Paperback
Published April 9, 1999 by Demco Media.
Fire upon the Deep
by Vernor Vinge
Vernor Vinge: Fire upon the Deep (Paperback, 1999, Demco Media)
- ISBN:
- 978-0-606-15981-4
Copied ISBN!
4 stars
(225 reviews)
Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence.
Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle.
joeyh reviewed A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (Zones of Thought, #1)
Review of 'A Fire Upon The Deep' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I had read Vinge's earlier books, but missed this one until 1997 when I
learned of it through a forwarded message from SWIL. (www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/org/swil/lists/sfdt.html) I remember that the title put me off, I was not expecting anything like this.
As an evocation of a certain period of Usenet, this surely helped inspire me to build olduse.net. Which involved digging up an archive and reanimating it, and I hope will end well..
All of which says nothing about AFOtD as a peice of fiction, but anything I could say has been said before anyway.
