Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Highly, highly recommend Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky [0], which won the Hugo in 2000.

It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony over centuries of time (in many ways thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation is in helping people to understand foreign ways of thinking.

At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of philosophical antipositivism [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and description that's familiar to yourselves... even if in so doing this becomes more art than science? Is creative translation ethical if it establishes power dynamics that would not be there otherwise? There's a mind-blowing meta-narrative to this as well when you think about how the reader should interpret the book with that question in mind, though to say anything more would delve into spoilers. And lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope.

While technically it's a prequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Content warnings for mind control and assault (though they're handled thoughtfully IMO). With Asimov's Foundation being adapted for TV (also recommend, if for the visuals alone), if you want even more sci-fi that speaks to societal rise and decline, and the lengths to which people will manipulate others in the name of control and survival, this is a must-read.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism

+1. A Deepness in the Sky is one of the most underrated works of speculative fiction that I've read. It is a masterwork of plotting and character work. A Fire Upon the Deep has some great ideas and some characters that have stuck with me, but I think Deepness is a far superior work. Its brilliance is that it has the structure of a great work of fiction but you can basically just read it as straight pulp science fiction and have a fun time.

I rate it 6/5

I'd rate it a 5/7 book

I recently read Fire Upon the Deep and I think I'd agree that Vinge is great at speculative fiction. I hadn't looked at the publish/copyright date when I borrowed the ebook from my library.

I was shocked just now to see it's a thirty year old book. Zero signs or hints of it, at least to me. The concept that computers/AIs can be affected by the region of space they're in is a nifty idea I don't think I've seen before, and one can find some parallels today (for example, Siri now on a sufficiently new enough iPhone isn't completely useless, but much more capable when within range of a data connection.)

My only complaint about FUtD was that some elements of the plot, namely stuff going on in the planet, felt drawn out and slow.

Thank you both for recommending another one of his books.

You can kinda tell when FutD originates by the fact that it has, basically, a galactic Usenet. Granted, it's justified by the setting, but still.

It is a bit of a slow burn.

But with these books, Vernor Vinge has now become one of my favorite authors, up there with Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, David Drake, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle (although I don’t care for Niven and Pournelle when they work together).

Larry Niven has introduced me to some new authors that I’ve liked, through his “Man-Kzin Wars” series, but I haven’t read enough of their works to put them in my “favorite authors” category, at least not yet.

Piers Anthony is also great, but I’ve only read his fantasy novels, so I can’t speak for where he would rate on the SF scale. I also wouldn’t consider Edgar Rice Burroughs to be SF. Same for Arthur Conan Doyle.

And Orson Scott Card is just plain weird. I love his work, but I find it hard to recommend to others.

James S. A. Corey is a pseudonym of two authors, so I don’t feel like I can include it on the top list above. But I do love what I’ve seen of their work.

Ironically, while I love the Dune movie, I haven’t actually read any of Frank Herbert’s work. I look forward to seeing the new Dune movie as well, and then maybe I’ll go back and read some of the novels.

I absolutely hated, loathed, and despised Aldous Huxley. The closest I ever came to suicide was while I was forced to read his book. The second closest was when I was forced to read “Madame Bovary”. Both were a result of a sophomore level English class I was forced to take in order to get my degree.

I don’t think I’ve actually read any of Roald Dahl’s novels, same with Cory Doctorow, Harlan Ellison, and Neil Gaiman.

And I think I’ll stop there. I’m seeing too many names that I recognize on the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science-fiction_author... but which I don’t remember reading any of their work. So, I’ve got a few decades of reading to catch up on.

I liked Madame Bovary so much :( I did read it in my late 20s though. It's such a slick book, I loved the... style/aesthetics. True nothing happens in it, but still. I guess I was going through a more lyrically motivated reading phase at the time.

The classics are classics for a reason. Huxley and Flaubert are both wonderful authors, but all the joy was sucked out reading their works when I was forced to do it. I don't know why. Personal failing, maybe.

I thought Herbert's non-_Dune_ works were very good while also being very disturbing. I read _The White Plague_ in my teens and am reminded of it whenever I read about modern gene drive technology. The ConSentiency stories and books have stayed with me to this day, and I periodically re-read them. Both _Hellstrom's Hive_ and _The Santaroga Barrier_ are fantastic utopias crossed over with deep horror; I love them but can't bring myself to re-read them!

