It's a disappointing sequel to the excellent A Fire Upon the Deep. Set entirely on Tines world, the surviving characters from A Fire Upon the Deep have some adventures against power-hungry villains. Annoyingly, it doesn't tell a complete story - the big showdown with The Blight is trailed repeatedly, but won't happen until some later book. If an author repeatedly says "ooh there's a big interesting bad guy coming", said bad guy really should make an appearance. The wolf-pack Tines remain an inte...

First off, I was a huge fan of Vinge's other books, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. They were awesome examples of hard science fiction, rife with interesting and innovative ideas and characters. Sadly Children of the Sky does not come close to its predessesors.To me it felt like the story suffered from Secondbookitis. It seems pretty clear that there is going to be a sequel, but this book just didn't know what to do in the interim. It was interesting to see how the humans were bo...

If your favorite part of Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning "A Fire Upon the Deep" was the relations between two human children and the dog-like hive minds called Tines on the medieval planet on which they became stranded, then you will love "The Children of the Sky".If you liked AFUtD for the peeks into the connected, multi-civilization melange of super tech species and near godlike transcended Powers, and the desperate flight of the rescue ship "Out of Band II" from the voracious Blight that was shut...

I can't say I waited twenty years for this like Vinge's long-time fans, since I only read A Fire Upon the Deep last year, but damn it was good to read another Vinge space opera. His Zones of Thought books now rival David Brin's Uplift series for my favorite SF. Vinge writes awesome, galaxy-spanning tales that manage to preserve some level of believability given a populated galaxy with super-advanced FTL technology, and he's particularly good with aliens, as he has proven with A Deepness in the S...

I was one of the numerous people who was looking forward to this book yet like so many others I found that, while it's enjoyable, it falls far short of the mark of its predecessors. A sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, it's far more thematically similar to A Deepness in the Sky. There are two big drawbacks to this book. One is the glacial pace (I easily skimmed at least a hundred pages in the middle of the novel with no loss). Antagonists who are so obviously evil that they should've been dispatche...

Wow, if Fire Upon the Deep was pretty cool, and Deepness in the Sky was bearable, The Children of the Sky is one of the worst and most useless books I've ever read.The action is so confusing and to no actual purpose at all. Who cares about the darned tines and their internal political struggles? Yuck. The writing style sucks big time.Avoid. Stick with FUTD which didn't need any sequel.

Not quite as good as the first two, but still really enjoyable. The first two just have this great scope to them - they take place on more than just a single planet and with multiple groups of characters - while this one is smaller, confined to a single planet and a fairly straightforward story. Like I said, though, still really good. I really enjoyed this series and Vernor Vinge's writing. Looking forward to reading more by him.

When you're following up one of the best science fiction books of the late 20th Century (A Fire Upon the Deep), expectations will be high. And unfortunately, they're dashed here. There are parts of this book that are fantastic, but there are a few sections that are glacially paced. A bigger problem is the characters: One of the heroic leads from the first book comes across as a myopic idiot at times in this one, and having just re-read AFUTD prior to starting this, that was hard to swallow.Also

I see several similarities between this book and Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, his sequel to Ender's Game.Both are sequels to exciting, mega-hit sci-fi novels involving space travel, action-packed battles, changes of locale, and more.Both sequels are confined to one particular planet, confined to the politics and relations between humans and one particular alien race.Both sequels, while somewhat well-written, are slow and mundane compared to the first novels they follow.

This was a bit of a roller coaster for me, in that I expected huge undertakings and huge payoffs, but what I got never delivered more than an upheaval of Tines society and the progression toward a technological revolution in the Slow Zone, but after I got over this rather large disappointment, I was pleased to run with all the packs in a fascinating, complex, and plot-driven wonder of a really good character novel.I should have reread A Fire Upon The Deep first, but it wasn't absolutely necessar...

