
A Deepness In The Sky - DanielBMarkham
http://hn-books.com/Books/A-Deepness-In-The-Sky.htm
======
ekidd
There's a great scene where young Pham, a kid from a medieval world, learns to
maintain a 5000-year-old legacy code base on a starship:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=GUUvxumMf6kC&lpg=PA226&...](http://books.google.com/books?id=GUUvxumMf6kC&lpg=PA226&ots=8pIM_7Rc9e&pg=PA225#v=onepage&q&f=false)

 _Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. "The word for all this is
'mature programming environment.' Basically, when hardware performance has
been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to
code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be
rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know
how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I
have here." She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. "We are
low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was
none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the
coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don't have the
proper equipment to support this—so lately, I've been doing my share of
archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened
after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature
maintenance package that is precisely what we need."_

 _"Almost precisely." Bret was grinning again. "With some minor revisions."_

~~~
pavel_lishin
I love the terms "programmer-at-arms" and "programmer archeologist." I wish
more people read this book, so I could use the term and not have people look
at me with a blank look in their eyes.

~~~
stcredzero
The above excerpt is actually an accurate description of what I do at my day
job! ("program archeology") My coworker, who's been working on and off with
this code base for over 12 years, never fails to point out if any of my ideas
was already implemented once before. So far, everything I've suggested since
starting this job 3 months ago has already been done in the past.

------
jerf
The first time I read this, the middle of the book tried my patience and I
wanted it to just get to the conclusion; I started skimming a bit more until I
got to the end.

The second time I read the book, I had planned on just skimming the middle
again, but this time without the drive to know the resolution (since I
remembered it from last time), I discovered that the middle of the book is
really the best part. It's very detailed and well-thought-out, and the second
time I didn't even have a problem with the pacing. It's just a very big book,
in a good way.

The only other book I know of that I have had this reaction to was the Lord of
the Rings series. The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the
first time, but subsequently, the only thing I routinely skip over is the foot
chase through Rohan. (Which I remembered as being 50-60 pages long but turns
out to actually be only about 12. Still manages to _feel_ 50 pages long to me.
YMMV.)

Strongly recommend, and despite being listed as a "prequel" you do not need to
have read A Fire Upon the Deep first; only a handful of throwaway details will
be mysterious as a result and none of them matter much to you. Vinge does not
fall into any of the usual "prequel" issues that for instance the Dune
prequels did ("Remember that expansive universe you loved that so carefully
managed to feel like just a small part of the totality? No, it was the entire
totality and the only people in the universe up to that point were the direct
ancestors of the people you loved.") or other things. This is truly a prequel,
a story that took place before a later story, and temporal ordering is
honored.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time

Final denouement? Man, I gave up trying to read it after what felt like
seventeen chapters of "they walked through a field."

~~~
pjscott
In Tolkien's defense, the man had some of the finest field-describing skills I
have ever seen.

~~~
Dylanlacey
I believe he came closest any author ever has to walking someone else through
their imagination.

Tolkien only wrote a story incidentally. What he did was show us the _real_
Middle earth, the one in his mind.

Most authors are the Lonely Planet Guide to their fantasy worlds. Tolkien...
Tolkien was David Attenborough.

~~~
pjscott
As someone whose imagination was shaped in large part by reading Tolkien's
vivid descriptions of Middle Earth as a child, I couldn't agree more. You put
it beautifully.

------
russnewcomer
Vinge is, in my opinion, the preeminent hacker SF writer. He was a CS
professor at SDSU and both the two ZoT novels and Rainbows End show that he
really grasps the end-to-end nature of technology and how hackers interact
with the world. I also thought that Rainbows End was a great story about how
hackers age, and it's just as well worth reading as Deepness.

------
gwern
> At one point I think Vinge showed his manuscript to somebody else, because
> after that he spends a bit of time defending his description of some of the
> aliens The author protests a bit too much. Because it's a prequel, there is
> just a bit too much detail.

Almost surely. He had a number of consultants and others go through _A Fire
Upon the Deep_ (which I liked better), as one can see from the annotated
edition: [http://news.slashdot.org/story/03/09/18/0411259/Review-A-
Fir...](http://news.slashdot.org/story/03/09/18/0411259/Review-A-Fire-Upon-
the-Deep-Special-Edition)

------
CoffeeDregs
I'm really curious what draws people to these two books (and I've read both
books and the review). I found them both to be somewhat slow and about half-
wasted with all the stuff about the "Tines". While I love Vinge's writings on
the future of technology, his books (including Rainbows End and The Peace War)
have never worked for me.

I have a pet theory that people who really like Stross' Accelerando (super-
fast, super-speculative buzz-wordy, hard science fiction), Banks' Culture
books or Morgan's Market Forces would have a harder time with A Fire Upon The
Deep or A Deepness In The Sky. Yes/No?

~~~
arethuza
A definite No I'm afraid - I love most of Stross' work (particularly
Accelerando, which has an insane idea density), the Culture books in all of
their socialistic contrarian splendour but I also love all of Vinge's work -
particularly A Fire Upon the Deep (for its sheer sensawunda) and Deepness.

~~~
Vivtek
Another counterexample here. I've loved everything of Vinge's to date, and
even like the stuff Charlie wrote before he got published (it's pretty damn
freaky stuff for idea density). Don't like _all_ the Culture books, but I do
like many of them.

------
keithburgun
Just want to point out, that the reason he cites is NOT, at all, the reason
why most sci-fi sucks.

The real reason that most sci-fi (and fantasy and romance and most 'genre'
novels) suck is that they focus too much on the "stuff", and not on the things
which actually matter in narrative fiction writing.

The things that really matter in a story are characters, strong motivations,
good dialogue, plot, conflict, etc... techniques of the writing craft. These
are what make a book good or not, but they are kind of an afterthought to all
the "STUFF" in Sci Fi books.

------
stcredzero
I also recommend _A Fire Upon the Deep_ which is "space opera" written as
intelligently as possible by "someone who should know better." (Vernor's
words)

~~~
billswift
You might find this interesting. An alternate fan-fic ending of _A Fire upon
the Deep_ (and what comes after for the direct participants) by Eliezer
Yudkowsky.

