Reading Every Book in my Late Dad's Library #4: a Fire upon the Deep
Someone I can't recall once pointed out that writers find it almost impossible to write a book about a truly different future. Huxley liked to imagine the 1930s with drugs and eugenics; Orwell perceived the 1940s with helicopters and televisions; Asimov effectively threw hyperdrives into a post-war industrial society. I'm sure anyone reading this can think of exceptions, but we praise worlds like that for their rarity. For its part, A Fire upon the Deep occupies a kind of quantum state where it is simultaneously well-written and stilted, imaginative and dull, and most curiously of all, essentially timeless while being horrifically dated.
This one is famous for its worldbuilding, so let's explore that first.
This is the best known work of the late Vernor Vinge, himself one of modern sci-fi's best-known authors. I could even go further: all the marketing pasted on the front and back of my copy emphatically declares it to be the first big, defining space opera of the 1990s.
How 1990s is it? Well, we have an enormous and enormously diverse Milky Way comprising literally millions of civillisations (not just individual worlds), tied together for all their varied cultures into an incomprehensively vast galactic society (rather like how it must have felt to use your new Windows personal computer in the aftermath of the Cold War)-- and because of bandwidth limitations, they communicate on a forum suspiciously similar to dial-up Usenet internet.
I am not joking. Millions of species interact via text, with a data-link measured in kilobytes, on message boards and chatrooms that are so similar to early 1990s forums that I can't decide whether it was an imagination failure on the part of Vinge or deliberate irony. He quotes a lot of these messages in the book, and there is a legend that he may have deliberately based some of his "online" alien personalities on real Usenet posters. I do hope it's true, but either way, the book is instantly dated, and as a 1999 birth myself, I can't quite buy the conceit that this is going to be the pinnacle of galactic communications. Maybe that betrays my own, equally limited expectations for the future.
In other ways though, the praise for Vinge's world is well-deserved. His galaxy is different from most writers'. I'm not going to spoil the central premise, because it takes about 150 pages of mystery before the reader fully understands and I enjoyed that process, but it's an infinitely interesting way of combining every archetype of future space technology. Do you like the hardcore Clarke sub-light sort of space adventure, with interstellar voyages passed over centuries in coldsleep? Do you like Star Trek replicators and warp drives? Do you like the idea of transcendant beings and technology so advanced that the barrier between mind, body, matter and energy break down? Vinge's world feels huge, and like all the best stories, it makes you believe there could be another dozen books to fill with it and endless variety in them all.
Unfortunately, he's not always the best at following through with his own teased ideas. This is a story about an apocalyptic struggle for survival, where hundreds of billions of lives are lost and much of the galaxy is set ablaze, deicide, species eradicated, enslaved, mind-controlled, fleets of hundreds of thousands of vessels -- and most of it is referred to by message board traffic. Even when PoV characters see things, the description is passing. We never get any real perspective on the Blight, or what it does in the Top of the Beyond. We never really understand the stakes except that we are told -- not shown -- billions are dying. When the setup was so good, this was infuriating.
That's the main plot, but remarkably fully half of A Fire Upon the Deep is a first contact story on an isolated medieval world (this starts in the first couple of dozen pages). I've seen a lot of criticism of Vinge's characterisation, particularly for having poor interiority, and for writing stilted action and drama that let his worldbuilding down. I can honestly say I think most of it is unwarranted. Yes, once you get past the fascinating high-level concept of the Tines civilisation, their individual personalities don't go much further than archetypes (the wanderer, the adorably pathetic braggart, the wise queen, the evil lord, the, traitor, the mastermind), but I don't think this weakens the story, being a consciously medieval setting and a contrast to the space opera above. I found that Vinge hit his stride with the characterisation after 200 pages or so, since after several chapters of not being able to remember each person's name, I suddenly found myself liking them.
The greatest praise I can give Vinge is that I never felt bored by the two alternating plots. They were different and refreshing as they followed on from each other. That wouldn't be possible if the nuts and bolts of his writing weren't up to scratch.
It is a different story for the prose. Dear God, the careless use of slang made me want to give myself up to Flenser's knife willingly. Apparently, the main antagonist is "cool", a sentient plant is a "fellow" and a human weapon, when being referred to in a discussion explicitly about his human weapon status, is a "guy". Aliens use metric measurements for no reason and with no sense there is translation from another unit.
The good is very good; the bad is debilitating. Objectively, this is a phenomenally strong book, but my judgement does have to take its inflated reputation into account.
Final rating: 3.5/5
I have the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky. I considered waiting until I'd read them both to write this review, but it doesn't seem like they were supposed to be considered as one novel. I'll read it next.