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This is in my list of top 10 (ish) books I've read. If you've enjoyed it, He's got two more books in the Zones of Thought universe: A Deepness In The Sky, which follows Pham in his Queng Ho days before A Fire Upon The Deep (recommended!) as well as Children Of The Sky, which follows Ravna and the children on the Tines world as a direct sequel to Fire Upon The Deep.
A fantastic book. It will really make you ache for more information, though. Why do ascended beings only hang around for a few years and where do they go? What fraction of living beings survived the Blight and the Countermeasure? What is the present-day status of Earth?
This is in my list of top 10 (ish) books I've read. If you've enjoyed it, He's got two more books in the Zones of Thought universe: A Deepness In The Sky, which follows Pham in his Queng Ho days before A Fire Upon The Deep (recommended!) as well as Children Of The Sky, which follows Ravna and the children on the Tines world as a direct sequel to Fire Upon The Deep.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think looking at things like Stargate SG-1 seasons 9/10 show why it's better to be left with such questions than answers. And I think that no author would be able to satisfyingly describe concepts like that anyway, just the way that their "mortal" characters perceive such concepts.
Liu Cixin managed to provide some very interesting answers regarding the nature of the cosmic dark forest and higher dimensional space in Death's End, the third book in the Three Body Problem trilogy. The Expanse book nine, Leviathan Falls, will probably explain the advanced alien conflict and unknown aggressors that proceeded human discovery in the distant past. Given how the authors have handled mysterious alien st…
This is in my list of top 10 (ish) books I've read. If you've enjoyed it, He's got two more books in the Zones of Thought universe: A Deepness In The Sky, which follows Pham in his Queng Ho days before A Fire Upon The Deep (recommended!) as well as Children Of The Sky, which follows Ravna and the children on the Tines world as a direct sequel to Fire Upon The Deep.
Stay away from Children of the Sky unless, having finished Fire Upon the Deep, your response was "I'd sure like to hear more about those whiny children and the dogs"
As an atheist who usually can't say out loud what I really think about facile, Earth-bound supernatural beliefs, I was enchanted to find this feature included in this already-mesmerizing world.
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/0812536... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism
Future archaeologists have traveled to a remote asteroid to investigate an alien artifact found within it, a computing device of some kind. They bring it to life and begin extracting its data and programs for their research.
A debate breaks out about the substantial virus risk known to be associated with these "found" computing devices. They decide to cut and run, but not before the artifact has regained its ancient sentient awareness, unbeknownst to the crew.
They wipe and rebuild their onboard computers as quickly and thoroughly as they can.
But as they are rocketing away, the artifact scans their ship and finds a neglected peripheral on its surface.
A software vulnerability is found! It makes its move.
Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on right-to-repair issues in a way.
I consider Rainbow's End to be a pretty good picture of what it might be like to live through the singularity.
Especially evocative: the kid at the end chipping a skill his (grandfather?) worked for a career to accumulate, using it for a weekend, and then discarding it.