A Fire Upon the Deep

Yes, that is a book title. A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge. This is the kind of sci-fi novel I really love: big ambitious ideas that wouldn't work in any other genre, explored and fleshed out with a lot of depth.

The actual core plot of the book is somewhat unspectacular if you boil it down to its essence: people who don't fully understand the risks awaken an ancient evil that could consume everything, and a tiny handful of people are the only hope to stop it. The set dressing is more interesting than usual - the evil is a transcendent intelligence rebuilt from blueprints found in a five-billion-year-old archive written and re-written by thousands of civilizations, accidentally unleashed by a hopeful culture that took one too many risks and was fooled by a vastly superior intellect - but that core story of awakening an ancient evil is fairly unexceptional. I mean, if you want to get technical.

What makes it great is the universe and the ideas that tell the story.

The big thing is that the galaxy's laws of physics aren't uniform. The galaxy is divided into several distinct zones. The borders between the zones aren't easily visible and change slightly over time. People are generally unconcerned with zones below them, seeing them as insignificant and backwards, while often aspiring to ascend to the zone above.

• The Unthinking Depths, around the galactic core, where only minimal intelligence and technology are possible.
• The Slow Zone, basically our kind of place, where faster-than-light travel and communication are impossible.
• The Beyond, further towards the galactic edge, where artificial intelligence and antigravity and faster-than-light travel are possible, allowing interstellar civilization and culture and organizations.
• The Transcend, the edges of the galaxy and farther out, past the point of technological singularity where individuals may as well be gods compared to even the heights of the Beyond.

There have been a lot of solutions or workarounds to accommodate faster-than-light travel in fiction, but the idea that physics simply aren't the same everywhere is a new one for me. And the book does a good job of exploring the implications: it features characters from every zone (except the Unthinking Depths), and there's a big chase scene descending from the Beyond down to the border with the Slowness, during an unprecedented zone storm where the boundary is in flux. It shows the dangers of taking technology designed for a high zone into a low zone, and even includes some workarounds that "trick" lower physics into allowing higher technology.

The other big idea is pack intelligence. There's an intelligent species, the Tines, where the minds and souls of individuals are formed by the constituent members of the pack. A pack of six isn't a group; it's a single person with six appendages. They think and communicate with sound, so individuals can't get too close to each other or they'll interfere with each others' "thought sounds".

These things probably sound interesting on their own, but what's really fantastic is how A Fire Upon the Deep explains and explores the implications and consequences of its ideas. That quick paragraph I just wrote about the Tines really doesn't do them justice. Many of them are point-of-view characters, and it's amazing how the book keeps their point of view and gradually gets you to understand their minds and culture. In fact, I assumed the first Tines I met were "regular" people, and it wasn't until they started to mention "sending out members" that something seemed odd.

The way the Tines' minds work is explained through trauma: an individual's member dying, the person nearly splintering, but then incorporating a new fragment and becoming a new whole. There are Tines who experiment with crafting purpose-built personalities by breeding and selecting the right pack members. The species' big weakness is their reliance on sound to think; individuals have to remain meters apart to hear their own thoughts and stay coherent.

All of this is done without relying on infodumps. Occasionally some finer points are explained to humans, but it's amazing how the novel is written to lead you to understand. In fact, I'm confident that you won't properly understand how the Tines' pack mind works from the descriptive text I'm writing here - you're much better off reading the novel to get all the subtlety and the point-of-view thoughts to truly understand the concept.

Actually, quite a lot of the background information in the novel is told this way - the reader gradually piecing together the whole picture from several viewpoints, or learning/inferring through comparisons and exceptions. None of this "As we both know..." crap. Even great books have exposition, but the natural discovery of how things work in this novel feels like something special.

What's really crazy about A Fire Upon the Deep is that it's composed of many ideas that are each complex and interesting enough to build a whole novel on, but they're all worked in here together, and it not only makes sense but creates a world that feels incredibly rich and complex. I'll admit to feeling a little off balance in the first few chapters after being thrown into the world without knowing how anything worked, but figuring it out along the way made for a rewarding experience.

Read it if you're a sci-fi person.