Everybody's different. I can't stand Asimov or Clarke or Drake or Heinlein, despite reading nearly all of their respective science fiction oeuvres, but that Ursula Le Guin isn't in your top five is a damn shame. _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is one of my favorite books, and _The Dispossessed_ primed a political conversion completed by Iain Banks' Culture novels years later. Le Guin and Banks are probably my two favorite authors now, and in that order, with Bradbury and Adams a very close third and fourth.

I'm so tired of trilogies and tetralogies and so on and so forth. I wish authors would just finish the damn story. I think that's why I like Le Guin and Banks so much. You can read out of order and it's no big deal. In fact, I read _The Tombs of Atuan_ before _A Wizard of Earthsea_, and all of Le Guin's Hanish stories are stand-alone. The same goes for Banks' Culture novels, where I started with _Excession_ and back-tracked to _Consider Phelebas_ and read in release order (mostly).

Anyway, I heartily recommend giving the literary fiction another chance some day. There's some really amazing stuff out there that doesn't happen in space.

Besides the SF content, A Deepness in the Sky is also one of the very very few books that have completely disgusted me about a fictional character, namely in this book, what happened to Qiwi and Kira Pen Lisolet. I had to stop reading a few times. For the writing to steer impressions this much alone this book is 11/10.

That aspect of it destroyed the rereadability of the book for me. I tried reading it again recently because I loved the part of the plot that dealt with the spiders, but I ended up skipping over the chapters with the emergents because I knew where thing were going and didn't want to re-experience it.

Still, that's credit to the author that he was able to write something powerful enough to evoke such a response.

Deepness introduced me to the concept of software archaeology. I won't spoil it, but there's a really fun bit when a character, digging deeply into the bowels of software systems in this far-future human society, makes an observation about the basis for timekeeping in the oldest systems.

The "focused" remind me of the mentats from the Dune universe, but less general purpose-- more like replicating feedback-based control systems. I have a back-of-the-mind worry that our society will end up with a class of citizens working in "focused" roles powering "intelligent" systems.

There's a meme phrase that applies quite literally to Focus, and has similar implications in the real world to those in the novel. That phrase is "weaponized autism".

If we're going in this direction, you might find enjoyable the book Echopraxia (and its predecessor, Blindsight). Without spoiling too much, it features a group of people that pushed their cognitive wetware and hardware to the point they can't even communicate with normal humans anymore.

The character in Blindsight didn't push anything, they lost half their brain to a bioweapon.

I wasn't talking about the protagonist.

Who else doesn't communicate? The vampire isn't a candidate for having done anything to themselves.

Ok, so specifically, I meant the Bicameral Order from Echopraxia.

The protagonist is a synthesist - whose sole job is to translate the incomprehensible in-language of the augmented scientists to mission control

They speak sensible english.

It's mentioned that they're actually speaking a creole that's been translated and simplified to english for the (baseline) reader.

I've read Blindsight, but wasn't aware of Echopraxia. I'll look for it.

One common disappointment I have with sci-fi is how often AIs or alien intelligence are so close to human intelligence. In the Star Trek universe, every alien species is essentially humanoid with some added prosthetic and makeup. This is understandable in a weekly TV show with a tight schedule and budget. But I've read lots of books where the aliens or AIs not only act human, they think and reason like humans. What a boring waste!

There was a lot to like about Blindsight, but I particularly appreciated the completely alien life forms and their interpretation of broadcasts coming from Sol.

Echopraxia will not disappoint you, then.

And along the lines of good portrayal of non-human intelligence, I can also recommend Children of Time, and its sequel, Children of Ruin. Both deal with Earth animal species getting uplifted and left to create their own civilizations.

We've observed perhaps the closest thing to alien intelligence in the form of intelligent cephalopods -- like squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish. What surprises me about octopuses is how, despite a brain structure that diverged from our lineage perhaps billions of years ago and is vastly different from ours (they have a small central brain and enormously innervated tentacles each with its own local processing), they manifest what we readily recognize as affection and contempt for their human caretakers. They will nuzzle a favored human with their tentacles, and squirt water at a disliked human through their siphon. They do not need to be trained to do this. Either they are capable of experiencing emotional bonds broadly similar to ours and our terrestrial pets', or they are very, very good at faking it.

I didn't use to think this way, but now if we ever met an alien species, it wouldn't surprise me if we had enough cognitive and emotional common ground to establish meaningful relations provided they are carbon-based lifeforms or analogous.

