On My Shelves: A Fire Upon the Deep

On the edge of the Galaxy, an archaeological expedition finds a cache of ancient wonders. But in delving into the secrets of a civilization so advanced they can barely comprehend it, they unleash… something. A Something that bides its time, hidden until it is prepared, and then acts to consume them all, flower into malevolent power. Only a desperate sacrifice by two researchers – themselves also nigh to reaching a superhuman state – allows any of them to escape at all.

At the same time, far towards the center of the Galaxy, a race of strange dog-ratlike beings is in the midst of a civil war. They have no idea that soon their world will be the key to the salvation – or destruction – of a million other worlds and a thousand civilizations.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the grandest-scale epics ever written, a true heir to the space operas of the 1930s and 40s with 50 years of additional technology and perspective added. In this novel, Vinge expanded and fully enunciated the universe of the Zones of Thought, in which all known Galaxies are divided into four Zones: the Unthinking Depths, in which no known intelligence can function; the Slow Zone, where speed of light remains an absolute limit, but intelligence can develop; the Beyond, where superhuman intelligences, including artificial ones, can be developed, faster than light drives function, and other wonders of technology and science are possible that the laws of the Slow Zone forbid; and the Transcend, at the edge and beyond the edge of the Galaxy, where the godlike Powers exist – beings, or perhaps entire civilizations, that have ascended beyond normal physical instrumentality and become capable of feats of cogitation and action that more than border on the supernatural.

Powers can provide devices and concepts that "trick" the Zones themselves, so that they can in effect work miracles even in lower Zones. Thus, researching the traces of Transcendent Powers in the High Beyond or Low Transcend can be a very profitable business… or a terrifyingly dangerous one, if you unleash something that even a Transcend Power feared enough to hide away.

There are two main threads to the story, the first following Ravna Bergnsdot – the only human employee of the High Beyond station called "Relay" – two "Skroderiders" named Blueshell and Greenstalk, and Pham Nuwen, a man out of time who was revived to be an intermediary for the Transcend Power called "Old One". These four learn of the threat awakened at the beginning, now called the Blight or the Straumli Perversion, and it demonstrates its power by destroying Relay itself. Barely escaping, the four flee, with just the bare knowledge that there is a Countermeasure of some sort, a weapon that can be used to destroy the Blight, but that if it still exists, it would be on a ship that fled inward, towards the Slow Zone...

The second follows two children, survivors of the research expedition named Jefri and Johanna, and their encounters with the alien "Tines" – a species that forms flexible group minds out of small numbers of its people, so that an "individual" Tine is actually composed of four to six physical creatures. Jefri is captured by one side – fairly clearly the "bad guys", called the Flenserists, and Johanna is found/captured by the Woodcarvers, a faction resisting the Flenserists. Each of the children, with their advanced world knowledge, represents an incalculable treasure to either side in the civil war, and both sides know how dangerous the other can be.

Unbeknownst to the children or the Tines, of course, is the fact that somewhere aboard their ship – now marooned at the very bottom of the Beyond, the edge of the Slow Zone – is the only weapon that can defeat the fast-growing Perversion…

A complex novel told in multiple parts, A Fire Upon the Deep hit my "sensawunda" button hard. It is one of a very very few novels to have gained the signal honor of an instant re-read – I finished the book, and literally instantly turned back to the first page and started reading again.

Part of this, admittedly, was that some of the story is told through a series of messages/communications on the galaxy-wide Known Net, messages formatted deliberately to echo Usenet, the first really worldwide "social media" platform and one at its peak of popularity when Vinge published A Fire Upon the Deep. As a longtime resident of Usenet myself, I recognized the format, the manner of conversation, and found later that some of the individual posters in Fire were based on real posters on Usenet. There was a certain pleasure in the recognition of this piece of computer history.

A Usenet-like communication format actually makes some sense in the context of the universe of the Zones; not only are the more complex methods of communication going to be bandwidth-intensive (a hellish problem when you're trying to handle traffic from billions of people each on millions of worlds!), but as shown in the novel, too complex communications can carry hostile code – and "hostile code" in the Zones universe can mean "something that rewrites the brains of the people who read it and turns them into servants of the Perversion".

The messages also are not merely "here's what's going on elsewhere". Buried within some of those messages are clues as to what is really happening, and to revelations that later shake the characters to their foundations.

This is a space opera, and as such it has thrilling chases with last-minute escapes; immense fleets of vessels sent in pursuit of the heroes; terrifying enemies; and ultimately a final heroic victory using a superweapon that even Doc Smith would have to appreciate.

I was so inspired by this novel that I proposed – with a very detailed outline – a supplement based on it for the GURPS line of RPGs, and even contacted Vernor Vinge in case it went anywhere. Steve Jackson said he liked the idea, but alas couldn't convince the rest of the board to go along.

I strongly recommend A Fire Upon the Deep, and even more so the later prequel, A Deepness in the Sky – which I will review later!