I’d never read any of Vernor Vinge’s crazy space stories before but A Deepness in the Sky came highly recommended by friends and Vernor Vinge is an awesome science fiction author name so who was I to refuse?
To summarize the plot would be difficult. Basically you have three groups in a story that, thanks to deep sleep/stasis employed by all three, spans many decades but with characters aging much more slowly, though still getting older. It all takes place 8,000 years in the future and apart from the snazzy tech on display, paints a curiously depressing view of our future.
The three groups are:
Qeng Ho: Or as I call them, Capitalists Ho! These are people who love to trade and trade to love. Their goal is to trade as far and widely across the universe as possible. They are loosely federated with no real formal government structure.
Emergents: As the name suggests, these people recently emerged from a dark age and although technologically advanced in many ways, they are kind of bad, evil and whatnot. They aim to conquer and subjugate and conscript people into working as virtual computers by means of a mind-altering effect known as Focus.
Spiders: Living on a planet creatively dubbed Arachna by the humans, this is a race of large, intelligent spider folk. Like Earthlings, they are divided into factions and have a tech level similar to mid 20th century Earth, with space travel just becoming a possibility. The system they live in is the focal point of the overall story, as it features an improbable sun that burns normally for a few decades before effectively shutting off for a few centuries before lighting again. The humans, again demonstrating their cleverness, call it the OnOff Star.
For some reason the two human groups think this mysterious system will hold untold riches/power/something and they each dispatch fleets to secure the spider world. Deception and a surprise attack by the Emergents against the Qeng Ho leads to the survivors being forced to work together for decades while waiting for the spider technology to develop enough for them to appropriate it so they can all get back home and screw you, stupid spiders and your dumb OnOff sun.
The bulk of the story follows a large cast of characters, switching between the three groups and weaves in an exhaustively detailed level of the technology–everything from “localizer” nanites a-plenty to 3D holo displays that don’t require glasses or anything. This may sound glib but Vinge actually makes it all sound very believable, intriguing and yet commonplace to the people of the story.
Vinge also weaves in layer upon layer of deception and intrigue, sometimes tipping the hand for the reader to see, other times leaving it an open question on who can be trusted–if anyone.
I especially liked the depiction of the spiders. For a long time their actions and voices are identified by Focused interpreters who can only hear their transmissions and this creates a more human vision of them. That carries through to the spider sections of the story, with only occasional references to their spider-ness–“eating hands”, welts for holding babies on their backs, perches to sit in rather than chairs. And yet they have everything a good civilization would want: vehicles to tool around in, nice homes, clothes (of a sort) and, of course, nuclear weapons. It’s only when the humans and spiders meet that you really appreciate just how alien they are. And yet still adorably cute, somehow.
This cuteness would not probably translate to a film version. Unless they were depicted as Muppets.
I really enjoyed Vinge’s world building, something I’m not usually much into (and a large part of why I skip book series) and the sophistication of the plots the various characters act upon are equally interesting. The bad guys get what they deserve, which is always cathartic, especially after some of the vile things they perpetuate over a very long period of time.
If you like grand scale science fiction with deep (no pun intended) worlds and ever-twisting, slow-burning plots, you’ll love this. Unless you’re an arachnophobe, perhaps.
