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Thanks for the recommendations! I'll put them on the top of my reading list. I generally consider A Fire Upon the Deep to be one of the great achievements of human imagination.

Reading this book and discovering Vinge's unique vision of a variable physics universe was akin to reading Tolkien and discovering his vision of a divine universe.

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Vinge already cemented himself with the peace war books, but his ability to present otherness in the Zones of Thought books is probably his most impressive accomplishment.

Spiders you both can and can’t understand, and then hive mind mammals… The facile approach would be to cut out the middleman and make hive insects, and he did not. The speed of sound aspect of his hive mind was a brilliant stroke, the intergenerational element was the cherry on top.

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