With a re-release as part of the Tor Essentials range planned for this year, now felt like the right time to visit a classic I should have read years ago! A Deepness in the Sky is the second book in Vinge’s ‘Zones of Thought’ series, but works as a loosely connected prequel to book 1, A Fire Upon the Deep. Having yet to read the latter myself, I had no issues at all following the story, and I believe you can read the books in either order (though I won’t be mentioning characters by name in this review, to avoid unintentional spoilers!).

The premise of Deepness is an intriguing one – humanity is heading to explore an unusual star which has been nicknamed ‘On/Off’. This star spends 216 of it’s 250-year cycle dormant and producing minimal light. The final 34 years see the star operating as usual, transforming the sole planet of the system from a frozen wasteland to a utopia fit for human habitation. Not only does this planet contain life, but it’s believed that it is home to the first advanced alien species discovered in thousands of years of human exploration! The only trouble is that two rival human societies have arrived to make first contact at the same time, and it’s clear that they are not going to play together nicely…

The book jumps between plotlines happening both in the human fleet and down on the planet surface, and both are excellent in their own ways. The human storyline is a tale of mistrust and subterfuge, and I found the rivalry between factions to be very believable should humanity ever end up in their situation. It is not clear who each human faction trust more – their fellow humans, or an unknown alien race! It is the alien plotline though that is the star of the show for me. It is a tale of discovery and scientific advancement reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, where select individuals and their discoveries are driving society forwards at breakneck pace. Vinge takes great care to ‘humanize’ the aliens in the way their world is described to mask their lack of a bipedal form – without spoiling anything, this sets up a brilliant segment towards the end of the book, where it becomes apparent that the races view their world very differently.

This is a book that is epic in scope, and uses it’s lengthy page count to properly develop characters and relationships with each other. Whilst most of the plotlines made a real splash with their resolutions towards the end of the book, there was one that fell flat and felt like a real missed opportunity to me given the setup. If you’re a fan of military sci-fi and first contact stories however, this is no reason to skip Deepness in the Sky, and I’d definitely recommend giving it a go!

I somehow missed that this has been out since 1999. I liked this and recommend it, but it has so many helpful reviews that I don't have anything new to add. Sci-fi fans, and fans of Vinge will likely enjoy this.

Thanks very much for the free copy for review!!

True science-fiction classic!! What a magnificent novel. The writing and the story are very unique. I love it so much!

Ever since I had a chance to hear Vernor Vinge talk at a WorldCon many years back, I have kept an eye open for opportunities to read his books. Vinge's writing has never let me down. Although Venge almost did too good of a job of creating some really hateful and disturbing villains in "A Deepness in the Sky", the story was fantastic. (And the ending nicely satisfying.) This book was delightfully full of exciting hardcore scifi aspects including realistic (given some reasonable assumptions) galaxy and time spanning space travel, scary bioweopons, very understandable and quite likeable insectoid aliens, excitingly new astrophysical phenomena, nanotechnology, plenty of human on human conflict, and so much more. This book reaffirmed my desire to read more SF by Vernor VInge! I recommend this book to anyone that likes SF that includes space exploration, first contact, new technology, and military conflict.

I thank TOR and Vernor Vinge for kindly providing a temporary electronic review copy of this awesome book.

Where do I even begin?

I have never read a Vernor Vinge story before. According to Jo Walton's introduction to this one, this and The Fire in the Deep are basically the culmination of his lifetime's work.

Reading this (admittedly quite long) novel is like reading a trilogy that's been refined down to just one volume. There is SO MUCH GOING ON - and it all works, and it draws you inexorably on. It's not particular frenetic in pace - I didn't feel like I was reeling from one explosion to another - but it's relentless. It's like an avalanche.

Partly this is because although the story takes place over decades, there are several well-placed time jumps. I think this is part of where the 'trilogy refined to one book' feeling comes from. There's nothing extraneous. There are moments of people just being people - being in relationship, having families, relaxing - but they don't feel like padding. It's all adding together to make these characters intensely real.

There are three strands. Two are human: the Qeng Ho, a loosely connected and enormous group of people whose aim is trade; they travel between planets to sell whatever is needed, and call people on planets Customers - not in a taking-advantage kind of way, but in a 'this is what we do' way. Then there's the people known as Emergents, and I wondered about this name for a long time... before I discovered it was because their society is the Emergency, named for a particularly dramatic time in their political history which has had cascading effects on their political and social structures (to become far more authoritarian than the Qeng Ho countenance) and honestly the name tells you a lot about them. These two groups of humans end up working together - much to the dismay and distrust of both sides - as they go to explore an astronomical anomaly. The third strand is the aliens who live on the planet around that astronomical anomaly, who are not bipeds and whose planetary and biological experience has led them to develop in some very different ways from humans... and yet, they are intelligent, and Vinge suggests convergent evolution in a lot of scientific and technological ways.

As I said, there is A LOT in this novel. Love and betrayal and family and war and technology... and then Jo Walton's foreword tells me that if I read The Fire in the Deep it may completely change the way I understand this novel? I'm a bit sad that it took me until now to read this, AND YET reading it at this age was actually excellent.

I'm so glad Tor is reprinting this and I hope it gets a lot of love.