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oldbee 's review for:
A Fire Upon the Deep
by Vernor Vinge
Being primed by other 90s science fiction, this one went into all the directions I did not expect it to, which makes it stand above all the others for me. It doesn't always make sense and sometimes it gets downright silly, but it never once loses sight of what's important. Easily one of the most wholesome science fiction books, and that's despite covering some pretty heavy topics – as always, how you approach a topic matters much more than the gruesomeness of the topic itself. In the end, it is still formatted as a traditional hero story, but the heroes here are a librarian with a steadfast moral compass, a confused resurrected prince, trees on wheels with memory issues, a couple lost children with high-tech toys and of course, a bunch of intelligent dog packs in the middle of a medieval war. What's not to like!
It is really hard to write believable aliens who are not just humans in funny suits; Vinge has almost managed it, though they had to be disguised in dog suits. The idea of a mind spread across multiple bodies may not be entirely new, but here it is explored to its every logical conclusion, and it's a joy to follow the author as he listens in to the beings of this strange world. It is only unfortunate that the rich setup of the story – itself a thinly veiled metaphor for colonial interference, with technology as the main prize about to change the stakes on both sides of a local war – is necessarily resolved by the overriding need to save the universe and the loyalty of humans primarily and always to their own kind before anyone else, transforming it into an easy "pick the good guys's side" decision.
It is really hard to write believable aliens who are not just humans in funny suits; Vinge has almost managed it, though they had to be disguised in dog suits. The idea of a mind spread across multiple bodies may not be entirely new, but here it is explored to its every logical conclusion, and it's a joy to follow the author as he listens in to the beings of this strange world. It is only unfortunate that the rich setup of the story – itself a thinly veiled metaphor for colonial interference, with technology as the main prize about to change the stakes on both sides of a local war – is necessarily resolved by the overriding need to save the universe and the loyalty of humans primarily and always to their own kind before anyone else, transforming it into an easy "pick the good guys's side" decision.