[…] I decided to embrace and extend that idea, liberally borrowing from Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon the Deep […]

I just finished the A Fire Upon the Deep and I was interested to see what others think about the zones of thought concept. It seems that observables (meaning: that astronomers can observe) are not effected by the zones and the part of reality that behaves differently is unknown to races in the slow zone. I really don’t care if this picture is not coherent with current scientific theories… theories change faster than trends in science fiction literature. (Just a month ago some bogus neutrino measurement stemmed 1200 scientific papers on new physics. (All considered junk by now of course.)) I enjoyed reading both about the ship and the pursue, and the doggies with the kids. The first introduced this interesting new world (through e.g. chat-log), while the other was like a Disney story for adults with interesting new concepts and plot. Despite this, it is a disappointment that the next novel is about Pham. For me, he was the least interesting part of the whole thing.

@ astine:

Good point. I think that Vinge was going for a “journey/quest” theme here but it did not pan out well, because not much interesting was happening during the transit. It was mostly Pham being emo, and Ravna browsing the web and worrying.

Also: trolling and flame wars on interstellar message boards – absolutely riveting, edge of the seat stuff. I appreciate him trying to give it a familiar Usenet feel but… I think that was the problem – it was too familiar. I was half expecting the characters to start using interstellar IRC and fighting for ops any second. :P

I liked the zones of thought concept.

What I didn’t like was that while the story of the kids on the planet was much more interesting than anything else in the book, the author kept insisting on focusing on the rescuers, and so a third of the book is folks trying to get from points A to B. There is way too much time spent describing people just waiting around in a ship’s hold. The story would have worked better if told entirely from the perspective of the kids, or maybe just the characters on the planet.