Humanity never broke the FTL barrier here and the Quen Ho travel from star to star in ram scoop ships that manage about . A brilliant scientist, Sherkaner Underhill, spurs a scientific renaissance that culminates in the Spiders staying awake through the Dark. It's a really good, interesting book - Vinge does a fabulous job (again) with his alien characters and creates a culture that will live long in the memory. What separates the Robert Mugabe's of this world from Tomas Nau, save that Nau's depredations will never leave the written page and Mugabes kills and destroys out in the unreal real world?

Events build toward a climax similar to A Fire Upon the Deep, with numerous groups’ plots and sub-plot converging in a complex ballet of space battles, nuclear weapons, and various individual betrayals and twists. Not something you find enough in Hard Science Fiction--and Vinge brings off some mind-blowing concepts without ever falling into infodump or other awkward constructions. Vinge excels at thinking about primitive alien species, and much like the telepathic dog packs in A Fire Upon the Deep, he devotes lots of pages to describing their society in depth. Published in 1999, the novel is a loose prequel (set twenty thousand years earlier) to his earlier novel A Fire Upon the Deep (1992).The novel can be seen as a homage to many SF classics, from Foundation with its idea of rise and fall of civilizations and the attempt to prevent it; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress with its pro-free market libertarian and anti-tyranny ideas and a lot of others.

There are always compromises when new technology pervades society, and that's one of the reasons science fiction is so useful and compelling. It takes longer than it should for the ties to grow strong enough to tug on your heart-strings, and somewhere in that delay the fifth star is lost from the rating.It's notable though that in A Fire Upon the Deep, what got mentioned in my review and made the greatest impression were the alien characters, the dog-like Tines.

A Deepness in the Sky' is one of the novels that I wish was taught in every high school in America, as an example of great, compelling, and entertaining fiction that isn't caught up in the moment, isn't pretentious or self-serving or self-important, isn't relying on shock value that should have been tired since the days of Baudelaire, or lauded solely because of the insight white people think they get from it, or praised because of its supposed 'historical relevance'. Lands Command να τον έχει πάρει μέσα από θαυμαστά και περίεργα μέρη, βλέποντας πώς το Σκοτάδι επιδρά τον κόσμο τους και σκεπτόμενος για τα μέσα που θα χρειαστούν για να το αλλάξουν, όταν φτάσει στο τέλος του ταξιδιού του, και τα σχέδιά του πέσουν στα αυτιά του μοναδικού ατόμου που θα μπορούσε να τα ακούσει πραγματικά, ο Sherkaner θα βρεθεί στα επόμενα χρόνια σε ένα πόστο μεγάλης ευθύνη, κρατώντας στα χέρια του το μέλλον όλων τους. The third in the trilogy, The Children of the Sky scores significantly lower here on Goodreads than either of the first two ( an average of 3.It has characters you can care about, conflicts that end in messy and flawed resolutions, and a sense of futility regarding the longevity of human societies tempered by the reassurance that, regardless of era, humans are as wonderful and surprising as they are selfish and destructive.

Hrunkner Unnerby, συνεργώντας με το πιο φαντασιόπληκτο άτομο που υπάρχει και παρατηρώντας τις πιο τρελές ιδέες του να υλοποιούνται, θα δει τον κόσμο του από μια διαφορετική σκοπιά· ο Tomas Nau, παίζοντας τις θανάσιμες πολιτικές των Emergents του και στοιχηματίζοντας πολλά για να νικήσει, θα κάνει ό,τι περνά από το χέρι του για την απόλυτη επιτυχία του· ο Pham Trinli, επανεντάσσοντας στο Qeng Ho μετά από πολύ καιρό και δουλεύοντας σκληρά για να διατηρήσει την κρυφή του περσόνα, θα ξεκινήσει να στήνει τα δικά του σχέδια· η Qiwi, ζώντας τη μισή παιδική ηλικία της μόνη μεταξύ των αστεριών και μεγαλώνοντας μαθαίνοντας για την επιβίωση στο διάστημα, θα πέσει θύμα των πολιτικών παιχνιδιών· και η Μικρή Victory, γεννημένη μαζί τα αδέρφια της εκτός φάσης και περνώντας τα χρόνια της κρυμμένη από τον υπόλοιπο κόσμο, θα ξεκινήσει σε μια περιπέτεια που θα σημαδέψει την ζωή της για πάντα. During his plotting he begins to admire the Emergents' Focus technology, seeing it as the missing link in his lifelong goal to create a true interstellar empire and break the cycle of collapse-and-rebuild that plagues human planetary civilizations. Second, there are the alien creatures living on a planet in the sun's system that have evolved to live through this cycle.

There are terrific ideas like the on/off sun and what this means for the evolution of a species, or the conflict of two human fractions with very different ideas of society. Vinge explores how intelligent control can use mesh networking of these devices in ways quite different from those of traditional computer networks.