A Deepness in the Sky: Vernor Vinge (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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There are always compromises when new technology pervades society, and that's one of the reasons science fiction is so useful and compelling. It is quite disturbing to see how they are treated like disposable wetware, while at the same time being relied on as sophisticated technicians in every conceivable aspect of Emergent life.

They use these Focused people to run/manage the hardware and also to keep tabs on the Qeng Ho folks. Seven years later, he followed up with A Deepness in the Sky, set 20,000 years earlier in the same universe, and this captured the 2000 Hugo Award and John W. The next and last of the trilogy was published only about two years ago and is a direct sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep and starts two years after the close of events there. This top notch sci-fi novel revolves around two star-faring factions of humans that converge on a planet of interest and the spider-like aliens that inhabit said planet. The bad guys are among the evilest ones I have ever come across in science fiction and the odds against the good guys are among the longest as well.I've become a lot pickier about my sci-fi, but A Deepness in the Sky has held up even better than the first book in the twelve years since it was written. Focus is a tamed virus that increases the neurological connections in its victims' brains, causing them to become very competent in one area, like linguistics, at the expense of most of their social and interpersonal skills. The book sets itself up for a fantastic climax (seriously--plan to read the last 150 pages or so in one sitting; you have been warned), and, while the climax isn't terrible by any stretch of the imagination, it seemed a bit rushed. This seems to be something of a Vinge trope as Nau is cut from the exact same cloth as the villain of A Fire Upon the Deep Mr. This is a ‘hard’ space opera, with speed of light limit on communication/travel, quite unusual for the genre.

Din punct de vedere al complexității Universului și al introducerii de noi concepte, Adâncurile cerului nu m-a șocat, limitându-se la planetele cunoscute de către oameni, a căror tehnologie nu permite călătoria cu viteze superluminice. This is a book that I imagine would be great all the way through on the second read because there would be no need to figure out the meaning of the setting of the book and the numerous characters' motivations. The final third of the book picks up the pace of events, as the two human factions start meddling heavily in the Spider’s technological development for their own reasons, and the Spiders themselves struggle with differing political ideas and social conflict. Once I understood why they were described in this way, the story made more sense, but it’s a major spoiler to say much more, and even after the truth emerged, I wasn’t really comfortable with how Vinge handled this part of the story.It's a form of literal intellectual slavery, a substitute for the lack of high-performance computing that's the legacy of living in the "Slow Zone" of the galaxy, where no artificial intelligence is possible. While on the surface their appearance is so different from that of humans, from a psychological standpoint they are so similar! In a sense, they are human computers, something like the Mentats of Frank Herbert‘s Dune but far less independent. The prequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, this is the story of Pham Nuwen, a small cog in the interstellar trading fleet of the Queng Ho. Yes--it was a good surprise, but I want to know how it happened, the history of it--not just be presented with its occurrence at the end.

Later in the book, we get a description of the spiders from a human perspective and that is very different.Any way, from the half way point onward this book is very involving and you may need a deFocus treatment afterward. So the story of the "Emergents" versus the Qeng Ho was every bit as interesting as what was happening on Arachna.