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matthewcpeck 's review for:
A Fire Upon the Deep
by Vernor Vinge
I can't, in good conscience, assign a star rating to 'A Fire Upon The Deep', because I abandoned it at the halfway point. I haven't voluntarily given up on a book in this way for at least a decade, but I realize that I'm not getting any younger, and that life is too short to force my way through something that was still failing to engage me after 300 long pages. I really did not care for this book.
Vernor Vinge is a former computer science professor and current deep thinker, best known for popularizing the concept of the coming 'singularity' when artificial intelligence will surpass human comprehension. He has remarkable ideas that can be explored in some fascinating interviews available on the internet. A storyteller, however, he is not. This is strong book in conceptual terms: the Milky Way is divided into 'zones' that increase in technology and intelligence with distance from the galactic core. The alien species are wonderfully exotic, and include mobile plants and hive minds. But the novel is faulty in characterization, dialogue, sentences…even simple components like flow and pacing. Apart from some broadly sketched traits, the characters all sound nearly identical - similar to the point that their expository conversations and Vinge's own expository interjections dissolve into one garbled, clunky word stew. The prose is awkward - the last sentence I read ended with "she might look on back on these months as goldenly happy". It's probably unfair to nitpick at these sorts of things in a book with such expansive ideas. But 'A Fire Upon The Deep', at least in its first half, fails to use the power of these ideas to energize a good story. A large part of the failure may be due to the portrayal of the 'Blight' - the malevolent AI(?) entity whose appearance drives the events of the novel. Its nature, intentions, and effects are so vague, so unclear, that there is little of the sense of menace and urgency that compels the reader to find out what happens to the characters. Reading this book is often like happening upon a blog post in an online fan community for something esoterically nerdy - breathless, full of obscure jargon, and insulated against outsiders.
Perhaps the second half of 'A Fire Upon the Deep' is mind-blowingly good and exciting, and I'll read it during an extended convalescence or artificially extended lifespan. But for an example of sprawling, epic science fiction that successfully marries the escapism of space opera with "hard" SF foundations, I'd recommend readers to take on Dan Simmons' "Hyperion" instead.
Vernor Vinge is a former computer science professor and current deep thinker, best known for popularizing the concept of the coming 'singularity' when artificial intelligence will surpass human comprehension. He has remarkable ideas that can be explored in some fascinating interviews available on the internet. A storyteller, however, he is not. This is strong book in conceptual terms: the Milky Way is divided into 'zones' that increase in technology and intelligence with distance from the galactic core. The alien species are wonderfully exotic, and include mobile plants and hive minds. But the novel is faulty in characterization, dialogue, sentences…even simple components like flow and pacing. Apart from some broadly sketched traits, the characters all sound nearly identical - similar to the point that their expository conversations and Vinge's own expository interjections dissolve into one garbled, clunky word stew. The prose is awkward - the last sentence I read ended with "she might look on back on these months as goldenly happy". It's probably unfair to nitpick at these sorts of things in a book with such expansive ideas. But 'A Fire Upon The Deep', at least in its first half, fails to use the power of these ideas to energize a good story. A large part of the failure may be due to the portrayal of the 'Blight' - the malevolent AI(?) entity whose appearance drives the events of the novel. Its nature, intentions, and effects are so vague, so unclear, that there is little of the sense of menace and urgency that compels the reader to find out what happens to the characters. Reading this book is often like happening upon a blog post in an online fan community for something esoterically nerdy - breathless, full of obscure jargon, and insulated against outsiders.
Perhaps the second half of 'A Fire Upon the Deep' is mind-blowingly good and exciting, and I'll read it during an extended convalescence or artificially extended lifespan. But for an example of sprawling, epic science fiction that successfully marries the escapism of space opera with "hard" SF foundations, I'd recommend readers to take on Dan Simmons' "Hyperion" instead.