A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Who’d have thought puppy power was actually a thing?
Ravna Bergsndot has taken a posting at the High Beyond of the Transcend, where data flows quickly and transcended beings hang out before getting bored with mortals. But all that comes to an end as an artifact unleashes The Blight that enslaves all natural and artificial intelligences. Ravna is only able to narrowly escape with a reconstructed human from the Slow Zone, Pham Nuwen, and two Skroderiders. Now their mission is to find a potential cure for The Blight in a race against time.
If you are into reading those “Top 10/20/42” lists of “best ever books in [insert narrow genre here]” you’ll have no doubt come across a reference to A Fire Upon the Deep. Well, at least, that’s how I came across it. With no other recommendation, I tracked down a copy in my library and set to some holiday reading.
In some respects, I can see why this made it onto a list of top sci-fi books. There are some big ideas here and it is pretty well executed. I was particularly interested in the Tine characters and the idea of a group intelligence.
In other respects, this was a confusing book to start reading. It wasn’t until I was solidly halfway through the book that I felt like the story had hit its stride. Before that, everything felt like planet info-dump, population: cardboard cutouts we’ll expand on later.
A Fire Upon the Deep was fine. Once it got going things fell into place and it was good, but a fickle reader may not get that far.
Tyson Adams 