Fire Upon the Deep

[MacGregor]

Finished listening to Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge the other day on audible. Overall I liked it, though I thought it hardly qualified as hard sci-fi.  I noticed several terms we use in OA such as blights. Anyone else read this book?

[Drashner1]

Yup - read it and love it.

One of my favorites.

AFAIK Vinge never claimed it is hard SF. Hard SF isn't really his thing per se in any of his writings, although he's done some near future stuff that is likely pretty hard if a reader wanted to go through and figure out how the tech might work. Rainbows End would be the main one in that area.

Todd

[stevebowers]

Me too.
Vinge is credited with popularising the concept of the Singularity in modern science fiction, although the way he uses it is somewhat different to the way we use it.
See
https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.c...arity.html

[DarrenRyding]

I read it in 1997, and was thoroughly impressed with the sheer scope of the setting and the vividness of Vinge's writing style.  I am certain that it had an impact on my own writing and imagination.

I'd give in a borderline 5-star rating.

[Rynn]

I quite liked it. It's definitely more of a space opera than a hard-SF but did hard-SF as a named genre even exist when it was written? Other than the singularity ideas that really took off I found the book peppered with little ideas that are very cool and haven't been widely picked up:

1) The hive mind race in which everyone has 3-5 bodies but can swap them/add more at the cost of personality change was a cool small exploration of what it would be like to be multi.

2) The way space battles worked with the jump drives was excellent, with fleets continually jumping around but predicting their enemy's jumps more and more. Typically jump drives in fiction are treated as a way to get from A to B and then battle commences normally, but this book integrated it really well.

3) The kid's educational laptop having an economic development app that could be fed available resources and spit out a specific plan for how to develop a high tech. Such a good idea that is often overlooked in fiction in favour of giving the blueprint of a specific technology, when in reality that would only be so helpful without the knowledge of manufacturing techniques, logistics and skills needed to make and use it.

4) The focus on interactions with strong superintelligent Powers as being incredibly profitable. A few times it was mentioned how a trivial gift from a Power would be worth billions. It really hammered home the differences in resource capability.

5) The fact that subjectively speaking Powers don't exist very long, maybe about a decade, not because they die but because they're in such a rapid and constant state of change that after a decade for lower level lives the Power has lived through potentially millions of subjective years of change.

All good stuff Though it also has some hilariously quaint ideas. The fact that the FTL communication system of a galaxy is mailing lists will always be charming, hilarious and insightful to the era in which it was written.

[MacGregor]

Yeah, the galactic mailing list idea hasn’t aged well. 

I had different expectations going into the book as some review I read had it listed as hard sci-fi, which as y’all have mentioned it isn’t nor does the author claim it to be.

How do the sequels compare?

[Drashner1]

Yeah, the galactic mailing list idea hasn’t aged well. 

I had different expectations going into the book as some review I read had it listed as hard sci-fi, which as y’all have mentioned it isn’t nor does the author claim it to be.

How do the sequels compare?

Heh. Makes you wonder how well current depictions of future communication networks will age.

Re the sequels -

A Deepness in the Sky is actually a prequel and is quite good, although the scope is not as large.

Children of the Sky is a direct sequel and I didn't enjoy it as much as Fire. Mainly because it almost entirely lacks the high tech elements of Fire (one of the primary things I enjoyed) and is very socio-political in nature (which generally doesn't interest me).

I could say more, but don't want to include too many spoilers.

Hope this helps,

Todd

[MacGregor]

Todd,

Good to know. Yeah, I probably wont get around to reading those.

[stevebowers]

A Deepness in the Sky is set in the Zones of Thought universe, but entirely in the Slow Zone, so it does not incorporate any faster-than-light or agrav tech, etcetera.
In many ways it is much more like an OA story than A Fire Upon the Deep.

[Rynn]

I had different expectations going into the book as some review I read had it listed as hard sci-fi, which as y’all have mentioned it isn’t nor does the author claim it to be.

I've found that a lot of older sci-fi gets categorised into hard and soft but often in ways that fit the time. I can see how FUtD would be considered hard-SF at the time. It doesn't have anything fantastical like psychic powers, the technologies they have are given clearly defined limits, other than the FTL and antigravity everything else is plausible within physics (other than the clarketech but even modern hard-SF has that) etc. I think what counts as hard-SF depends on what tropes of science and technology people find plausible at the time.