Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
This is an impressive work of hard science fiction. I admire the author's creation and the writing is decent if not riveting.I enjoyed the story of the Tines, aliens with pack minds, and I came to like the concept of the "zones of thought", where different levels of technology are possible in different areas of the galaxy.But I found myself indifferent to the rest of the characters. The enemy they called the Blight seemed ominous only in the prologue - for the rest of the book it was kept at suc...
Epic science fiction at its best, this space opera novel shared the 1993 Hugo Award with Doomsday Book. This is incredibly imaginative, with a great, complex story and detailed, believable world-building, and some of the best alien species ever imagined. It's a long, sprawling story and the technological parts are rather dated, but I still loved it.A group of scientists investigating a five billion year old data archive accidentally unleashes the Blight, a malignant superintelligence that rapidl...
I got incredibly, and unusually, bogged down in this (admittedly lengthy) book, and only a little bit because I struggled with aspects of it. It’s also been a terrifically busy time. At any rate, this 1990’s Hugo-winning novel (an award shared with Doomsday Book, which I LOVED) is fairly famous and highly regarded, so I have a feeling that my middling reaction to it is something of an outlier, but there it is. I found it to be alternately rambling, dense, imaginative, compelling, obtuse, and fru...
children on the run. alien dogs that think as a group. power in numbers! powerful book. good dogs. although some bad dogs too. I guess fanatical is a bad personality trait, even for dogs.different flavors: adventure, medieval fantasy, comedy, hard science fiction, even horror. big ideas.thoughtful, exciting, highly original. fantastic book.
Sooo, I know this is a seminal classic of the Space Opera genre, so the fact I didn't LOVE it as much as everyone said I would makes me feel a bit inadequate in a way, but hey, everyone is entitled to their opinions, eh? I mean, from an intellectual standpoint, this is brilliant. The world-building is so convincing, I actually was frequently disturbed by it, which is kinda why I can't love it, which is actually a testament to it's brilliance. It's thought provoking and unbelievably well shaped.
Maybe I'll come off as bi-polar when I start this five star review (my first of 2011) with an extensive list of why the book I'm applauding is utter garbage. But what the hell, I'm game if you are. Let's do it.Why "A Fire Upon the Deep" is Utter Garbage1. Mr. Vinge's characters are only so-so, and the humans are the worst of the lot. Every once in a blue moon a character will shine, which makes it so hard to bear their poor treatment at other critical points. Vernor struggles, as most sci-fi aut...
A Fire Upon The Deep is Vernor Vinge’s magnum opus, a classic of the genre, one of the greats and deservedly most popular sci-fi novels ever. Google “The Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time” and you will find this book included in many of these lists, sharing shelf space with Dune, Ender’s Game and the likes. I suppose if you are looking for a quick “yay or nay” recommendation you will already have your answer by this point. You may as well avoid exposure to my long-windedness and get started on the...
I want to make it clear that I don't lightly write rave reviews. Please read the following sentence twice:This is an absolutely fantastic book.On the outskirts of the Galaxy, far from the physical constraints of the Galactic core, faster-than-light travel is possible, and Transcended intelligences flourish to a complexity that dwarfs human comprehension. Scavenging for buried knowledge on a dead world, a party of humans awakes an ancient evil: an archive containing an entity so powerful and so m...
I tried very hard to like A Fire Upon the Deep. The reviews for it are stellar, and it did won a Hugo. Also, I am a huge fan of SF, so I felt this book would be a sure-fire hit with me. Not so.As other reviewers pointed out, this book has some great ideas. Pack sentience is very nice, and the idea of zones is intriguing. Unfortunately, all these are wrapped in very shoddy writing. To tell the truth, the writing was barely above fan sci-fi in some places.The characterization is also, most unfortu...
This is the galaxy in the unimaginably distant future, populated with millions of species. The shape of civilizations is dictated by the shape of the galaxy: close in at the core is the “slowness,” the place where only sublight travel is possible. Farther out is the “beyond,” where FTL drives function and cross-system communication passes on great data pipelines, and very advanced technology can begin to be truly sentient. And above that is the “transcend,” where automation goes beyond sentience...
