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.