A Fire Upon The Deep By Vernor Vinge (1992)

This is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time (as you can tell by my username!). It has such deep and original world-building, three-dimensional characterization, an interesting plot, and its conception of the future is firmly rooted in the days of the early internet, so it's a pleasure for me as a fan of retrofuturism.

If anyone likes this book and hasn't read John C. Wright's The Golden Age series, I can't recommend it enough.

This novel, and the prequel A Deepness in the Sky, depict a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.

<spoiler>The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse.<https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255></spoiler>

People always talk about the future Usenet and such, but this is the most important single insight of Vinge in the two books.

Written in Emacs, so you know it's good! https://imgur.com/G6HXGCw

The subsequent prequel "A deepness in the sky" is also well worth a read.

I don't want to spam this post and I'm not top threading after this at all. If you're an aspiring writer and Kings "On Writing" was a huge disappointment in the fact that he never really outlines his process and it just sounds magical that one day as a teenager his horror/alien fic started getting notice from scifi mags and published.. Read these vernor txts. He explains so much of how he works in a technical manner. He must be amazing at using grep, wonder if he uses ripgrep now.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading "The Children of the Sky", which is a direct sequel to "A Fire Upon the Deep". It's pretty good, though IMO not as good as the original or the prequel "A Deepness in the Sky", which other commenters have mentioned. The Children of the Sky feels... unfinished? As if another sequel is coming.

The 3 novels were published in 1992, 1999, and 2011. I wonder if Vinge is working on another one?

This is one of my favourite sci-fi books. I'd put it up there with the Three Body Problem trilogy. Incredibly imaginative and a great story.

"Rainbows End"

And for HN see especially "True Names":

> a 1981 science fiction novella by American writer Vernor Vinge, a seminal work of the cyberpunk genre. It is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk. The story also contains elements of transhumanism, anarchism, and even hints about The Singularity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names

I read Fire Upon the Deep earlier this year and it blew me away.

If you want to read his work, please buy a copy instead of using archive. Or borrow a copy from your local library. Authors still get royalties with libraries that use catalogs like Overdrive and Gardner, as most municipal libraries do.

Vinge is still with us and he deserves to get paid for his work.

I can't believe it's already been 31 years since that came out.

Did Vinge ever say why the book's called "A Fire Upon The Deep"? Is it because of the space ship landing vertically on the planet?

Although the concepts in his books are original and interesting, I think the writing is overly-descriptive and pretty dry.

I think both books would have been far better as novellas, and not dragged out into 800 pages, with a lot of frankly pointless meandering storylines.

But I suppose for modern sci-fi it's better than nothing.

Hey! I recently finished reading this, and am almost through the prequel (A Deepness in the Sky). Outstanding Sci-fi/political drama/fantasy.

These are a tier below Stephenson, Weir, and the Children of Time books, but if you're through those, these two would be my next picks.

This book and its prequel share pacing, plot flow/tension, and character archetypes, but differ significantly in the environments and levels of technology they describe. A Fire is more mystical and fantasy, while the prequel is more Scifi. If you enjoy one, it's likely you'll enjoy the other. I'm enjoying the setting and conflict more in A Deepness personally.