A Fire Upon the Deep

First introduced in Vinge's story, “The blabber”, the Tines are the best part of this book, a truly wonderful and appealing alien species, and here he tells us much more about them and shows their society in action. I think I could happily read a whole series of books about them, if well done. I initially gave this book four stars on the basis of the Tines.

However, the book has two different sets of protagonists operating in very different environments. The Tines are confined to one world and initially know nothing of anything else; while Ravna Bergsndot and her associates travel between the stars, among vastly larger and more advanced societies in a different part of the galaxy.

Ravna is likeable enough, but the galaxy in which she lives is so vast and so alien. It's hard to make it seem real and convincing, and for me Vinge doesn't quite succeed. His Zones of Thought are implausible; his Powers and Perversions and Blights seem like childish nightmares, and the disasters they cause are over the top and hard to take seriously.

The way he peppers the story with alien Internet postings may have seemed forward-looking at the time of writing, but it already looks rather archaic by now, especially as he includes lengthy header information with each post; and this stuff contributes little to the plot.

In the end the two threads of the story converge and join to give us a fairly satisfactory ending.

Rereading the book, I tend to read about the Tines and skim or skip through much of the rest. Even the story of the Tines suffers somewhat from an overdone villain. Evil people can be found in real life, I suppose; but most real-life conflicts are between relatively normal people with some notion of morality, who happen to have conflicting interests and/or somewhat different notions of morality. Completely bad or completely good people are unusual but boring; most people have some bad and some good in them.