This is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time (as you can tell by my username!). It has such deep and original world-building, three-dimensional characterization, an interesting plot, and its conception of the future is firmly rooted in the days of the early internet, so it's a pleasure for me as a fan of retrofuturism.
If anyone likes this book and hasn't read John C. Wright's The Golden Age series, I can't recommend it enough.
The whole trilogy was great, and I was sad when I finished The Children of the Sky because there weren't any more books set in that universe left to read.
Another space opera I felt the same way about is Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga. There's also a trilogy and some other novels set in the same universe. 99% of the fiction I read is space opera, and the Commonwealth universe is definitely my favorite. So action-packed and enthralling, couldn't put the books down. As a matter of fact — it's been a few years since I've read them, and I'm almost done with Lords of Uncreation, so I think I may read it again :)
The Commonwealth Saga has so much world building and depth to it - with a really wide selection of characters and ideas. Some of which make people uncomfortable, but IMO that is the point of all speculative fiction - "what if?"
That's a name I haven't heard in a while. I remember that his Awake in the Night was a fantastic reimagining of William Hope Hodgson's (terrible) The Night Land
Huge fan of him! Loved the Golden Oecumene a bunch.
This story is chilling and hints at a deep viciousness of character, which unfortunately does come out quite a bit of you follow him further. http://www.sfsfss.com/stories2/guest-law.pdf
Still, the first 20 pages of the Golden Oecumene are so amazingly stylized and interesting, and the whole thing is great.
This novel, and the prequel A Deepness in the Sky, depict a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.
<spoiler>The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse.<https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255></spoiler>
People always talk about the future Usenet and such, but this is the most important single insight of Vinge in the two books.
Ok I was initially going to ask why this book is on archive and posted here. Is it out of copyright? It was only written in 1992?
Anyway, I'm less curious about that now and more curious about the absolute eye blast this emacs picture is. I write short stories and grand adventures in Scrivener. I'm familiar with emacs, I don't use it or vi/m I'm an IDE person but this just.. I have no idea whats going on.
Is this an editor(s) and the author communicating via emacs notation? Like, what are these -
d2 -- editor? it/they/them seem to be making bullet points and spelling corrections. But then, what's PRB? What's ID?
CHK?
d0 jrf?
then d2 comes back and does a d2 STOP and d2 START ??
CHK is back but it's CHK AFUD BKG
FRAG shows up
d0 jrf is back .. ok d0 jrf definitely sounds like an editor now
Well at the end here I think I answered my own question and these are various editors but if I'm wrong would love to hear. This looks like an absolute nightmare this is like.. 1 or 2 pages and that book was 624 pages. Also, reee, I bought that book in 2009. wow.
He's talked about the custom format he uses for the text files containing his stories [1]. He has a bunch of text processing tools that help him connect story lines and make notes to himself regarding them.
There's also out there a version of A Fire Upon the Deep that includes at least some of his annotations. I'll update with a link when I find it again.
Check out this thread [2] right here - it has a link to the annotated version on archive.org, and the discussion includes references to scripts to format it more nicely.
My guess was: drN is notes from "draft N", CHK is things to check, FRAG is a note about a fragment that may be useful but doesn't have a home -- then some compilation software/scripts would pull out various bits at a time for different views.
That's probably a really good call I didn't consider this possibly being one persons TODO: messages. And here I am just TODOing everything.. huh. Do any of you do verbose/specific TODOs like this? I can't really think of what I'd make the topic. I use a TODO plugin that highlights TODO and FIXME but honestly only use TODO..
I just did a bit of a dive into his annotated writings, I'm still like 1% deep but this was on literally page 2 of a page where he describes how he writes (which is in another comment if you're curious) https://i.imgur.com/m2nO2Am.png You're quite accurate
Agreed — I was worried the prequel would be a bit of a money grab follow-up on the first one's popularity, but (1) it's a standalone story which is great in its own right, and (2) in the few places where it does have some narrative connections with the original, it is done very well, and tragic/bittersweet.
