r/printSF

I picked up We Are Legion as a light read and thought I knew what I was getting myself into but STILL wasn't prepared. This is the most Elon-core book Ive read since Ready Player One and Im struggling mightily, my eyes hurt from the eye rolling.

My question is this: given how fanfic ultimate STEM mary sue handwavy everything style the writing is I genuinely cant comprehend how this series could be more than one book, and yet Ive seen infographics about the huge scope and there seems to be smart people who actually like this. So does it like… do something? Have a purpose? Or just idk get better? Or is it just what it seems to be: pure 2010s reddit geekslop; and I should bazinga myself out of there

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.

Just finished Ray Nayler's latest novel last night and today typed out a review on Goodreads, that I thought I'd share here 'cause I'd love to talk about this book. Here's my quick review, which very much includes spoilers.

Great! Characters were well inhabited, mysteries tantalizingly developed, political statement strongly asserted. I honestly thought the ideology went a bit too pointed at the end and moved from being anti-AI to being fully anti-technology, which maybe was a bit of a bit of a bridge too far. At the same time I liked the way Nayler subverted expectations with the "brilliant scientist develops genius and terrifying new tech" thing. Lilia's dioramas that can peer inside someone's brain and inject new thoughts were introduced like chap 2, but never really utilized, and then at the ending Nayler used this tech as a metaphor for the inherent evil of human invention, pointing to an endless history of technology being invented out of pure curiosity and then being used just because it can, with myriad unintended consequences arising. Which is true and a good point. The whole bit with the AI prime ministers achieving a more authentic consciousness and immediately realizing they were a harm to humanity and killing themselves was definitely interesting, but again kind of heavy-handed. I don't know, I really liked this book a lot, it just didn't have a lot of subtlety in its messaging and presents as its core theme the statement that technology nearly always makes human lives worse, which is a non-nuanced statement.

What made this book shine for me was the nuance and subtlety given to the characters. While the political messaging of the book was very black/white, the characters were allowed to be complex and multi-faceted. There are no hard heroes and villains in this story, only human beings trying to breathe in a society that has removed all the oxygen from life.

Also, the prose was lovely! Nayler is very good at the short, beautiful sentence. The writing feels pretty refined, even more-so than his first novel. 4 stars!

Thoughts welcome! From what I've seen on other posts here Nayler doesn't seem to be well-embraced yet but I've enjoyed both his novels so far and really dig his writing style. And even if I personally think the political messaging of WTAIB lacks some nuance or room for discussion, it at the very least has made me think quite a bit and will certainly remain in my mind for quite some time. To be clear on where I stand : I also think AI is a mostly shitty and useless thing and I agree with Nayler that if we as a society keep pushing machine learning into every facet of our society the outcomes will be bad. I only disagree with the extrapolation of that train of thought: that technology in general is a mostly negative force. Would love to hear what others got from the book. Okay cool thanks bye!

Just finished the Buymort series, and found myself want more about Tyson's increase in intelligence. I have read classics where this happens like Niven's Protector and Flowers for Algeron. Niven often said that writing a character more intelligent than your are is an interesting challenge.

Looking for some other more contemporary or neglected classics where a human intelligence is increased, either by a biological change or some kind of technological implant. A cyberpunk setting is a plus.

Hello!

Another recommendations post.

Some context: I have always been an avid reader. But after high school, studying history at a very crunchy, left wing university (as much as such a thing exists) for both undergrad and grad school, haven't really been reading fiction for the past decade or so. I have historically read a lot of dense social history, political theory, anthropology, etc. Something about turning 30 made me really want to start reading fiction again.

Since October 2025, I've read the following books, largely science fiction. I guess I'm looking for recommendations in the vein of those same texts.

What I've been reading:

April

Blue Mars (KSR)

March

Green Mars (KSR)

Red Mars (KSR)

Railsea (Mieville)

A Scanner Darkly (PKD)

February

Always Coming Home (LeGuin)

Perdido Street Station (Mieville)

January 26

The City and The City (Mieville)

Aurora (KSR)

Man in the High Castle (PKD)

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Mark Twain)

Worker Student Action Committees, France May 1968 (Fredy Perlman and Roger Gregoire)

Dune (Frank Herbert)

December 25

Deaths End (Cixin Liu)

Left Hand of Darkness (LeGuin)

Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)

The Dispossessed (LeGuin)

Embassytown (Mieville)

The Situation Room (Stephanopoulos -- grandmas Christmas gift lol)

The Lathe of Heaven (LeGuin)

The Trial (Kafka)

The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)

October / November 25

The 3 Body Problem

Dark Forest

Of these, LeGuin is definitely my favorite, and I have The Word for World is Forest and Searoad on deck, as well as Mieville's King Rat. I'm less interested in hard sci fi (though not opposed), and more the sociological and ethical speculative fiction side of things. Obviously I need to read Butler, NK Jemison, but looking for all recommendations in the lefty vein of things.

Thanks!

I’ve been working on a sci-fi project for a while now, and something unexpected happened as I kept building it.

It started as a pretty straightforward story, but the deeper I got into it, the more it stopped feeling linear.

Instead of events happening in a clean sequence, it started to feel like everything existed at once: memories, timelines, different versions of the same moments overlapping and influencing each other.

That idea kind of took over the whole thing.

Now it feels less like “what happens next” and more like how different points in time echo into each other, almost like reality itself isn’t as stable as we think it is.

So I’m curious...

Do you prefer sci-fi that treats time as something structured and logical… or stories where time feels fractured, subjective, and almost emotional?

And are there any books that you think handle that really well?

What scifi books get really involved with the details of the spaceships, megabuildings, space elevators, sewers, undercities, space stations?​​ Books where characters really interact with their scifi setting, and it isnt just inconsequential scenery they move through. Books that do this well are the Murderbot Diaries, Most books with the overused but still great plot of stumbling upon a mysterious derelict, and for a very niche example, the arc in Stray Cat Strut where they go under the city and in the sewers.

Which book (or book series) has been the widest gap between what you expected and what you got when you read it?

My pick: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams.

This book didn't leave a great impression.

I was wondering how it has been received, generally speaking.

Ideas here are currency. surround them with your voice and jump in. first thought as you enter, time does not move, we do. if we believe we move forward then it should not be hard to believe in reverse time.