I love A Fire Upon the Deep much more, myself. Sure, the characters aren't quite as good, but in epic scifi I don't think that matters so much. The idea of the

I love A Fire Upon the Deep much more, myself. Sure, the characters aren't quite as good, but in epic scifi I don't think that matters so much. The idea of the Beyond and Transcend is just so compelling, and it's comforting in a way to have Earth located in the Slow Zone -- a place completely safe from the godlike intelligences that roam further out, but also utterly stifled by the structure of spacetime. It's nice to imagine that somewhere out there in the universe, the unbearable distances of space don't matter so much. For weird spiders encountering interstellar explorers (the premise of Deepness), I thought that Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time was better. Although Deepness is still very good.