I had high hopes for Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep because I love sci-fi set in space but, while it might make a decent fantasy novel, it is a poor excuse for science fiction.The novel takes place in Vinge's "Zones of Thought" universe in which the galaxy is separated into discrete zones, each of which is identified by its relative location to the galactic core and its ability to support advanced technology and faster-than-light travel. I initially found The Zones a silly and unnecessary c...
One of my favorite Hard SF novels of all-time. It's brilliant and you should definitely read it.
Crypto: ◘Syntax: 81As received by: GR ServerFarm NWLanguage path: Stream of Consciousness Babble→Poorly Considered Argument→LOLcats→Goodreads In-jokes→Only Funny to Me→Irony→EnglishFrom: Joeleoj[A known Goodreads reviewer of Midwesten US origin. Extensive priors before this review began. Appears aligned with the Hipster Coalition but has denied close ties. Program recommendation: Imagine this post being read in a tone of self-satisfied ironic detachment]Subject: Books to talk about with my wife
Executive Summary: This book started out pretty strong for me, but lost steam as I went on. I liked it, but not as much as I hoped. Full Review My reading of this book was pretty uneven. I read about 25% on a plane, then several days with no reading. Then I read another 25% on a plane and several more days with no reading. After that it was a chapter or two here or there stretching the whole thing out over 2+ weeks. It's not a short book, but it was obvious to me as I went on that I was losing...
I'm against the flow again, all my friends here who read it liked it a lot or were amazed by it. Me? I think it was OK, but nothing more. I should have read this a long time ago, maybe I would have liked it then. But reading it now, after all the works of Al Reynolds, PFH, Watts, and many others, it felt outdated; I don't think it aged well, and it's not even that old. Anyway, my opinion is that it's much too long for what it has to say; too many details, monologues and even dialogues for my tas...
Vinge's high-water mark to date and his masterwork, I think. Splendid deep-space adventure. On my (ever-changing) 10-best-SF-ever list. A reliable comfort read. Five (or more?) re-reads! My pb copy is pretty battered. I suspect I bought it used.Here's Jo Walton's fine retro-review, from 2009:http://www.tor.com/2009/06/11/the-net..."Any one of the ideas in A Fire Upon the Deep would have kept an ordinary writer going for years. For me it’s the book that does everything right, the example of what
A Fire Upon the Deep: Fascinating aliens but clunky plot and charactersOriginally posted at Fantasy LiteratureA Fire Upon the Deep was the big breakout novel from Vernor Vinge, winner of the 1993 Hugo Award and nominated for the Nebula. It features a unique premise I haven’t encountered before: the universe has been separated into four separate Zones of Thought: the Unthinking Depths, Slow Zone, Beyond, and Transcend. Starting from the galactic core, the Zones demarcate differing levels of techn...
I love it when I give a book 5-stars!I knew practically nothing about this book when I started - except that I hadn't liked the only other Vernor Vinge book I'd read (Rainbow's End). This is about a gazillion times better!So here's the low down:This is a far future yarn, with three great 'big ideas'.1) Space is not uniform. I'm probably going to explain this poorly (my wife looked somewhat unconvinced when I tried to explain it to her), but here goes: there are zones of thought. Somewhere in the...
Entering the Zones of Thought, some of the best worldbuilding physics metaphysics fusion, alternative universe functioning explanation space opera escalation.After reading the 2 books of this series, please keep thinking and theorizing about the possible implications of what it would mean if the mechanisms of this universe would be true in a parallel universe or in one of the endless others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_...This is some of the most unconventional and potentially manifold
I seem to be one of the few geeks who was dramatically underwhelmed by this book. I guess that this is classic "hard SF", in the sense of being all ideas and not so much on the characterization. And maybe I've just passed the time in my life when that really excites me. But overall, it just didn't grab me.The notion of the zones of thought was interesting, albeit a real stretch to me. The tines were a kind-of interesting construction, though mass minds have been done before. And, for whatever re...