larsdradrach 's review for:

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

5.0

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Set in the same universe as "a fire upon the deep" but very much it's own story.

Following a group of Queng Ho, with our old friend Oham Nywen on an expedition to an anormaly, a star that turns on and off every 200 years, which might be the remnant of another space faring race.

At the star they encounter another fraction of humankind the Emergence, a totalitarian culture that runs human slaves by mind control, after a brief war and a cruel deception, the remaining Queng Ho are (literally) forced to work with the emergence, to survive at the stange star, awaiting that the culture on the one planet, which consist of intelligent spiders, reaches a technological state where they can support them in building a new fleet.

The world building is amazing and the structure of the story told from both the spiders and the human side keep the story flowing, it's space opera on a generation spanning scale and at the same time a very personal tale of a few characters.

Vinge manages to cramp more ideas and concepts into one story, than many other writers do in a whole series of books.