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Wes

wreing@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Software Developer in Boston Sci-fi, fantasy, non-fiction

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reviewed A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (Zones of Thought, #2)

Vernor Vinge: A Deepness in the Sky (Paperback, 2000, Tor Books) 4 stars

After thousands of years searching, humans stand on the verge of first contact with an …

Is this my favorite spider uplift book?

4 stars

After reading Children of Time I felt like a had to come back to this. I read this at least 10 years ago so this is based on hazy memory. But I think I prefer this to Children of Time. I feel like he plays such a neat trick with the arachnids where you picture them as humans and then flip to picturing spiders.

I'm going to reread this soon and update my review after.

reviewed Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Children of Time, #1)

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Time (Paperback, 2016, Pan Books) 5 stars

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a …

If you are going to read one book about spiders discovering space travel ...

4 stars

... read A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge 😀

Actually, I think this book is more widely regarded and probably correctly at that. But I think I personally prefer Vinge's book. I guess my real recommendation is to read both.

I think its a nice example of how the genre has grown in the last 20 years. Tchaikovvsky's book has more nuanced characters, and the book moves away from some of the genre breeziness I expect. Its still "hard sci-fi", you couldn't change the cover and get it shelved on the Literary Fiction table.

I initially bounced of the book because it opens with Kern, an obvious Musk stand-in, and I didn't really want to deal, in 2023, with either a glowing great man capitalist protagonist or not very subtile criticism. But it was much more deft then I was planning to give it credit for.