A Deepness in the Sky: Vernor Vinge (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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Vernor Steffen Vinge is a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. I did get lost in some scientific details but most of them do become self explanatory as you read on.

But now that the Spiders can live during the Dark, that, like a myriad other things, will have to change. When the Qeng Ho and the Emergents arrive, the Spiders are dormant, frozen in their deepnesses, but when the star flares to life, they are poised to enter a modern technological age in the next generation. The third in the trilogy, The Children of the Sky scores significantly lower here on Goodreads than either of the first two ( an average of 3. Initially they seem to be people living in a simple small-town existence in an unnamed place not entirely unlike 20th century planet Earth.Not something you find enough in Hard Science Fiction--and Vinge brings off some mind-blowing concepts without ever falling into infodump or other awkward constructions. Vinge didn't drop the ball once, and he even made the Spiders relatable and interesting characters, so that the shift between human and Spider POV never annoyed me the way some books do when a more interesting character's story is left hanging to shift to a less interesting one.

Children are conceived at the end of the cycle (the Waning Years) and grow to adulthood during the next Brightness. Unfortunately, they guess the structure of the Zones (though not the actual properties) backwards, coming to the conclusion that the bright center of the galaxy is the most likely location for advanced civilization.

A brilliant scientist, Sherkaner Underhill, spurs a scientific renaissance that culminates in the Spiders staying awake through the Dark. The first are Qeng Ho, wandering traders, who try to keep the human civilization (light years apart) the whole. They use these Focused people to run/manage the hardware and also to keep tabs on the Qeng Ho folks. When a new alien species is discovered on a planet orbiting an oscillating On-Off star, they immediately see this as an opportunity for potential new scientific discoveries, i.

The novel can be seen as a homage to many SF classics, from Foundation with its idea of rise and fall of civilizations and the attempt to prevent it; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress with its pro-free market libertarian and anti-tyranny ideas and a lot of others.When I think about encounters with the alien, I am much more inclined to believe in aliens that are truly inscrutable and terrifying, like those in Peter Watt’s Blindsight, for example. This is a prequel to the first book of the Zones of Thought trilogy, but not only can this stand alone, I think it might be best to read it first. This massive accumulation of data implies that almost any useful program one could want already exists in the Qeng Ho fleet library, hence the need for computer archaeologists to dig up needed programs, work around their peculiarities and bugs, and assemble them into useful constructs.