I never truly enjoyed that book, but Vinge’s A Deepness In The Sky is the most beloved sci-fi book for both me and the wife.
A Deepness in the Sky, took more than one reading to appreciate as much as the original.
Vinge's later work, Rainbows End, has some interesting ideas about AR integrated into everyday life.
Also, it was lucky I had A Deepness In The Sky on my e-reader as I had no idea how long it was and it would have been far more intimidating in its physical form!
Vinge retired from lecturing compsci in 2000. Deepness was 1999. Children was 2011, was competent, but lacked almost all the clever insights of the previous novels. I wish he'd go back.
Oh well, he gave us several very good novels and 2 great ones. He deserves a break!
I think it can happen in some circumstances though. For example, Dilbert still feels largely locked in some 1990s PacBell cubicle land.
I feel I know the stories well, so it's disconcerting that maybe I missed something. I'll keep an eye out if I read them again.
Personally, I think Deepness is the better work, but Fire is pretty good too. If you read Deepness first then, because it was written second, at least one character may seem a little off for reasons that will become obvious.
[0] The characters we follow the most are human anyway.
The actual On/Off star was presumably powering a zone changing device of some kind - antigravity technology had remained working for millions of years which made me think it was in a bubble of High Beyond or Transcendent zone levels (like the ending of AFUTD).
Did we every get an in universe or author-commentary explanation confirming the theories about the On/Off? I always figured it was some high-tech artifact based on Beyond or Transcend tech that was going to remain mostly unexplained?
- Deepness in the Sky: super mustache twirling, one of the worst.
- Fire upon the Deep: I consider the blight to be twirling. Why treat lower civ that way? AFAIK, for mustache twirling.
- Iain M Banks: lotsa mustache twirling. Surface details and Player of Games in particular. My view of the culture AI is that they are constantly sarcastically toying with humans, and are thus secretly twirling.
- Fifth Season (Jemisin): no twirling. One of the most balanced novel on that front, every faction has believable reason to act the way they do.
- Book of the New Sun: no twirling, but OMG, stop what you're doing a good read these books! The tone and story was just perfect for me. Sure, it looks like a weird cross of SF and fantasy, but there is no fantasy at all in the novel in reality. Book of New Urth is, in comparison, just merely very good.
- Ancillary Justice (Lecki): some small twirling, but justified since it's an empire: absolute power corrupt. The twirling is commensurate with having a empress as head of state. She even becomes mostly sympathetic later.
- Left hand of Darkness: not only no twirling, but the power struggle is extremely believable. Great illustration of an interesting alien civilisation. Great for both world-building and character building. Another of those stop everything and just read it now novel.
- Roadside Picnic: no twirling. The conflicts and abuse of power are all believable.
- Collapsing Empire (Scalzi): lot of mustache twirling. Not DotS level, but not that far off. Plus, there is a plot point in the first novel that made me quit reading for a week. Incomprehensible because it was all of unbelievable (given the multiple characters behaviour before), idiotic and had zero impact on the rest of the book... so why write it. (Page 260 in my paperback version, for the record)
I think both the Hell faction in Surface Details and the empire in Player of Games have reasons to be as nasty as they are; they're somewhat internally consistent, in that the social stability of both the Hell faction societies and the empire are dependent on the nastiness. There are, unfortunately, real life examples of this. Veppers is a bit gratuitous, granted.
Hunting down the OOBII comes down to the escaped personae having data that could be used against it by another power.
(Sure, it's revenging past wrongs... on humans, some of whom are far, far descendants of the original perpetrators, and none of whom have any idea what they're even been punished for.)
It works best to read them both, in publication order (aFutD first), because you only see the second book's layer of dramatic irony with that background. More on this in Jo Walton's review: https://www.tor.com/2008/07/19/deepnessreview/
Also the first book is shorter, and if you're like "meh" about it then I doubt you'd be into the second either.
I'd say that the barrier to entry for both is the same, though: Vinge's writing, while rich, is also quite hard for reading, in a sense that you have to go slow to parse things correctly. FOTD has a bit more action in it that speeds things up sometimes, so it's an easier read. But if you could read and enjoy it, you shouldn't have troubles with DITS.