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

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Every so often, she learns the horrible truth about her situation — particularly the scene where she stumbles upon a recording of Thomas Nau enjoying torturing her mother to death — just to have her mind wiped. Again and again and again. The next Zone beyond the Slow Zone is called the Beyond, and this is where artificial intelligence dominates. Travel and communication both happen here faster than the speed of light. There are some human beings in this zone, but all originate from a single Norwegian ethnic group that managed to arrive from the Slow Zone.

Enforced Technology Levels: Within the lower Zones. Earth is located in the "slow zone", where physics works as we currently understand it (i.e. faster-than-light travel is impossible, no such thing as anti-gravity, etc). Further out is called "The Beyond", where things like FTL travel and Artificial Intelligence become possible. Farthest is "The Transcend", a zone where magic and science lose any distinction and you have things like powerful A.I.s becoming akin to gods. Fantasy World Map: A Fire Upon the Deep has a map of the galaxy done in fantasy style. It includes a delineation of the "Zones of Thought", which regulate FTL travel, as well as the path the protagonists' ship takes. Becoming Focused is only better than being turned into the Blight's appendage insofar as you are at least no longer capable of understanding the horror of your situation. Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Ultimately, despite all the suffering and sacrifices, closer to the idealistic end of the scale. The first grand SF I've read in ages...Vinge is one of the best visionary writers of SF today.” — David Brin, author of Earth

New in Series

In Children of the Sky it's when Amdi is tossed, member by member, from Vendacious' airship, in full view of Ravna and Jef. Only several chapters later is it revealed that it wasn't Amdi that was defenestrated, but Vendacious. I have never taken the time to write a review before this one. I know we all have different tastes and many have reviewed this book in a positive light (that is why I bought this in the first place). This is the first audio book where my mind would wander. My own thoughts about what to eat for dinner or which route to take home from work were more engaging than the story. Very disappointing. I have about 9 hours left and just can't finish it. Meat Moss: A rare benevolent example occurs in A Fire Upon the Deep; the Old One filled one of the rooms of the Skroderider's ship with this. It turns out to be a complex biotech weapon used to combat the Blight. It's not shown in A Fire Upon the Deep, but in The Children of the Sky, Tines are shown to have such sharp hearing, and such precise control over the sounds that they can emit from their tympana, that they can use surprisingly fine echolocation as long as the surroundings are sufficiently quiet. This makes up for their poor low-light vision. 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.

Recursive Canon: A Deepness in the Sky is partially recursive. It uses a Switching P.O.V. that alternates between chapters focusing on the humans lurking in orbit around Arachna and studying the Spiders, and chapters focusing on the Spiders themselves. Near the end of the book, it is revealed/heavily implied that all of the Spider-POV passages in the novel were written In-Universe by a human translator monitoring the Spiders' communications and directly communicating with one of them. Space Nomads: In A Deepness in the Sky, the Qeng Ho traders are a loose collective of interstellar traders that travel via slower-than-light ramscoop-powered sleeper starships. The Qeng Ho hold that if they start to use the local time system (days/months/years) instead of their UNIX-time based system (seconds, kiloseconds megaseconds, etc), they've been in the system for too long.Woodcarver excels in several form of fine arts and basically invented the scientific approach, revolutionizing much of Tines' culture. On top of that he/she is a competent politician and military leader, and apparently was a badass warrior in his/her younger days. Two Aliases, One Character: A justifiably partial example occurs in The Children of the Sky. What's left of Steel is disguised as Screwfloss using fake dyed pelt-markings, but when one of his members is killed, he loses some cognitive capacity, which causes him to be lax in keeping the disguise maintained. That naturally pales before Beyonder surveillance methods, revealed in The Chidren of the Sky— swarms of nanocameras, that infuse the target's bloodstream, can be transferred by a casual touch, and relay everything their host hears and sees. Of course, such technology swiftly decays in the Slow Zone. Gut Punch: The series as a whole is too dark and violent to get much darker, but taking The Children of the Sky as a single work, most of the "evil" going on is either safely offscreen or nonviolent. Nevil Storherte, the most prominent of the Big Bad trio, spends most of the story coming across as a seditious and weaselly but charismatic manipulator. He never quite seems like the type to condone violence except in necessary situations, and since he's the Big Bad, it seems likely that the story's conflict will remain mostly political... until, near the end of the book, he fires an explosive Wave-Motion Gun into a crowd of civilians in an attempt to kill a target who might be there. Shortly thereafter, he privately laments the deaths... and blames them on his intended target for maybe being there.

The plot of the novel describes the ambitious activities of Straumli Realm, a human civilization that lives in the highest part of the Beyond Zone, near the Transcend Zone. They are taking part in an expedition to investigate a data archive but become compromised by the release of an ancient superintelligent power known as the Blight. The Blight begins to take over the High Lab where the Straumli Realm is doing their research. The humans attempt to escape in two ships, one for adults and one for children. The one for adults ends up being destroyed by the Blight but the children survive. Walton, Jo (June 11, 2009). "The Net of a Million Lies: Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep". Tor.com. Recognizing the danger of what they have awakened, the researchers at High Lab attempt to flee in two ships, one carrying all the adults and the second carrying all the children in " coldsleep boxes". Suspicious, the Blight discovers that the first ship contains a data storage device in its cargo manifest; assuming it contains information that could harm it, the Blight destroys the ship. The second ship escapes. The Blight assumes that it is no threat, but later realizes that it is actually carrying away a "countermeasure" against it.Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence. Physical God: Any Power from A Fire Upon the Deep. "Applied Theology" is one of the most important scientific disciplines in the Beyond. Capital Letters Are Magic: Plenty of examples note The Tines, the Powers, the Emergents and the Emergency, the Spiders, Focus and the Focused, the Children, the Choir, and of course the Zones themselves, the Slow Zone, the Beyond, and the Transcend, but one of the strongest examples in the trilogy occurs when Beyonders trapped in the Slow Zone start referring to it sullenly as "Down Here". A Fire Upon the Deep is a 1992 science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge. It is a space opera involving superhuman intelligences, aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and a communication medium resembling Usenet. A Fire Upon the Deep won the Hugo Award in 1993, sharing it with Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. [1] 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.