I came into this hoping to learn more about Tones, and I did find enough interesting new aspects to be worth the read. I especially liked (view spoiler)[Johanna's Fragmentarium for old and injured members, the interactions with the choir from the tropics, and the idea of Tinish "romance novels" about fragments joining up. (hide spoiler)]That stuff wasn't really the main focus of the book, though. It was mostly plotting and intrigue between the humans and Tines for control of the world. That part...

There's a scene in A Beautiful Mind where Nash is visited by a friend and former colleague after coming home from the mental hospital. Nash shows his friend his latest work, which is just childish scribbling, from a man who had previously done work worthy of a Nobel Prize. The friend gives him patronizing encouragement but it's clear that he's horrified at what has happened.That's how I felt upon getting into The Children of the Sky. Vinge has produced two of the best books I've ever had the pri...

A Fire Upon the Deep is an important novel that SF fans really should read. I think, like Niven's Ringworld, it's a flawed book with really good ideas. Like Ringworld, it also has a much better sequel.The original book had two completely different plots centered around different, very interesting ideas. It was obvious that the one plot was moving toward the other, but only because they were appearing in the same book. There was no actual causal relationship between the two, so the book was extre...

Well, it's the sequel I've been waiting for - for almost 20 years. TWENTY-YEARS! Why, oh why, would a man who takes 20 years to write a sequel, clearly write something that does not wrap up the story? Yep, this is a trilogy, at the very least, and he puts these things out so slow, he's all but blackmailing the world to come up with some life extension technique that will allow him to continue writing for many more decades. Either that or we never find out how it ends.That's why I'm a bit pissed,...

Two credits. I had been anxiously awaiting the release of The Children of the Sky and totally planned on getting the audiobook because the ebook was too expensive. Then, it turned out that the audiobook was two credits on Audible. I hesitated for about one day. Then, I saw that it was narrated by my favorite narrator, Oliver Wyman and I caved. Wyman is absolutely wonderful and giving each character a unique voice and I have yet to hear a male narrator who does a better job at voicing women and c...

I started reading "Children"with moderate expectations: I knew it wasn't another A Fire Upon The Deep, but I've liked all his other novels -- I'm pretty sure I've read them all.I liked the book, and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It's mid-quality Vinge, and definitely not the place to start if you're new to him. A definite must-read for Vinge fans, like me. For those lukewarm re Vinge -- I'm not sure. For me, 3.5 stars, rounded up. I liked it a bit more on rereading.There are writing-craft issue...

It took me a while to warm up to this book. I hate it when well-meaning characters are betrayed by people who want power, but who claim to be acting "for the greater good." That made the first third of the book unpleasant to me even though I realized what was happening with the humans on Tines World grew naturally out of their situation (the now-adult children, remembering their lives in the highly advanced Straumli Realm, resent being trapped in a medieval world). But then that pattern keeps re...

ALMOST a 5. I have seen some fairly critical reviews of The Children of the Sky, but it seems that in general they do not criticize the book for what it is but rather because it is not what they wanted it to be. Vinge fans have been waiting for this book eagerly, because the other two books in the series were so good. My impression, though, is that there seem to be (at least) 3 kinds of readers involved, and we were anticipating 3 different books. First, there are the people interested in the al...

I read the 1st book for the aliens and I skipped the 2nd book because I hated Pham: there is no reason for me to read an entire book about him. I read this book because it continues the story of the Tines... I enjoyed it even tho V.V. insists on continuing to kill my favorite characters. And I enjoyed it even tho the bigger picture story (about the Blight) has not been advanced here at all (except they may be 10 of the 30 light years closer.) (view spoiler)[There is probably zero chance of recov...

A study in the dangers of high expectations.I so, so wanted to love this book. Vernor Vinge is a great author, and the other books in the Zones of Thought series serve as shining examples of the very best that science fiction has to offer. But while Children of the Sky is by no means a bad book, it is thoroughly average. The characters lacked life, the dialog was awkward, the plot twists alternated between being incredibly obvious and incredibly contrived, and on the whole it lacked the sense of...