Vernor Vinge
A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)
Shared winner of the 1993 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Reviewed: 2002-11-09

How to write about a post-Singularity civilization? As one of the foremost proponents of the concept, Vinge fully realizes the impossibility. And so he boldly decides to shape the natural laws in a way that will allow him to still write a great space adventure with human protagonists, a more cunning solution than Iain M. Banks's ultimately unsatisfactory humans-as-pets when that author faced a similar problem in his Culture novels.

Our galaxy is separated into zones. At the rim there is the Transcend, the realm of the Powers, a wondrous world where extreme technology and superintelligence are possible, almost inevitable; further towards the center we enter the Beyond, a region full of FTL and the kind of supertechnology we have come to expect in space opera; below lies the Slowness, where the speed of light is the limit and intelligent machinery turnes into an oxymoron; finally the core of the galaxy is taken up by the Unthinking Depths, where even intelligent life is impossible. Innumerable civilizations populate the Beyond and are connected to the Known Net, a galaxy-spanning data network. Theology has become a science, applied to the Powers that roam the Transcend. Thus is the universe of A Fire Upon the Deep.

When a human civilization meddles in the Transcend they unwittingly unleash an ancient evil that sweeps through the High Beyond. Aptly named the Blight, it spreads through the galaxy, transforming and swallowing everything in its way. But something has awoken along with this perversion, something just as ancient that had lain buried with it for billions of years and that is now carried along on the single space ship that makes good an escape into the Low Beyond, outside the conceivable reach of a malevolent Power. The vessel strands on a planet whose native aliens are stuck in a medieval culture and the survivors are caught in the local warfare. Meanwhile a race is on among several factions from the Beyond to recover or destroy whatever artifact the ship may have carried and what may be the ultimate weapon against the Blight.

As in Marooned in Realtime, Vinge's strength is the evocation of enormous vistas of time and space. We are also treated to some of the more interesting alien species conceived in the genre. By comparison, the story itself and the writing are almost painfully ordinary. The Known Net is the Internet writ large, and with its newsgroups, cynically dubbed the Net of a Million Lies, Vinge perfectly captured the spirit of Usenet already a decade ago. The plot twists are sharp and Vinge never forgets to remind us of the insignificance of single lives, or civilizations, in the grand scheme of things.

Home Page | Review Index | Latest Reviews

Generated: 2006-04-26