A Fire Upon The Deep

Review

★★★★★

A Fire Upon The Deep is a sci-fi novel by Vernor Vinge. It tells the story of the Blight—a galactic-scale, transcendent evil—and the humans racing to stop it.

I first read A Fire Upon The Deep, and the prequel A Deepness in the Sky, about 20 years ago and loved it. A Fire Upon The Deep was one of the last books I read before college and grad school caused me to stop reading fiction due to lack of time. So I was excited to pick this book up again when my book club voted to read it, curious to see how it compared to my memory of it.

In short, I still love it. The ideas are incredibly thought-provoking, the characters all have unique personalities, and the story keeps moving without slow spots. It’s one of the best books I’ve read, behind only Blindsight and Echopraxia so far in my list.

Zones of Thought

The core idea in A Fire Upon The Deep is that the galaxy is divided into “zones of thought”. There are four concentric zones, starting at the core of the galaxy and working their way outward:

The Unthinking Depths: The area around the galactic core where basic intelligence is not possible.
The Slow Zone: A place where biological intelligence is possible, but not true artificial intelligence. Faster than light communication and travel are impossible, but some civilizations travel the stars using cryogenic sleep and Bussard ramjets. Advanced technology generally stops working after a time.
The Beyond: The location of the most advanced civilizations, where AI, FTL travel, and anti-gravity technology allow miracles of science.
The Transcend: The zone where super-intelligences are possible, and the place where civilizations that transcend to become Powers move to. The Blight and the Old One are from here.

Some characters in the book believe that although the zones seem detrimental to life, they actually allow civilizations to be born and flourish, protected from more powerful entities by the zone boundaries—like fish protected from predators by the crushing depth of the ocean.

A Fire Upon The Deep shows this theory to be overstated, as the Blight freely crosses from the Transcend into the Beyond, and is still able to destroy multiple Powers and hundreds of civilizations. The main protagonists, humans attempting to stop the Blight, travel from the high Beyond to the low Beyond and into the Slow Zone, where even their limited technology gives them a decisive advantage. This theme of more powerful entities crossing zone boundaries and influencing less advanced realms is central to the book’s plot and conflicts.

The Blight

The Blight is an ancient evil, defeated five billion years ago and accidentally revived by humans tricked by an archive they discovered in the Transcend.

Although the Blight is the main and largest threat, it remains in the background for most of the book. The story of the war is primarily told through newsgroup postings,¹ and so comes off as distant, clinical, and cold even as trillions die or are enslaved and solar systems are destroyed. One of the posts even berates the other posters for their obsession with a local event that just isn’t that important to the rest of the galaxy.

This approach makes the few times that the protagonists are directly attacked feel sudden and tense, because they otherwise are safely removed from the war itself. When Relay is attacked and destroyed, the chapter starts out calm, with the protagonists literally on the beach, and ends with the death of a Power, the destruction of the system, and a mad escape in a half-ready ship. There is real tension because you know how strong the Blight is.

By putting the war in the background, the story feels close and personal, while still conveying high stakes and huge impact—just like The Shadow of the Torturer. This contrasts with novels like Consider Phlebas, where the war is put front-and-center to emphasize the insignificance of individuals in the face of galactic conflicts.

A Fire Upon The Deep makes the universe feel old, with forgotten history and ancient evils, in a way House of Suns failed to do.

The Tines

The Tines are a race of dog-like creatures. The individual members are not particularly smart, but they form sentient hivemind packs by connecting multiple members together through high-frequency sound. This is similar to the Bicamerals in Echopraxia, in which we see that a mind is not limited to a physical structure, but can be any system connected together with high enough bandwidth.

In fact, both the Firefall series and A Fire Upon The Deep operate under a similar rule: that intelligence is the ultimate advantage. A smarter adversary will almost certainly come out on top, as seen with the various transhumans in Peter Watts’s book and the Powers in Vernor Vinge’s work.

But despite their alienness, the Tines suffer from being too human in motivation. This is a common problem, seen with the Mesklinite in Mission of Gravity, the Cheela in Dragon’s Egg, and the spiders in A Deepness in the Sky. Only Eater really succeeded in making something that did not feel human, although other books—like Heaven’s River—excuse their human-like aliens by arguing that evolution forces those traits.

The Tines, specifically Flenser and Steel, are the “street-level bad guys” in A Fire Upon The Deep. They obviously pale in comparison to the Blight, but when they slaughter Johanna and Jefri’s parents and schoolmates, it feels worse than when the Blight kills billions in the background because of how close and personal it is.

Half of the main story takes place on the Tines’ world. It focuses on the human children Johanna and Jefri Olsndot, who are separated after their ship crashes on the planet. Each child is taken in by rival Tine packs: Johanna by Woodcarver’s more benevolent group, and Jefri by the ruthless Steel. This parallel storyline provides a close-up view of Tine society and politics, while also exploring how the arrival of advanced human technology impacts their medieval-level civilization. It grounds the novel by providing simple, human-scale consequences to an otherwise incomprehensibly vast war.

The Out of Band II

The other half of the main storyline follows the Out of Band II, or the OOB, as it races away from the Blight towards the Tines’ homeworld, trying to retrieve a countermeasure that could save the galaxy from the Blight. On the ship are:

Pham Nuwen: a human constructed by the Power “Old One” to serve as his presence in the Beyond, and who now suffers moments of insight even though Old One was destroyed.
Ravna Bergsndot: a human librarian and applied theologist.
Blueshell and Greenstalk: Sentient aquatic plants that ride around in “Skrodes” that also enhance their limited short-term memory.

They barely escape the attack on Relay by the Blight and begin their desperate attempt to reach the Tineworld. On the way they attract the attention of genocidal butterflies who blame the humans for the Blight, as well as the Blight itself. They are also betrayed by the Skroderiders, who it turns out were created by the Blight 5 billion years prior to act as a fifth column.

One of the themes of A Fire Upon The Deep is autonomy and the loss of it. Pham is puppeted by a Power, and even after the Power is destroyed the “god shatter” controls his actions some of the time. The Skroderiders likewise are taken over by the Blight, with Greenstalk being used to try to assassinate Pham. Similarly, each Tine is an amalgamation of multiple “individuals”, each controlled by the whole, but also influenced by the personalities that make up the whole. Even Steel and Flenser’s machinations can be seen as a primitive form of thought control.

A Fire Upon The Deep does an excellent job of introducing fascinating ideas—the zones, the Tines, the Powers—with really well-written characters where everyone feels unique, with different personalities and motivations. It is one of my favorite books!

Like the newsgroups in Ender’s Game, it feels a little dated that the exact same communication paradigm that happened to be popular when the book was written persists billions of years into the future. ↩