A Fire Upon the Deep: 1 (Zones of Thought)

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Deceptive Disciple: Flenser was Woodcarver's offspring/creation and most brilliant disciple, until the nature of his experiments was revealed. Some characters including Flenser!Tyrathect even call out Woodcarver for creating such a monster and then just letting him go. Cute Is Evil: A Fire Upon the Deep has the Aprahanti species. They are humanoid with soft features, big round eyes, butterfly wings, soft downy fur, and cute sing-song voices. They are also militaristic fascists who make their first appearance pushing around a shopkeeper and later take a flimsy pretext to attempt genocide on humanity. Nuke 'em: How the mad governance of Tarelsk tries to deal with Qeng Ho fleet. It fails, but kills billions in the process. Besides the normal print book editions, the novel was also included on a CD-ROM sold by ClariNet Communications along with the other nominees for the 1993 Hugo awards. The CD-ROM edition included numerous annotations by Vinge on his thoughts and intentions about different parts of the book, and was later released as a standalone e-book. [2] [3] Setting [ edit ]

Alternative Calendar: In A Deepness in the Sky, interstellar traders have done away with not just years and months, but also with days, hours and minutes. All timespans are measured in (appropriate powers-of-thousands of) seconds, with dates simply being the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch (with some unspecified but explicitly mentioned relativistic frame corrections) — though in-universe it is most commonly thought that the zero-second was at the first moon landing. Settled planets all have their own calendars. One way the traders know they have stayed too long is when they start using the locals' calendar. Benevolent Alien Invasion: Inverted in A Fire Upon the Deep, where humans are the aliens invading the medieval Tines planet and changing its culture to benefit both species. Granted, the invasion wasn't intentional (a cargo ship carrying children in stasis crash-landed on the planet and the humans only expected to stay long enough for rescuers to find them, but things got much more complicated), but by the end of the book, the humans have upset the political balance of a large part of the planet. By the start of The Children of the Sky, the sole adult human has become co-ruler of the most powerful nation on the planet, is working to advance the Tines' technology beyond Space Age levels within a century, and the human children are intermingling with the native Tines and creating a social revolution almost unintentionally. Tomato Surprise: In A Fire Upon the Deep, the early parts with Peregrine as a viewpoint character focus on the details he finds interesting and don't mention details that he considers to go without saying, allowing the reader to picture him and his traveling companions as humanoid by default for quite a while before it turns out they're really, really not. Staying Alive: It is unclear whether The Blight retained some self-awareness, even after being submerged into the Slow Zone, or just cooked up complicated programs for its fleet right before that, but said fleet is certainly alive and still intending to nuke the Countermeasure, alongside with the Tines' world, as soon as it gets there. Which might be far sooner than anyone's worst predictions.

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Vinge, Joan D. (November 2008). "A letter to my readers". Archived from the original on March 3, 2016 . Retrieved October 3, 2016.

In A Deepness in the Sky, Tomas Nau is done in by Qiwi, remembering for one final time her mother's rape and murder. An ancient, malevolent super-intelligent entity which strives to constantly expand and can easily manipulate electronics and even organic beings. Playing with Syringes: A Deepness in the Sky gleefully teeters on the fence between invoking this and playing it straight. In the Dénouement, while negotiating over what to do with the human POWs, the Spiders insist on keeping Ritser Brughel, unarguably the worst of the surviving war criminals, to themselves. When the humans concede that it would be fair to give him to the Spiders to be punished, the Spiders' response is something along the lines of, "Punish him? Oh, no. We just need a live experimental subject to help our studies of human physiology. Any 'punishment' would be strictly incidental." Ragnarök Proofing: The Spiders have to learn some of this to progress their civilization on a homeworld orbiting the On-Off star.

Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. Hive Mind: A whole species consisting of micro- Hive Minds in A Fire Upon the Deep. The Tropical Choir in The Children of the Sky is an enormous, but very scatterbrained example. Space Is Magic: The laws of physics as we know them only hold in the local Zone; farther out, the laws of physics change and things become commonplace that would be impossible marvels on Earth. Vernor Steffen Vinge is a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels A Fire Upon The Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999) and Rainbows End (2006), his Hugo Award-winning novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004), as well as for his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.

Physical God: Any Power from A Fire Upon the Deep. "Applied Theology" is one of the most important scientific disciplines in the Beyond. Batman Gambit: A Deepness in the Sky has a rare example of competing protagonist Batman Gambits. Sherkaner Underhill invaded the Focus system and manipulated it to defend against Nau's genocidal plans, while Pham Nuwen used the localizers to invade the system and manipulate it against Nau. They both almost squash each other by accident, buying Nau valuable time when executing his Evil Plan and leading to the probable death of both Sherkaner and his wife. The Spiders in A Deepness in the Sky have a larger visible spectrum of light than humans, referring to infrared frequencies as "far-red" and ultraviolet as "far-blue". Human display technologies, designed only to display what we can see, look like simple and underdeveloped technology to them, despite our otherwise advanced capabilities. Some Spider dwellings also appear dark to us, due to being lit with light outside our visible spectrum. On one occasion, Spiders are also shown to be able to "hear" vibrations in the ground through their feet. A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. It's All About Me: The true core of Emergents' ruling caste approach to life, as explained by Tomas Nau, but relentless, single-minded selfishness is probably the most defining trait of Vinge's villains in general.

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Vinge first used the concepts of "Zones of Thought" in a 1988 novella The Blabber, which occurs after Fire. Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky (1999) is a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep set 20,000 years earlier and featuring Pham Nuwen. Vinge's The Children of the Sky, "a near-term sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep ", set ten years later, was released in October 2011. [9] The Blabber is set at at least millennia later, on a human-colonized planet near the top of the Slow Zone. A young man has grown up with a very strange pet who is suddenly an object of intense interest when a shipful of Beyonder sightseers arrive. It was out of print for a long time but is now available in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001).

It is never the same river twice. The first edition of Vernor Vinge’s great long-limbed space opera, A Fire upon the Deep, which I and others reviewed excitedly in early 1992, may have been reprinted without a change ever since—the edition you are holding now may have been reset but is the same text—but right now, in July 2019, I have just read, or reread, something that feels hugely different to the mind’s eye. The kaleidoscope has been shaken, and something like a clean, pure, laser-bright blast from the past has just transfigured my summer. I think A Fire upon the Deep may be better today than it ever was. Now with a new introduction for the Tor Essentials line, A Fire Upon the Deep is sure to bring a new generation of SF fans to Vinge's award-winning works. Last-Minute Hookup: A Deepness in the Sky has two mild examples. There is some foreshadowing of the relationships involved, but it's still pretty sudden.

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Each "soul" can survive and evolve by adding members to replace those who die, potentially for hundreds of years, as Woodcarver does.