A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

My rating : 4.5 of 5 stars

This is definitely one of those books that sticks with you. It’s an interesting mix of space opera and fantasy that switches between two narratives to tell its story, those narratives being the weirdness of a high-concept kinda-post-singularity sci-fi in which an evil sentient entity/program/construct threatens to wipe out the entire extended culture of the Milky Way, and the grounded political machinations of a not-quite fantasy world where a race of intelligent pack-minds meet their first off-worlders and set about using them as pawns in their own little game of kings. And yes, it is exactly as strange as you’re probably now imagining, but also ridiculously readable and more-ish.

So, as you probably guessed, I really enjoyed this one. It’s been on my to-read pile for a long time, and if I’m being honest, I was always putting off reading it because I’d heard and read so many reviews that made it out to be this massively highbrow work. However, having now made the plunge, it’s actually a damned good read.

I think one of the reasons it’s got the rep it has is because of when it first came out. First published in ’92, it followed in the wake of the cyberpunk boom of the eighties, and the growth of interest in the Singularity, and for a lot of readers in the decade following its initial release I suspect it would have been a lot to take in. As it says in the intro to the SF Masterworks edition, on the surface it’s just a sci-fi adventure, with good and evil, and heroes and villains. But dig beneath the surface and it’s got some remarkably cool ideas about the cosmology of the galaxy we live in, and some interesting subtextual conversations about what it is to be human (in the broader sense), and where humanity fits within the greater, wider world.

The alien races described herein, and there are a few to choose from, are genuinely alien and give the reader a lot to think about in terms of how intelligence and sentience presents itself, but it’s the Tines that that make this book stand out. Pack-minded not-quite-wolves whose intelligence is primarily based on the number of members making up each individual consciousness (three is the bare minimum, eight is reaching the edge of too many), and whose souls can live for centuries as members die and are replaced. The various Tine characters are so well written that I couldn’t stop myself smiling at Peregrine’s playfully exuberant curiosity, or grumbling internally at Steel’s villainy. I could easily read more books about the Tines, which is good because the third in the series, The Children of the Sky, is apparently set entirely on Tinesworld.

So yeah, this is an awesome book, and a much easier read than I expected. Definitely one to take a look at if you like space opera that’s a bit different, or sci-fi that challenges genre boundaries.