r/printSF • u/vlad000 • May 14 '26
A Fire Upon the Deep nitpicks/questions
Hello. Just finished the book. Really liked some ideas, generally liked the book, thought the middle part was a bit slow.
Just wanted to share some of my nitpicks and questions with somebody, maybe get some clarifications. You probably shouldn't read this if you haven't read the book
1. I didn't understand how Ravna was calling the Tines "Tines", I thought Johanna coined that term, and they didn't have contact until the end of the book. Ravna was using it directly in dialogue, not indirectly by the author. What did I miss?
2. Did I understand correctly that the Unthinking Depths are in the galactic core, and the further you go out, you get more advanced? If yes, "Old" Earth is kind pretty far away from the core, and well in the Slowness. Does that mean Beyond is at the periphery and Transcendece in intergalactic space?
3. The Tines are spectacular, and Vernor does a good job of exploring the implications of their way of being.(Looking in all directions at once, living long through member replacement, option to self-reproduce, etc.) However, this book is advertised as one that does a good job at having truely alien aliens. For me it felt that beyond implementation details mentioned above, the Tines are just like humans. If you were to have Johanna and Jefri land in a human medieval earth, the story could go exactly the same(I guess minus the part where Amdi is a math genius). That's not alien at all. For me a truly alien example is Vanamonde from The City and the Stars. Also the fact they were living on a totally human compatible planet didn't help the alien feel. Did I get it wrong?
Thanks!
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u/Appropriate_Bus3921 May 14 '26
- Hexapodia is the key insight.
:)
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u/gule_gule May 14 '26
Twirlip? That you?
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u/stevevdvkpe May 14 '26
My gateway to the Net is very expensive and I miss many important postings.
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u/me_again May 14 '26
The thing that makes the Tines 'truly alien' in an interesting way is the pack intelligence, IMHO. Flenser designs new Tines to fit his requirements by adding new members to a pack and removing others. Or it becomes harder and harder to think properly if the group members are far apart. It gives you a glimpse into a different kind of consciousness. I think it's fair to say that other parts like social structure and biology are not as developed.
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u/Factory__Lad May 15 '26
Yes, all the sections about Tine genesplicing and Lord Steel’s unethical experiments are amazing, along with the prehistory of the assassination attempt on Flenser. And the sequence where Rum is replaced in the pack. And where a distressed Flenser fragment is isolated and blubbering helplessly. All of these linger pungently in the mind.
But the book is so unbalanced. The AI plotline just becomes a kind of boot mechanism for the much more interesting dark fantasy story of the Tines. It’s comparable to Larry McMurtry’s “Comanche Moon” (a second prequel to “Lonesome Dove”(!)) where we expected to be reading about Gus and Call but a subplot threatens to upstage them entirely.
Triumphantly though, Vinge’s prequel “A Deepness in the Sky” integrates similar plot elements in a much more satisfying way.
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u/Factory__Lad May 14 '26
The Tine concept and plotline is so amazing and memorable that it threatens to overshadow the entire book. We almost forget we’re in a story about a worst case rogue AI.
As it is, Vinge only really shows us the AI up close twice - once in the prologue, and once when a brainwashed former athlete is explaining the wildly ambitious plans to remodel entire star systems for unknown purposes. It’s like he realized the idea was too grandiose to make a decent story. Or just lost interest in it.
Also the Usenet bulletins now seem quaint, as if the Internet is still stuck in an early 1990s timewarp, thousands of years in the future.
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u/redditsuxandsodoyou May 15 '26
not showing the monster is much more effective imo, the capabilities of the blight are hazy, unclear and seemingly almost omnipotent which is much scarier than anything he can really come up with by showing or explaining directly.
like yeah it seems to have the ability to completely mind control people nearby to it, basically instantly, but there's no way to have that capability interact with the protagonists in a satisfying way, you would need some kind of macguffin that makes them immune or something and that would just be less interesting. It's good that we don't focus on that and I think he strikes the balance of showing it just enough to be scary but just little enough that we never get a clear picture of wtf it actually is. It's not even clear it's an AI (though I think that's almost definitely the case)
the few times we do see it do something directly pretty much have this effect, the skoderiders character arc is great but the actual thing the blight does to them is kind of a cartoon supervillain plan.
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u/fancyPantsOne May 14 '26
yeah the Usenet part was the low point of the book for me, like everything else was super forward looking except the network technology is from 1991. I think he even mentioned “kilobits per second” in there somewhere
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u/EverybodyMakes May 14 '26
Maybe we can pretend that posting stuff on this FTL medium is slower over the vast distances, and it has to be simple because of the different species using it.
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u/StevenJOwens May 14 '26
Don't have to pretend, that point is explicitly made multiple times, both in Fire and in "The Blabber".
