there are far more dimensions to A Deepness in the Sky than the one about communicating with alien cultures (the Focused is just one example). Both books are brilliantly multi-faceted, though the Tines World is a slog.
- JohnMashey 5y agoIn 2007, Vinge told me he was planning to write story of Pham & Anne's crusade against the Emergents ... a few years later, when that hadn't appeared, I asked him about it ... he said it was too depressing. (People found Deepness dark, now imagine portrayal of the Emergents' worlds, even though they obviously get defeated, given Fire.)
- rsync 5y agoAgreed that _Deepness in the Sky_ is better than _Fire Upon the Deep_. However, in my opinion, _Fire Upon the Deep_ should be the better book and has, in many ways, deeper and more thought-provoking concepts at play. The problem is, none of them get fully explained or resolved. The book wraps up the character driven story arcs and the much deeper, conceptual story arcs involving non-human actors just peter out ...
- jl6 5y agoFire has the most breathtaking, hooking first chapter of any book I’ve read.
- amosj 5y agoThis is an extraordinary book and one of my top 5 among many a science fiction novel. "You want a deepness that endures, a deepness that [we] can depend on? there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever" it's got VR headsets, distributed computers - hacking plays a major role. Only way it could be better is if I could forget the plot so I could read it again
- jf 5y agoI’ve enjoyed each reread almost as much as the first. What a book!
- abecedarius 5y ago> I would argue that Deepness is best read first I strongly recommend the publication order instead. Deepness ought to work standalone, but you'll be missing dramatic irony.
- wibblewobble123 5y agoThe dramatic irony is highly overrated. Deepness before Fire is way more enjoyable.