Yes, I am always worried about prequels for that reason, but I think I enjoyed this one more than the original. They are really very different in scope and story as you said, and the bittersweet quality of the connection between the two books enhances the ending of the prequel in my view.
I don't want to spam this post and I'm not top threading after this at all. If you're an aspiring writer and Kings "On Writing" was a huge disappointment in the fact that he never really outlines his process and it just sounds magical that one day as a teenager his horror/alien fic started getting notice from scifi mags and published.. Read these vernor txts. He explains so much of how he works in a technical manner. He must be amazing at using grep, wonder if he uses ripgrep now.
Coincidentally, I just finished reading "The Children of the Sky", which is a direct sequel to "A Fire Upon the Deep". It's pretty good, though IMO not as good as the original or the prequel "A Deepness in the Sky", which other commenters have mentioned. The Children of the Sky feels... unfinished? As if another sequel is coming.
The 3 novels were published in 1992, 1999, and 2011. I wonder if Vinge is working on another one?
> a 1981 science fiction novella by American writer Vernor Vinge, a seminal work of the cyberpunk genre. It is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk. The story also contains elements of transhumanism, anarchism, and even hints about The Singularity.
For HN I think the most important work by Vinge is still his report from 1993 where he said we would have the technological means to build AGI and usher in nerd’s rapture in 30 years, which is this year.
I read Fire Upon the Deep earlier this year and it blew me away.
If you want to read his work, please buy a copy instead of using archive. Or borrow a copy from your local library. Authors still get royalties with libraries that use catalogs like Overdrive and Gardner, as most municipal libraries do.
Vinge is still with us and he deserves to get paid for his work.
U.S. public libraries do not give any royalties to the author when lending physical books, so in that sense "borrowing" the book from the Archive is not different than borrowing it from a library. There is indeed a trend of treating ebooks differently, but I'm not convinced that's a good idea---it seems like yet another example of strengthening the position of copyright holders over the public.
I thought it was referring to the planet being "deep" in the sense of being in one of the lower zones of thought. And the Fire was the conflict of galaxy-spanning import that was playing out there.
But maybe there was more to it?
By contrast, the meaning of the title of the sequel "a deepness in the sky" is fairly literal once you get to know more about the alien species and their habits.
I remember from somewhere (A forward?) that he originally titled it "On the world of the tines", but an editor suggested A Fire Upon the Deep instead. Sounds cooler? There's a connection to the story as it develops.
I'm not going to argue with your assessment but... what even is modern scifi? I'm almost 40 and after you saying this it made me wonder why all of the space operas I've read are from people nearly twice my age.
Are there any up and coming or recent space opera people I should be reading?
> Are there any up and coming or recent space opera people I should be reading?
Look around you. Are any of your friends/peers capable of producing literary works that are anywhere close to the work of Asimov, Simak, Heinlein, Garrison, Anderson, etc.?
The tech is already here, and the optimism of the flying car is gone. We see now that peak tech is used for nothing more than to sell more ads and make a paragraph of text eat 500MB RAM to "securely" display in your browser. Only after you 2FA to log in of course.
lol that's a really interesting view on it. Ironically my next (or maybe first?) favorite genre is just post-apocalyptic stuff. I love the Silo series and my favorite book is the Canticle for Leibowitz.
Hey! I recently finished reading this, and am almost through the prequel (A Deepness in the Sky). Outstanding Sci-fi/political drama/fantasy.
These are a tier below Stephenson, Weir, and the Children of Time books, but if you're through those, these two would be my next picks.
This book and its prequel share pacing, plot flow/tension, and character archetypes, but differ significantly in the environments and levels of technology they describe. A Fire is more mystical and fantasy, while the prequel is more Scifi. If you enjoy one, it's likely you'll enjoy the other. I'm enjoying the setting and conflict more in A Deepness personally.
If anyone likes this book and hasn't read John C. Wright's The Golden Age series, I can't recommend it enough.