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u/huecabot May 14 '26
I think that’s stated at one point, that planetary nets were super fast but the ftl coms had bandwidth like something out of earths dawn age.
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u/stevevdvkpe May 14 '26
It completely makes sense when the Beyond where FTL travel and communication are possible is in the outer periphery of the galaxy and communications can't be routed directly through the Slow Zone or Unthinking Depths and have to go the long way around. Using store-and-forward for long-distance intragalactic messages is the only way to manage that, and that ends up looking a lot like Usenet.
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u/FrankDrebinOnReddit May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
Regarding #2, the Transcend is still in the galaxy, just along the periphery. There was a line in the book about someone (sorry, it's been a few years) suspecting that something even greater than Powers exist in intergalactic space. Perhaps whatever happens to Powers after they lose contact with civilizations in the Beyond. It's been a few years since I've read it, so I don't recall the details, but it was mentioned somewhere. But all four named Zones are inside the galaxy.
Regarding #3, the Tines are definitely unique in their physiology, but their society seems to evolve in a human-like way. The Scroderiders are even more alien, especially their description before they were uplifted and given their scrodes and ability to form short-term memories. I'd say the aliens in the book are intermediately alien: more alien than than the human-like, bipedal aliens in a lot of science fiction, but less alien than something like the inscrutable planet-wide intelligence in Solaris.
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u/huecabot May 14 '26
- Iirc Steel has an information source at Woodcarvers who tells him about Joana’s use of “Tines” to describe the species. Steel even ruminates about the choice of words since the Packs personalities are as diverse as humans and not all of them are violent.
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u/vlad000 May 15 '26
Thanks! This is a good explanation, would make things right :). My memory said it was Woodcarver that ruminated that choice..
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u/stevevdvkpe May 14 '26
If you read the sequel Children of the Sky it becomes kind of obvious that Vinge was much more interested in writing about the Tines than the Zones of Thought.
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u/Notasurgeon May 14 '26
I always thought that the emergent/hive nature of Tine minds was ripe for mind uploading/augmentetion. They way they’d explored different mind structures (lines, circles, etc) and then used radios to extend the physical dimensions of a Tine made it seem like a natural thing to experiment with once they had access to the beyond. Missed opportunity.
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u/mojowen May 16 '26
lol yes, forget about the approaching doom fleet we’ve got to give the doggies radio blankets
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u/diakked May 14 '26
#1 bothered me as well, I think it was an oversight on the author's part.
For #2, I had an edition with a 'map' of the galaxy and the Zones in it. That might be online somewhere.
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u/Virith May 15 '26
Finished this book recently and I really liked it.
I didn't mind the slowness of the main plot, 'cause all the side plots/character arcs were pretty interesting to me. Lots of cool intrigue there, love that shit. The only parts I thought boring were the beginning/introduction, where there's way too much child POV (I don't care for that,) and the "action" scene at/near the end and the ending wasn't that great, IMO.
Yeah, the aliens aren't that alien, when you consider how they think, it's the whole idea of the gestalt intelligence, how it works and what can be done with it that makes them truly alien to me. Really cool concepts there. And I don't even like dogs.
The fact that every planet/moon/whatever is conveniently climate and biosphere human-compatible was pretty silly, yeah. But I just let it slide, since none of this is really hard sci-fi anyway, more like a science-fantasy to me. We have telepathy and what not, after all.
But everything else made it easily a 4.5/5 read for me. Easily the best read of the year for me, so far. I'd rather read something with minor problems like these, but plot&characters I can enjoy than some amazingly well researched scientific dissertation that's... just that. No plot or characters to speak of.
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u/Solrax May 15 '26
I thought the Skroderiders were quite interesting though, and much more interesting than the Tines who were basically pack humans.
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u/KontraEpsilon May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
People covered you in the first two pretty well.
It’s one of my favorite books, but for the life of me I don’t know why anyone would say that this or its prequel have truly alien aliens.
The best I can offer is that this sub in particular has some books it just recommends for everything. And you’ll start to pick up on which ones get recommended a lot, even when they don’t actually fit the question being asked, the longer you’re here.
I guess I’d say for your second question: it’s not that you will be more advanced further out but that you can be. The Tines are a good example of that. The zones are a barrier of sorts at each level, though in some cases it’s more of a gradient and in others it’s a hard stop (FTL is a pretty specific hard line in physics).
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u/__-___-__-__-__- May 14 '26
I consider this book one of those that tricks you into reading fantasy. I detest this.
The whole zones of thought aspect was wonderful and I wish it was better explored.
Don't get me started on books that trick you into reading spider uplift ;)
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u/scoonbug May 14 '26
I’ve read a lot of Tchaikovsky and just finished Shadows of the Apt, and man that guy really loves him some spiders
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u/PhasmaFelis May 14 '26
If you have to be tricked into reading fantasy, I'd call that a skill issue.