[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ulti...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ultimate_Meta_Mega_Crossover)

~~~
Eliezer
That's fundamentally fanfic of Permutation City rather than AFutD.

------
BoppreH
It may be a different medium, but I was impressed with the technobabble in
Mass Effect. It actually made sense.

Every single detail, from astrobiology to weapon systems and shields, had a
plausible explanation if you cared enough to visit the Codex. The whole game
seemed like it was expanded from a giant "what-if element zero".

Maybe I'm deeply wrong about all this, but I think the game is not receiving
enough praise for this side.

~~~
Dylanlacey
I think the entire game was a labor of intense depth. The internal fantasy was
watertight, from the technology, to the politics, to the way the story changed
dynamically depending on your choices.

------
AndrewGreen
What most impressed me about ADITS was how I was brought to feel great empathy
and even affection for the spiders, not till the end do we see just how truly
alien they and their environment are.

~~~
wildwood
I agree, the 'golden age' narration was a great inversion, where the spiders
seemed more human than the humans did.

------
rst
So, what do people think of "focus"? (A drug treatment regime used by the
"emergents" to turn people into monomaniacs.)

Vinge goes out of his way to show how it could be abused --- but I sometimes
get the feeling that people crunching in early-startup mode would willingly
use it, at least for a time, if they had it...

~~~
pontifier
What I thought was extremely interesting was the way the way the some focused
were used... as components behaving as the intelligence behind computational
tasks. The creator of Mechanical Turk undoubtedly read this book... I sure
thought about creating something like that after I read it.

------
me_again
It's kind of interesting that the review (and the other comments here so far)
doesn't even mention the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs
the evil socialistic Emergency. Is that view just so ingrained that it's not
even worth mentioning?

~~~
CWuestefeld
_the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs the evil socialistic
Emergency_

I enjoyed that in the books, but I'll point out that his _Realtime_ books are
much more explicitly anarcho-capitalist.

As an aside, I think you're wrong to characterize the economics as politics.
It's very common to assume that such as "minimum wages increase unemployment
at the margin" as a direct condemnation of minimum wage policies. But that
presupposes a given set of values. It's quite quite possible to make a
political statement in favor of minimum wages (for example), while
acknowledging the economics of it.

Economics and politics are two separate things. They are related, they inform
each other, but there's always a case to be made for things like "I accept
that doing X would have a negative effect on total economic efficiency, but we
have a moral obligation to pay that price."

~~~
wnewman
For some evidence that your point "it's quite possible" isn't merely some idle
hypothetical, search for "Webb" and "Seager" in

<http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf>

The same author (Leonard) also published a paper in _History of Political
Economy_, "More Merciful and Not Less Effective." I remember it as similar,
but I'm not finding an ungated version online.

------
abecedarius
The author has a sequel to _A Fire Upon the Deep_ coming out in the fall --
Children of the Sky. Set in the same universe.

~~~
AlexC04
I've read all of Vinge's work and it really is phenomenal. It's been years
since I read it and can only remember vague concepts now... the singularities,
the 'focus' drug that makes his programmers super-human.

I really must read them again. Quite excited to hear a new book is coming out.

------
CratosGodOfWar
I found it really really hard to gather with it and never finished it. Same
was with "A Fire Upon Te Deep", but after the first quater it was okay for me,
and I finished and liked it.

What I really found hard was, that this takes all place in it's own Universe
with it's own Rules. And no where is described/explained what the these things
or rules are. Just like you would dive into e.g. Star Trek TV Show for the
first time and see someone beam. The person would disapear and repear
somewhere. Due to the fact that you see it, you understand what this beaming
thing is. Not so in Vinges Universe. Same applies to Gibson and the Sprawl.
It's hard to mess around with it, when no where things are explained. Mabye
this is due to the translation of these books (I am a german reader). Any
others experienced the same/similar ?

------
simonista
Daniel, you've really fleshed out the site since last time I looked at it -- I
think when you first posted it here. It's looking really good. Any update as
to how the project as a whole is going for you?

------
spaznode
F- yeah! This (don't forget to read the other book first - a fire upon the
deep) is my third favorite sci fi novel series of all time. Right after
foundation series and dune collection.

A must read for all hn readers.

------
istari
Blabber is a short story, Vinge's first foray into the Zones of Thought
Universe, and features several cameos from A Fire Upon the Deep:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=txBNZiQw2GUC&pg=PA78...](http://books.google.com/books?id=txBNZiQw2GUC&pg=PA78&dq=blabber+vinge&hl=en&ei=8N5JTePkJIqcsQOR-4XwCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=blabber%20vinge&f=false)

------
koevet
Ah, the Kindle version is not available in Europe.

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leon_
> Your search "A Deepness In The Sky" did not match any products in: Kindle
> Store

Oh come on. I'm thinking about selling my kindle. Not one of the books that
really interest me are available for it :/

~~~
frossie
?? It's there, and also on the B&N nook:

<http://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-ebook/dp/B002H8ORKM/>

[http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Deepness-in-the-
Sky/Vernor-...](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Deepness-in-the-Sky/Vernor-
Vinge/e/9781429915090/)

~~~
leon_
Oh, yes. You're right.

But when I click on your like I get:

> This title is not available for customers from your location in: > Europe

:/