In the end, it all comes down to food and comfort.

I can't imagine a life form that won't look fondly upon another life form that helps them get their preferred food, and helps limit or avoid discomfort.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Remember the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs? That goose was providing but the farmer got greedy. In real life there tons of stories of people being attacked by animals they fed and sheltered for years.

I highly recommend the books "Octopus and Squid: the Soft Intelligence" by Jacques Yves-Costeau and "Other Minds: the Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness" by Peter Godfrey-Smith. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_...

Alan Dean Forrester's book series about the Humanx Commonwealth is an interesting take on the notion of very alien aliens being friendly. To the point where, in that setting, humans have formed a federation with sapient insects, with the two species having colonies on each others' worlds, a shared religion, law enforcement for federal matters, and military.

It's so hard to say more without spoilers, but Deepness plays with this trope in a way that is both satisfying and may actually improve your enjoyment of other sci-fi works!

Also along similar lines is Alastair Reynolds' Diamond Dogs short story.

I also really appreciated the software archaeology, and the projection forward of what were then common ways of communicating on the internet (Usenet, etc.) into the distant future where they might actually make sense again due to the transmission times and bandwidth for interstellar messages.

I definitely recommend both. I didn't realize he'd written a third in the series, but I'll be giving that a look.

Within that context, The title "Programmer-at-Arms" is the absolutely positively coolest three-word string I've encountered in English Language so far :)

This is an extraordinary book and one of my top 5 among many a science fiction novel.

"You want a deepness that endures, a deepness that [we] can depend on? there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever"

it's got VR headsets, distributed computers - hacking plays a major role. Only way it could be better is if I could forget the plot so I could read it again

I’ve enjoyed each reread almost as much as the first. What a book!

Not only is Deepness one of the best sci-fi stories I've read, it's also immensely better than Fire Upon the Deep. I read it first, and it's basically essential sci-fi in my book.

Agreed that _Deepness in the Sky_ is better than _Fire Upon the Deep_.

However, in my opinion, _Fire Upon the Deep_ should be the better book and has, in many ways, deeper and more thought-provoking concepts at play.

The problem is, none of them get fully explained or resolved.

The book wraps up the character driven story arcs and the much deeper, conceptual story arcs involving non-human actors just peter out ...

Fire has the most breathtaking, hooking first chapter of any book I’ve read.

A Fire upon the Deep is more flawed and uneven, but correspondingly more ambitious and thought-provoking. To me both are easily among the top 5 sci-fi novels ever written. I wish Vinge would keep writing more about Pham Nuwen's adventures. And to the grandparent poster's point, there are far more dimensions to A Deepness in the Sky than the one about communicating with alien cultures (the Focused is just one example). Both books are brilliantly multi-faceted, though the Tines World is a slog.

In 2007, Vinge told me he was planning to write story of Pham & Anne's crusade against the Emergents ... a few years later, when that hadn't appeared, I asked him about it ... he said it was too depressing. (People found Deepness dark, now imagine portrayal of the Emergents' worlds, even though they obviously get defeated, given Fire.)

Huh I just recommended that some do go forward with a deepness in the sky, but read a fire upon the deep first because of the aforementioned content warnings.

I think if I didn't already have some faith in the author I would have just stopped because the theming is so dark

It was definitely dark, and before I was halfway through I was desperate for the alien chapters just because all of the humans were just so damned miserable.

It’s almost like the way in which a society is described to you affects how engaged you are in their success… which is entirely the meta-textual point!

I am a little confused. Which of the books are you and GP talking about that is so dark?

They are talking about A Deepness in the Sky. The good guys lose pretty hard and suffer as a result.

Same here. I would have put down and thrown away Deepness if I hadn't read Fire Upon The Deep first and trusted the author. I'm glad I finished it because of the parts about the spiders and Pham Nuwen's past was really interesting. But the "present-day" emergents story line is dark... I did not enjoy reading those parts.

> I would argue that Deepness is best read first

I strongly recommend the publication order instead. Deepness ought to work standalone, but you'll be missing dramatic irony.

The dramatic irony is highly overrated. Deepness before Fire is way more enjoyable.

Pulling this point to the TL;DR top:

A Deepness in the Sky (1999) is a prequel set 20k years earlier than A Fire Upon the Deep (1992).

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