Faster-than-light travel remains impossible near Earth, deep in the galaxy's Slow Zone--but physical laws relax in the surrounding Beyond. Outside that again is the Transcend, full of unguessable, godlike "Powers." When human meddling wakes an old Power, the Blight, this spreads like a wildfire mind virus that turns whole civilizations into its unthinking tools. And the half-mythical Countermeasure, if it exists, is lost with two human children on primitive Tines World.

Serious complications follow. One paranoid alien alliance blames humanity for the Blight and launches a genocidal strike. Pham Nuwen, the man who knows about Countermeasure, escapes this ruin in the spacecraftOut of Band--heading for more violence and treachery, with 500 warships soon in hot pursuit. On his destination world, the fascinating Tines are intelligent only in combination: named "individuals" are small packs of the doglike aliens. Primitive doesn't mean stupid, and opposed Tine leaders wheedle the young castaways for information about guns and radios. Low-tech war looms, with elaborately nested betrayals and schemes to seizeOut of Band if it ever arrives. The tension becomes extreme... while half the Beyond debates the issues on galactic Usenet.

Vinge's climax is suitably mindboggling. This epic combines the flash and dazzle of old-style space opera with modern, polished thoughtfulness. Pham Nuwen also appears in the nifty prequel set 30,000 years earlier,A Deepness in the Sky. Both recommended.--David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

Excellent
Finally, a science fiction novel that does actually live up to the hype. "A Fire Upon the Deep" is a fast-paced, exciting, and incredibly inventive book. As many others have mentioned, Vinge's unique vision of the future is one of the novel's biggest strengths. He has created a galaxy where different species are moving upwards through a series of "zones of thought" as their technology becomes more sophisticated. The catch is that once humanity has ventured into "the beyond", it's difficult to go back to "the slow zone" because the new spaceships and computers won't work there. Vinge's ingenious plot device is to have a spaceship carrying two children and some vital information crash-land on a planet that's right on the border of "the slow zone", forcing a ragtag group of spacefarers to attempt a desperate rescue mission. While almost all science fiction writers include intelligent aliens, the species that Vinge dreams up are quite different from anything I've ever seen in any other book. There are the Tines, a race where a single consciousness controls a group of several individuals, the Skroderiders, a species that was sessile until they were provided with mechanical carts, and numerous others that help add color to the book.

But in addition to its remarkable futuristic world, "A Fire Upon the Deep" also contains an action-packed plot. The author springs a major surprise on you in almost every chapter: characters that you though were good turn out to be traitors and vice versa, certain groups turn out to be more powerful than you thought, etc... The bottom line is that you never know what's going to happen next, and Vinge manages to keep the suspense up throughout the entire book, despite its 613 page length. "A Fire Upon the Deep" is very well paced, and Vinge never keeps you confused about a concept for very long before providing an explanation. I personally felt that the ending did a good job of wrapping up the plot while at the same time giving readers a few facets to wonder about. Overall, this book deserved its Hugo Award, and a place on the shelf along with the best science fiction works of all times.

On the one hand, Ravna Bergsndot and Pham Nuwen live in a galaxy teeming with innumerable civilizations connected by the Net of a Million Lies, a galaxy-spanning version of the internet. Among his most pervasive ideas is the Zones of Thought: the farther from the galactic core you are, the more sophisticated is the technology allowed by the laws of physics. The descendants of the human race are only one of countless species existing in the buffer between the Slow Zone, where FTL travel no longer functions, and the rim, past which transcendant species and awesome machine intelligences dwell.

However, Vinge sets the other half of his story on a single planet, Tines' World, which is no less compelling. The dominant (medieval) species of this planet is race of packs of dog-like creatures: each individual consciousness comprises multiple bodies. The author's background in computer science, prevalent in the other half of the novel, can be seen here as well with the discussion of different network topologies for these "distributed" minds. Vinge does a better job of conveying the alienness of these "Tines" than he does with the Spiders in A Deepness in the Sky, while still making their motivations and personalities comprehensible.

My only real complaint with this novel is the ending. While grand in scope and thought-provoking, it still comes off a little flat; the first 550 or so pages do not really build up to it. Somehow, the resolution of the plot specific to Tines' World was much more satisfying than the end of Ravna and Pham's quest of galactic importance. Also, although I liked the characters, the plotting and characterization in A Deepness in the Sky (which I read first) are better.

Despite its imperfections, A Fire Upon the Deep is a great read, if for nothing else than the richness of Vinge's imagination. He infuses his writing with rich ideas and details that I can hardly begin to convey here.

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