A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992) • Hacker News Board

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#41

Post by ineedasername » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:22 PM UTC

mawise wrote: post #10

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.

I liked Children of The Sky, but in terms of plot it seems clearly meant to be a bridge to a next book, and seemed to suffer from the "middle book" syndrome of trilogies, losing a lot of the faster pace of the first book as it slowly builds up the details and tension to be resolved in the next book.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#42

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:23 PM UTC

btown wrote: post #27

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…

Huh 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

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#43

Post by Kaibeezy » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

Rainbows End

No apostrophe. The last chapter is “The Missing Apostrophe”.

Memorable book. The method of digitizing the library is unforgettable.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#44

Post by Terretta » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

btown wrote: post #27

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…

Pulling 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).

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#45

Post by ansible » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:28 PM UTC

abecedarius wrote: post #25

moonbug wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

When it came out I was also disappointed, but nowadays the villainous power-seekers and the unhinged denialist group make Vinge seem more clear-seeing than I was. (If you think I'm dissing just one side of today's culture wars, nope.)

Vinge fans (myself included) were expecting another high-concept space opera, and weren't that interested in social commentary (however relevant that has turned out to be to present day society).

It has been a while, maybe I'll give it a re-read at some point.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#46

Post by cletus » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

This is one of several books I read in the 90s that I still think about and love so much. Startide Rising and Downbelow Station are the other ones that immediately springs to mind.

This book (and Startide Rising) are very much in the space opera camp. There's really no basis in physics for the zones in this book but I really love the ideas. I love the Tines. I also love the idea of the arms race that was unwittingly started on this world.

If you like the theme of sudden technological advance, I highly recommend CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series. They're sets of trilogies and I think it's up to ~15 books now? This series is set in the same world as Downbelow Station (tangentially). The central premise is that FTL jumping is possible but difficult. In this series, a group of would-be colonists awake from jump sleep to find they have no idea where they've jumped to. They can't get any star bearings and they end up ultimately settling on a world that has an alien species on it that technologically is around the 19th century. It's not a fast-paced series but I love the thoughtfulness and introspection of it.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#47

Post by nl » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

sillyquiet wrote: post #19

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.

Vinge invented the idea (and name) of the singularity.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#48

Post by nl » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #34

jrootabega wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I acknowledge that I'm digressing into general Vinge talk here instead of Zones of Thought, but Rainbow's End was good, too, as more of a near-future vision that, these days, would barely be considered sci-fi. It's also got some elements that are scarily analogous to current trends in government/social media/political dialogue.

On the more general Vinge theme, his "True Names" novella is probably overlooked compared to his novels. But, along with Varley's "Press Enter" (written about the same time) is a really good early take on the "Net" and its intersection with the real world.

True Names was really really hard to find for a long time.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#49

Post by ineedasername » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

jrootabega wrote: post #17

mawise wrote: post #10

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.

I acknowledge that I'm digressing into general Vinge talk here instead of Zones of Thought, but Rainbow's End was good, too, as more of a near-future vision that, these days, would barely be considered sci-fi. It's also got some elements that are scarily analogous to current trends in government/social media/political dialogue.

I read Rainbow's End during breaks at the 2006 HOPE conference. It was coincidence, just what I had next up in my reading list, but I don't think there could have been a better setting for it.

I specifically remember putting it away as a session on rainbow tables began.

Getting mooned by Jello Biafra was also interesting.

Re: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)

#50

Post by travisgriggs » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

Have read all of Vinges works. They’re all great reads at different levels except Rainbows End (that one is a bust IMO). The nice thing about them, is that while some are loosely related, there is no order they need to be read in.