A couple of years ago I had exhausted all the books from my favorite authors. Ever have that happen? It tends to make me feel empty for a while… I’ll go into our little home office cum library where our bookshelves are and walk from shelf to shelf, staring at the titles in a quest for something to read. And stare. And stare. Etc. Each title I see, a little synopsis pops up in my head, and I’ll yet again go through the process of “do I remember everything about this book?” through “yes, but was it good enough that I’d like to revisit it again now?” to “neah, I hit that last year, and I can remember individual paragraphs.” I do tend to re-read things, what can I say?
So, I had reached that point again a couple of years ago, and found myself in the bookstore in a search for a new book. I secretly hoped that a new work from one of my known-good authors had come out recently, but no joy. So, in stumbling around the various aisles, I found myself in the Sci–Fi section and my eye fell upon A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (pronounced vin’jee as Javahead and I just discovered this past weekend). Winner of the Hugo award for best science fiction novel in 1993, it was a very impressive piece of fiction, and one that I had to concentrate on for a while to truly enjoy.
Enter Christmas 2002, and I had again entered that odd feeling of malaise, as a stood for almost 10 minutes in my library, staring at book after book in an attempt to find one that I would enjoy reading. I summarily dismissed all of my stalwarts, like Clancy, King, Hamilton and Conroy. Somehow none of them perked my interest. I was in the mood for some Sci-Fi, but Hamilton was too fresh in my brain to be intruiging. As it happened before, my eye chanced on A Fire Upon the Deep, but once again I could almost picture the entire pattern of it in my head. Then, miracles upon miracles, I saw A Deepness in the Sky right next to it, also by Vinge. And I quickly realized that nothing, and I mean nothing stuck in my head about it. Woohoo! Book found.
I finished it recently, and I can safely and without hesitation say that it is in my top three of all Sci-Fi works. Once again, Vinge has created a very believable, richly detailed universe within which some very interesting characters come alive. The story takes place in the same universe as A Fire Upon the Deep, but some tens of thousands of years earlier. Interestingly enough, a character from Fire, Pham Nuwen, makes a key appearance in Deepness, and actually puts an entirely different spin on the events in Fire for those who care.
Pham is the “leader” of the Qeng Ho, a loosely related collection of traders spanning light-years of time and space. I say “leader”, though that concept is hard to translate across such dimensions, and in fact one would probably think of him more as the spiritual leader of these traders. And “collection” might seem a bit anemic a word for the quantity of traders we’re referring to here, which is in the millions. Again though, across the breadth and depth of space we’re talking about, one can only refer to them as a collection since they’re so diluted in terms of the entire human race. Anyway, Pham’s life has been long in real-time and deep sleep and, ultimately, disappointing to him as his lifelong vision of a universal, pan-galactic “civilization” is dashed by the very people he counted as his most stalwart supporters. Exiled by these people, he finds himself essentially stranded on a world in real-time, waiting to die.
Enter the OnOff system, a fascinating solar system with a compelling 2-centuries-off/50-years-on star at its center and a previously undiscovered sentient civilization just entering its technological dawn inhabiting the sole planet in the system. The Qeng Ho are understandably excited by the discovery and embark on an expedition to the OnOff system, somehow finding and dragging the initially reluctant Nuwen along with them. The opportunities surrounding the nascent civilization are enormous, and apparently attractive to more than just the Qeng Ho. A separate starfaring population, the Emergents, are closing in on the OnOff system, and it doesn’t seem as though they would be very interested in the Qeng Ho’s normal modus operandi of free, peaceable trade.
If there’s one thing at which Vinge excels, it’s developing intensely interesting, believable alien lifeforms. In Fire it was the hyena-like Tines with their group-enabled intelligence and “thought” transferred between individuals via sound. In Deepness we are introduced to what the humans term the “spiders”. I’ll assume you can guess what they look like, but every aspect of their life cycle, from the long periods of dormancy during the dark in their deepnesses, to the “in-phase” reproduction is reasonable and relevant. The spiders, finally reaching their technological phase, are beginning to encroach more and more upon the dark, when traditionally they would be safely (again, usually) ensconced in their deepnesses. A particular cadre of spiders, the Accord, have among their number a brilliant if eccentric spider in Sherkaner Underhill. Underhill can be likened to the Einstein of spiderkind, or perhaps even an Einstein on crack, since his ideas come hard and fast, and some of them, if not most, are possible and revolutionary. However, like the humans secretly lurking above them in the glare of OnOff, the spiders’ lives are far from peaceful as the Accord struggles to come to terms with the Kindred and other governments around their planet over the coming nuclear revolution, when the dark will no longer be uninhabitable. He who controls the dark, controls spiderkind.
There’s a ton going on in this book, and I refuse to go into certain aspects of it, because it’s just so damned enjoyable making the journey. The tech of Vinge’s world is a whole lot of fun, and there’s good guys and bad guys and enough flawed heroes to make it all very entrancing. I’ll probably see it again in about a year, and I definitely look forward to visiting OnOff again.
