Date Finished: March 28th 2024
When I was a teenager, I read an enormous amount of Isaac Asimov and always revelled in the speculative ideas and thought experiments of those novels. I rarely go back to sci-fi and have been disappointed before, but after some quick research I opted to take a chance on A Fire Upon the Deep. About three days into my reading, its author, Vernor Vinge, passed away. Vinge was a professor of computer science who popularised the idea of the technological singularity, wrote one of the formative works that would go on to influence the cyberpunk genre, and won Hugo Awards for his writing five times. Silly though it may sound, I felt a somewhat deeper investment in the novel as a result of Vinge’s passing, a greater awareness that the words I was reading and ideas I was comprehending were the work of someone who had been around the day I picked it up and now no longer was; I suppose it was an awareness of contingency.
The galaxy is divided into Zones of Thought, which define the technologically capabilities of the planets in the zones, from the Slow Zone where technology struggles, to the High Beyond where faster-than-light travel is possible, to the Transcend were creatures beyond our comprehension dwell. Humans, having recently entered the High Beyond, are dipping into matters they barely understand, and in the process accidentally awaken the Straumli Perversion, a transcendent power that threatens life in the galaxy. Their only hope is a ship that managed to escape with the Perversion’s only known weakness and land on a planet that borders the Slow Zone, a world where strange dog-like animals, the Tines, live in a feudalistic society. The sudden appearance of this new technology and ideas about worlds beyond them will radically alter the course of the Tines, and meanwhile it’s a race against time between the Perversion and a small ship to get to this isolated planet first.
Vinge packs so much into A Fire Upon the Deep, from Tine experiments with their own communication and that of humans—all the appurtenances of first contact—to exploration of what it means for some creatures, Powers, to have transcended physical form and what their priorities are, to the legitimately heartwarming growing cross-species friendship between Jefri and Amdi and how that cross-species relationship works, to the inscrutable existence of the skroderiders. It’s just bursting with ideas in the way that all my favourite weird sci-fi and fantasy novels are, like China Miéville, constantly outlining new concepts that govern the universe millennia hence. To me, the best sci-fi and fantasy is the kind that has a hard-learning curve, peppering the reader with constant inventiveness and world-building and utilising that world-building like a sandbox for the writer to play in, and Vinge definitely does that.
The Tines are intriguingly built, a small pack of dogs linked like a mini hivemind, sharing thoughts and memories but unable to get too close to other packs as it interferes with their quasi-telepathic communication. They’re able to grow their pack by including others, several members forming a single unit. So an individual consists of one or more members combined. Within that, Vinge plays with the various ways it could be employed, the flaws that arise from this mode of organisation, and how it influences the politics of their planet. But the Tines also have a medieval level of technology and culture, and this is, in part, a first contact story: how can the first realisation of life beyond their world and the glimpses of technology that brings influence this more technologically primitive planet? Meanwhile, there’s a subtle alienness to humanity itself. We are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years in the future, and humanity’s known homeworld is Nyjora, humanity from old Earth is virtually mythic in its remove and has evolved enough in the interim that when a more ancient human is found, the differences make for an uncanniness.
“Where the surf meets the shore – lots of neat things can happen there. You saw all the life that floated in that madness. Just as plants love the sun, there are creatures that can use the energy differences down at that edge. There they have the sun and the surge, and the richness of the suspension.”
The scenes of space opera destruction, and some of the twists were literally hair-raising, scenes that gripped me in a way that no fiction has for a long time. The Fall, as we’ll call it, was one of the most thrilling scenes I’d read in a novel in quite some time, a rich moment of narrative force that bowled me over. I’ve spent years trying to find books as maniacally creative and rivetingly steep as China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series, and A Fire Upon the Deep ranks with books that come closest to that feeling again. Unfortunately, Vinge doesn’t quite stick the landing; the ending is somewhat rushed, and I found myself wanting the novel to get stuck into a bit more detail, and go on for as long as the story needed to fully resolve itself, but I was certainly satisfied overall.
When a man’s contributions to both science and literature are as numerous as Vinge’s, his legacy is sure to live on. Despite a somewhat hurried ending, A Fire Upon the Deep is still one of the most exciting novels I’ve read in quite some time, and it’s a pleasure to know the rest of Vinge’s writing is ahead of me. A triumph of imaginative, hard science-fiction, and sure to be one of my favourite reads of this year.
8.5/10
chrisgregorybooks 