Throwback Thursday: A Fire Upon the Deep Is a Brain-Burstingly Big SF Adventure

But Vernor Vinge has a fun time imagining it in A Fire Upon the Deep, his engrossing, Hugo-winning 1991 classic, which reads like a most unusual mix of hard sci-fi and epic fantasy. At its core, this story is about trying to divine what the interaction of sentient societies would look like when spread across such vast distances. (Answer: Kind of like newsgroups from 1993.) But this is just the account we’re reading, an account which, it seems, comes from races as diverse as super-intelligent plants and floating Magellanic clouds. It has all been translated into something resembling English, admittedly rough approximations at times. Because why would I have anything in common with someone from a billion light years away? I don’t have anything in common with my neighbors.
I dig the way Vinge divides the universe into “Zones of Thought,” so technology gets more advanced (as do the beings that operate it) the further you get from the center (as you might guess, Earth is in one of the “Slow Zones”). Mostly this provides an engine for the plot, but it’s one of those ideas so mind-burstingly big that you can’t really get a grip on it. If the transcendent, godlike beings on the periphery of this system are beholden to the Zones, then… what intelligence originally created them? And how do they get their computer network to operate so efficiently, because I keep having to unplug my modem?

Cool ideas. Cool, cool, cool. And I haven’t even talked about the plot they fit into: a team of human scientists awaken a malevolent A.I. somewhere in deep space; it goes berserk and begins chowing down on entire star systems (entire star systems, people!). A few scientists escape and crash land on a planet inhabited by the Tines, hive-minded puppy people whose unique culture and biology play a crucial role in the planetside half of the narrative, which develops their alien society with the depth and thoughtfulness of the best epic fantasy. One puppy alone is dumb, but four or six in a bunch can act as a single consciousness. Beyond distributed consciousness being a nifty idea, they way Vinge uses it to move the plot along is downright giggle-inducing (puppies, people). Elsewhere, word spreads that the crashed ship holds the only secret to stopping the galaxy-wide threat, so a team of super-competent scientist heroes quest off to get it.
This is a densely written, but still perfectly understandable SF novel, though it’s hardly an entry-level text—it presume a certain familiarity and comfort with the genre. The first time I tried it, in high school, I didn’t even make it through the prologue. The book was too big to fit inside my head. After a few more decades reading sci-fi, my head is bigger. If you love it (you’re going to love it), there is a standalone prequel that is every bit as good called A Deepness in the Sky, and a direct sequel set on the Tines’ world, The Children of the Sky.