wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep#Plot
goodreads.com/author/show/44037.Vernor_Vinge
In which I present the Wikipedia page for A Fire Upon the Deep in audio, and the stock art fever dream version that “AI” selected for each sentence:
More than thrice, I’ve spoken with someone who misremembered the nature of A Fire Upon the Deep, and I remember being thrilled to hear Brandon Sanderson report the same, in Writing Excuses season 8 episode 33.
The primary aliens we read about in this story are so “peopley” in their mannerisms that readers completely forget that the Tines are dog-like. It’s not a secret from the reader, but Vinge delivers constant dialogue with an in-translation style that has them calling each other “people”—never “human”. The concept of intelligence as people rather than human is terrific, and yet somehow relegated to such a background role that readers utterly forget it. That’s a pretty self-commentary by readers, to think intelligence is such a humanoid trait that it could not belong to something like the dogs.
Readers really can be forgiven for missing the alienness. Much of Vinge’s work in this universe carefully orbits the idea that humans are just peers to aliens, yet he does it without fanfare. Relegated to the premise, he spends no words explaining it. You are meant to understand it by experience.
In fact, Vinge doesn’t even give humanity a coherent connection to Earth. In the opening pages of A Fire Upon the Deep, we are to understand that the humans we follow are just a bunch of somebodies who don’t think of their origin as Earth at all. They are an interstellar civilization, living amongst many civilized aliens, in hub stations built by people (read: not humans).
On the whole, A Fire Upon the Deep is not plotted the way a modern sci-fi reader might require. The book does not twist and turn, and the action is fantastical because it dares you to imagine something cool, not because it really explains it. Ravna is forced to exposit a bit too much, and then she loops back and exposits a second time to make the first one clearer.
What I like most about this book is its universe, which may not sound like a ringing endorsement of the book itself. And you’d be right. As neat as it is, I think it functions best as bait to pick up A Deepness in the Sky, which is a superior story with even less sense of plot, a prequel designed to be read as a sequel, a sprawling cast of humans—and people—stuffed with an elaborate flashback that justifies Pham Nuwen’s role in the book we discuss here.
The semantic trouble with A Fire Upon the Deep is that its conclusion is a deus ex machina which turns upon Pham Nuwen’s mythological role and his right to hold a god in his head—and he shows up in the text kind of late, functioning as a sock puppet for the intended plot. There’s no use condemning the structure of the book—Pham is not a Mary Sue, he’s just weirdly positioned, and not justified at all unless you read more in the universe.
A Fire Upon the Deep isn’t just a glass half empty. Yes, the non-Tine aliens are a little under-developed, and yes, the space battles are plotted a bit thinly, and yes, the impact of the action and ending is mostly in your imagination…
But the story renders a compelling description of the Zones of Thought, a framework for the nature of intelligence and how it spreads in the galaxy. The novel doesn’t flirt with the Fermi Paradox, but it offers some tools for imagining how early mankind might have demystified the galaxy and its rules. The galaxy itself is widely settled but still mysterious. Humans are not at the top of the hierarchy, nor even are the people they coexist with.
I recommend A Fire Upon the Deep because of its audacity in an era that should have flayed it for not making aliens alien enough—a preemptive reaction which I think powered Vinge’s inclusion of more deliberately labeled aliens that made me think of something pulpy, and less Golden Age. Non-Tines aliens are not as seriously investigated in the book, because they are a background fixture of the universe, to be taken for granted. Meanwhile, the Tines are a new kind of people, enabled by the present arrangement of the Zones of Thought.
The book also tries to handle post-physical intelligence, and AI too. The story begins, turning on a premise that dead civilizations left behind valuable knowledge, a pile of treasure that humans and AI alike are eager to have. We never even read much about what the treasure is or means. For a MacGuffin, it’s at least explosive to the plot, and gets out of the way quickly.
I recommend you explore the novel, including in audiobook format, because while it may not blow your mind outright, it is a thoughtful realm, whose introductory premise has additional weight once you are allowed to experience the trauma of the Zones of Thought rearranging over time. Why wasn’t the data archive found before now, if it was so important?
Because some things just get lost in the deep.
The Wikipedia text lyrics follow:
An expedition from Straumli Realm, an ambitious young human civilization in the high Beyond, investigates a five-billion-year-old data archive in the low Transcend that offers the possibility of unimaginable riches. The expedition's facility, High Lab, is gradually compromised by a dormant superintelligence within the archive later known as the Blight. However, shortly before the Blight's final "flowering", two self-aware entities created similarly to the Blight plot to aid the humans before the Blight can escape.
Recognizing the danger of what they have awakened, the researchers at High Lab attempt to flee in two ships, one carrying all the adults and the second carrying all the children in "coldsleep boxes". Suspicious, the Blight discovers that the first ship contains a data storage device in its cargo manifest; assuming it contains information that could harm it, the Blight destroys the ship. The second ship escapes. The Blight assumes that it is no threat, but later realizes that it is actually carrying away a "countermeasure" against it.
The ship lands on a distant planet with a medieval-level civilization of dog-like creatures, dubbed "Tines", who live in packs as group minds. Upon landing, however, the two surviving adults are ambushed and killed by Tine fanatics known as Flenserists, in whose realm they have landed. The Flenserists capture a young boy named Jefri Olsndot and his wounded sister, Johanna. While Jefri is taken deeper into Flenserist territory, Johanna is rescued by a Tine pilgrim who witnessed the ambush and delivers her to a neighboring kingdom ruled by a Tine named Woodcarver. The Flenserists tell Jefri that Johanna has been killed by Woodcarver and exploit him in order to develop advanced technology (such as cannon and radio communication), while Johanna and the knowledge stored in her "dataset" device help Woodcarver rapidly develop in turn.
A distress signal from the sleeper ship eventually reaches "Relay", a major node in the galactic communications network. A benign transcendent entity named "the Old One" contacts Relay, seeking information about the Blight and the humans who released it, and reconstitutes a human man named Pham Nuwen from an old wreck to act as its agent, using his doubt of his own memory's veracity to bend him to the Old One's will. Ravna Bergsndot, the only human Relay employee, traces the sleeper ship's signal to the Tines' world and persuades her employer to investigate what the human ship took from High Lab, contracting the merchant vessel Out of Band II, owned by two sentient plant "Skroderiders", Blueshell and Greenstalk, to transport them.
Before the mission is launched, the Blight attacks Relay and concurrently kills Old One. As Old One dies, it downloads what information it can into Pham to defeat the Blight, and Pham, Ravna and the Skroderiders barely escape Relay's destruction in the Out of Band II.
The Blight expands, taking over races and "rewriting" their people to become its agents, murdering several other Powers, and seizing other archives in the Beyond, looking for what was taken. It finally realizes where the danger truly lies and sends a hastily assembled fleet in pursuit of the Out of Band II.
The humans arrive at the Tines' homeworld and ally with Woodcarver to defeat the Flenserists. Pham initiates Countermeasure, which extends the Slow Zone by thousands of light years, enveloping the Blight at the cost of wrecking thousands of uninvolved civilizations and causing trillions of deaths. The humans are stranded on the Tines world, now in the depths of the "Slow Zone". Activating the countermeasure costs Pham his life, but just before Pham dies, he realizes that, although his body is a reconstruction, his memories are real. Vinge expands on Pham's background story in A Deepness in the Sky.
