A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (Tor, 2017)

★★★★☆

In the far future, humanity awakens an ancient evil. Refugees flee, crash-landing on a medieval alien world. The only survivors are two children, who are immediately kidnapped by opposing alien factions.

Over the last few years, I’ve read surprisingly little “hard” science fiction. I chalk this up to a belief I’ve held that hard sci-fi is too opaque or technical for me to connect with. As a result, I’ve collected scant empirical evidence to the contrary, and the belief has become self-fulfilling.

A Fire upon the Deep, despite winning the Hugo in 1993, flew under my radar for a combination of reasons, but I think the above played a major role. In any case, I was shocked to see that five of my Goodreads friends had read it—all giving it 4 or 5 stars! I immediately bumped it to the front of my TBR.

(I had a much longer review planned and partially written here, and then lost it to the caprices of memory leaks, ungraceful hardware shutdowns, and the Country being On Fire. Abridged review follows.)

  • Perhaps it’s that earlier misguided belief talking, but I didn’t expect the immediate zoom-in to character. I got invested in the human children quickly.

  • What appears to have become the novel’s legacy: Vinge does a fantastic job imagining an alien group consciousness and its impacts on the world. A tertiary alien tree species is silly, but internally consistent, so I buy it. The alien evil is menacing but has disappointingly banal motivations.

  • Compelling tension and intrigues throughout. The balance of micro vs. macro conflicts was great.

  • Characters with interesting hooks: a Tines with warring personalities, a human who is the vessel/creation of a Power.

  • Despite all this, characterization was pretty thin.

  • The “Net of a Million Lies” is simultaneously prescient and dated.

And on the “prescient” side of that spectrum, a quote for the times:

Panic was slowly rising in Ravna Bergsndot, every day a little stronger. It was not any particular disaster, just the slow dying of hope.