In my continuing romp through classic and modern must-read sci-fi, I’ve returned to read Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. While ostensibly these are standalone books – and you can certainly read them as such – reading them together will considerably improve your understanding of the universe in which the two stories are set.
While A Fire Upon the Deep was published before A Deepness in the Sky, in the Deepness universe, the latter precedes the former by about 20,000-30,000 years. Thus, if you read it in publishing order, you’re likely to find the second book very limiting in scope. Unlike Rainbow’s End, A Fire Upon the Deep is definitely stuck in technological history – newsgroups are the primary way of conveying information back and forth. A Deepness in the Sky, by contrast, nicely abstracts away the information carrying mechanism and focuses (pun intended) on the slavery involved in generating said information. I should also note that the story of A Deepness in the Sky is much richer and triggers much more introspection than that of A Fire Upon the Deep, where the moral ambiguity seems forced.
Briefly, the chief plot driver is the layout of the galaxy. In order of increasing distance from the galactic core, the four zones are the “Unthinking Depths”, the “Slow Zone”, the “Beyond” and the “Transcend”. The origin of these zones are never really explained, but the consequences for inhabitants of the four zones are considerable. As their names suggest, the closer one is to the galactic core, the less sophisticated the technology available. Indeed, a major plot in A Fire Upon the Deep is a 6000 parsec race across the galaxy through the zones to stop an Voldermort-esque terror.
I have to say that, as with Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, I had considerable difficulty accepting this basic premise. To me, as an amateur astronomer and astrophysicist and someone who measures civilization by the Kardashev Scale, I would expect more advanced civilizations to harness the biggest, most energetic power source in the galaxy: the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way. Conversely, an intelligence at the edges of the Milky Way is likely to be starved for power once it exhausts the resources of its home system and would logically expand towards a star- (and hence, energy-) dense region of the galaxy: closer to the core.
There are a number of popular interpretations for this sort of inverted power structure. The argument that I’ve heard that is most persuasive to me is that Vinge is interpreting the galaxy like a black hole – the closer you are to the singularity at the center of the black hole, the more time is stretched out. In some fashion then, the closer you are to the Unthinking Depths, the longer it takes for anything to happen, and the more distortion there is on your vessel. It’s not the most elegant argument, but … I can see some sort of logic behind it.
Unlike Rainbow’s End, where Vinge has either written rather more fluffily or had an editor who cut ruthlessly, A Fire Upon the Deep has certain passages that make Virginia Woolf seem readable. I confess to having struggled to get into the novel several times before I make it past the crash landing on a world close to the Slow Zone. Perhaps because the story is less expansive or because Vinge had a better editor for A Deepness in the Sky, I found it to be his best novel yet: fascinating without bogging a reader down in needless detail. To be sure, Vinge glosses over certain things – many practical aspects of interstellar life, in matter of fact – in a fashion that makes me cringe and long for Alastair Reynolds’ no-nonsense style, but all together, I found the two books more interesting than Rainbow’s End.
Unfortunately, there is a major risk in reading anything after Charlie Stross’ Accelerando: no matter how wacky the technology, it always seems rather tame and evolutionary rather than mind-blowing and revolutionary. And certainly neither of these books pushes the state of the art in technology; in fact, reading the newsgroup postings in A Fire Upon the Deep, I felt that it was a rather genteel and quaint time for high technology.
What’s most important for me about these books, though, is the terminology he introduces. For example, it becomes clear about a third of the way into A Deepness in the Sky that despite 15,000 – 20,000 years of technology, contemporary human computers in the novels still rely on the Unix epoch to determine time. Another instance is his use of ten powers of seconds to tell time – hours are 3.6 Ksec, a day 86.4 Ksec, a week is .6 Msec, a month 2.6 Msec and so on. Driving to a restaurant after reading the novel, I found myself calmly noting that the road had been repaved in the last few Msecs.
To sum up: A Fire Upon the Deep is an interesting and thought-provoking book, but the story seems contrived and the pace forced. I’m going to make a prediction: you are going to find yourself frustrated by the vastness of the story and the need to rush through the plot quickly in order to finish it in a reasonable time (a few hundred Ksec maybe?) However, A Deepness in the Sky is a book worth reading a couple of times – all 750+ pages. I found the story of A Deepness in the Sky both more interesting and better thought-out than its predecessor. It’s a great and persuasive vision and one which creates a plausible scenario where even the most determined abolitionist might consider slavery an acceptable choice.