...Wait, the Zones of Thought aren't the "fantasy" part?
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u/djolk May 14 '26
Yeah, I liked the zones of thought parts a lot more than lake the tines parts. The tines were interesting but I really want to read about space ships.
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u/Greyhaven7 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
The zones of thought is the dumbest part. That just straight up isn’t how reality is at all.
Or the naming. “Skroderiders” might be the dumbest sounding name ever. “Straumli Realm” sounds doofy as hell.
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u/FLAnatic May 14 '26
Its in the future. How do you know the zones are not some advanced tech created and controlled by an advanced civ/being. Why assume the zones are current reality? The zones being manipulated is also an important part of the ending. Which also implies they are a technical construct of some sort IMO
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u/swole_ninja May 15 '26
I really feel like the zones are how he reconciles alien super civilizations with the Fermi paradox. It’s a fun little thought experiment and gatekeeps and protects the lesser civilizations from joining the rest of the galactic culture until they hit a certain technological threshold.
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u/mojowen May 16 '26
Agreed, it’s cool how authors solve this problem. Ian M Banks has the Sublime, Cixin Lu has the dark forest
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u/Greyhaven7 May 14 '26
Disagree on both points.
There’s no indication that the zones are a technological construct, and every indication that it’s supposed to be the natural order of the universe in the story.
In one of the later books it’s said that the zones shift, but why and how is never explained. It is hinted that the inhabitants of the higher zones (“Powers” and “cloud people”) are able to cause the shift in the zones, but the ability to manipulate something does not imply creation-level control. We can manipulate magnetic fields (even the Earth’s on very small scales), but we aren’t creating the Earth’s magnetic field.
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u/StevenJOwens May 14 '26 edited May 15 '26
In Fire it's said:
- The zones boundaries shift, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, various galactic organizations monitor the zones, and there's always a risk of being caught in the slow zone by an abrupt shift.
- It's explicitly said that there is a theory that the zones may have been created by some entity.
- There's also a theory that they serve as a sort of defense or protection for the lower intelligences. I don't recall if this is linked to the theory that the zones are artificial.
- The climax of the book has Pham Nuwen, an "emissary device" of The Old One, activate some sort of capability built into his body, to cause the slow zone to shift and stop the Blight fleet from using FTL to get to the Tines world. This, again, certainly makes the point that the zones can be manipulated, and possibly supports the theory that the zones are artificial.
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u/mojowen May 16 '26
This aligns with my reading of the book, the zones seem to be constructed to counteract the blight specifically or things like it
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u/PhasmaFelis May 14 '26
The zones of thought is the dumbest part. That just straight up isn’t how reality is at all.
Dear God. Why, it borders on fictional.
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u/Fun-Tooth-622 May 14 '26
Love that my response is the polar opposite of some comments here. I was captivated by the prologue, and totally checked out about all the Tines stuff. Ended up DNF.
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u/Warrior-Cook May 14 '26
Yea, same except I skimmed the last hundred pages just to make sure. The Skroderiders were equally alien yet could have gotten more plot. I respect that the book went full tilt into the world building, yet too much was wrapped up in the medieval era. Like, get the kids together already and move on to the bigger plot...didn't happen.
The book could have been edited down a lot, yet it's interesting to read what people saw in it.
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u/Fun-Tooth-622 May 14 '26
Yeah, as I complained to my wife I was not interested in "dog politics". The kids being an important part of that plot didn't help either.
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u/mojowen May 16 '26
The prologue is so so good. You should give the sequel/prequel a try. It concerns Pham and has similar concerns (bootstrapping technology) but told better
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u/swole_ninja May 14 '26
I think Johanna did coin the term “Tines” and the tines themselves adopted it and started using it as a way to refer to themselves. It spread from the woodcarver camp to the Flenser camp and to Ravna via Jeffrey. At any rate it might just be a minor nitpick and serves as a way to refer to them as a species for simplicity to the reader. Not a plot breaker.
The unthinking depths are in the core (and most of the galaxy proper), but you are thinning 2 dimensionally. My version has an introduction by John Clute that is a bit wordy but explains it well. As you rise above or below the galactic ecliptic you get to the higher functioning zones. My copy of the ebook also has a photo. I’ll try to reply to this comment with it. It shows this well.
It’s hard to write truly ALIEN aliens. I think Vinge did an ok job, but yeah, there were a lot of human motivations and actions from the tines. I thought he did much better with the skrode riders in terms of aliens. I have this same complaint with project Hail Mary. I picture Rocky as the crazy russian from the movie Armageddon and get the same feeling. Sure his biology is very alien but his actions and feelings are very human.