A Fire Upon the Deep | Vernor Vinge

A confession: despite being only 600 or so pages, it took me almost a month to finish Vernor Vinge's Hugo winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep.  Now some of this I attribute to my short attention span, another part (as is usual) is due to family and work obligations, and a larger part than normal stems from outside media influences, specifically Starcraft II and a TBR comic pile so high it's not only toppling, but grinning maniacally as it sways back and forth.

But if I'm going to come to the truth of it, if I'm going to be honest with myself and you, the Un:Bound audience, the fact of the matter is there are just some books that, no matter how hard you try, refuse to be read quickly, no matter how much you enjoy it.  Sometimes the reason can like in a plethora of ideas and concepts that force you to take your time, other times the fault can lie in byzantine plots and motivations that keep you sweeping back and forth, folding so many corners of pages it looks more like a textbook than something you're reading for pleasure.

A Fire Upon the Deep sits squarely in the former camp, examining space as zones of Thought, where technology rises or fails depending on where you are in the universe.  Civilizations reach up and out from their position in the Beyond to the Transcend in the hopes of acquiring new and amazing technologies they may not be prepared for, and the result can sometimes be the creation of a new Power, whose motivations, like it's technology, cannot always be comprehended.  The novel tells the story of one Power called the Blight, intent on total control of the universe.  Created by a small group of humans experimenting in the Upper Beyond which borders the Transcend, the Blight kills everyone except for one small ship that escapes with a central piece of its make-up, a Countermeasure that can end the Blight's existence.  The ship crashes on a planet in the Slowness, where civilization is medieval at best, and the survivors: a young girl and her brother, are swept up in a war between opposing factions of the primary race: a type of wolves whose consciousness, instead of residing in a single individual, is housed in a pack, ranging anywhere from 4 to upwards of 8 members.  As the war plays out a small band of aliens and humans who figure out about the Countermeasure, race to the lupine planet in the hope of stopping the Blight.  But as they dive deeper and deeper into the Slowness, the technology they're used to becomes less and less reliable, and an army of things that may or may not be controlled by the Blight is hot on their trail...

This is your grand Space Opera, mixed with a healthy dose of hard science fiction.  It took a while to get my bearings and understand how the universe operated and how technologies and the different Powers live in Vinge's architecture, but once set the novel moves at a nice pace, diving deeply into each of the major storylines and taking the time to really explore the diverse ideas encompassed in the novel.  Knowing that hundreds of pages about the consciousness of the universe might put even the most steadfast SF reader to sleep, there enough action, aliens and laser cannons to maintain an exhilarating pace, even as you're learning.

A Fire Upon the Deep is the first part of what will probably be Vernor Vinge's grand opus: a prequel novel called A Deepness in the Sky also won the Hugo for Best Novel, and the sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, The Children of the Sky, is due to be published in February 2011.  Lots of ideas, lots of action...each book will probably take me a year at this rate.