A Deepness in the Sky

So high, so low,
so many things to know.

So ends Vernor Vinge's epic novel A Deepness in the Sky (winner of the Hugo Award for 2000). Set in the same universe as his A Fire Upon the Deep (winner of the Hugo Award for 1992). It's an amazingly brief ending for such a large book, but one that sums up the journey that the various main characters found themselves on during the book and faced after the end of the book.

Where to start? As with A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky is a space opera. Every now and again, some pundit claims that space opera is dead, that science fiction has moved on. Then somebody like Vernor Vinge (or some of today's practitioner of the art form, such as Alastair Reynolds) and proves that there is still a lot of life left in the old sub-genre. You've got interstellar empires, evil characters, strange environments and odd aliens.

But Vinge pulls it all off and pushes it to a new level. His Qeng Ho, an interstellar trading empire, operates in a way that makes an interstellar empire (of sorts) seem to work. He manages to come up with a world with an environment that would make Hal Clement proud, and "peoples" it with aliens that are both sympathetic and understandable but (at the same time...alien. Even the odd (and humorous) names such as Victory Smith, Hrunker Unnerby and Sherkaner Underhill work.

Then there are the Emergents (or, alternatively, The Emergency). Never have a more despicable, evil and slimy bunch of nasties slithered through the pages of a science fiction novel. These guys make the Ploor of E.E. "Doc" Smith or Darth Vader look like amateurs. And (alas) they are all too recognizably human.

As for plot, see the Wikipedia entry (above), but be warned that there are some spoilers. Vinge has a couple of threads (the story of Pham Nuwen, the man who essentially created the Qeng Ho traders; the struggle between the Qeng Ho and the Emergents; the alien "Spiders" and their strange world of Arachna and the bizarre star known as On/Off). Just the story of Pham Nuwen alone would have made a worthy novel, or a story just told from the viewpoint of the Spiders. Vinge manages to keep all the balls in the air, spending many hundreds of pages tell the stories in wondrous detail. [One example is that of the Focused, a tool of the Emergents (which reminds me strongly of a lot of people that I've worked with over the years). Another great detail is the amount of information that you absorb over the course of the book concerning the Spiders: ranging from their star's cycle to religion and culture, to architecture and technology, to physical descriptions.]

Then things switch. For the climax, the pace quickens. You start turning pages faster and faster, wondering how the heck all the character's are going to survive (they don't) and whether the story will be resolved (it is). And then there's that brief, but very appropriate, Epilogue.

On to A Fire Upon the Deep! Come later this year, Rainbows End, the first new Vinge novel since A Deepness in the Sky burst upon the scene.