For one, I really don’t buy the whole “Zones of Thought” idea. Vinge postulates that Earth is in a band of space known as the “Slow Zone” where nothing can move faster than light. Outside that zone however lies “Beyond” where rules of physics relax and FTL travel is not only possible, but also inexpensive – an area of space just bristling with life. Thousands of sentient races live together in a space opera like setting, exchanging information using a galaxy wide internet equivalent. On the outskirts of the beyond – at the very edge of the galaxy lies The Transcend. It is a magical zone where almost anything is possible. It is a domain of AI-gods and post singularity intellects.

A Fire Upon the Deep

It is a neat idea that creates a stratified ecosystem in which baseline sentient species and transcendent powers can live side by side without much interference. It neatly explains why the higher intelligences don’t simply assimilate, absorb, wipe out or kick out humanity from their domain. A little too neatly for my taste. Vinge never explains why the Zones exist, or how exactly do they work. They’re just there, and we were supposed to accept them. This is fine, but I grew accustomed to explanations better than this. I have seen the “physics don’t work the same everywhere” done much better by Neal Stephenson in Anathem or by Jacek Dukaj in Perfect Imperfection. Both books used concepts of alternate dimensions, which at least have some basis in the string theory. Vinge’s Zones are mostly magic – they have no scientific basis – or at the very list, the author did not demonstrate such in his writing. I like hard SF and this is a lazy solution.

I’m also not a big fan of universes bristling with alien life, Star Wars style. Perhaps I’m a pessimist but I find space civilization with little or no aliens more compelling than ones that invent throw away critters as a minor joke. Vinge for example creates a race of fuzzy, cute Care Bear butterflies that turn out to be a ruthless, violent warrior race. Ugh…

Finally, I absolutely abhor when an author transplants their favorite Marry Sue character between settings for the sole purpose of having a cool protagonist. Guess who shows up in this book? Motherfucking Pham Nuwen from A Deepness in the Sky. Actually, this is incorrect. Vinge wrote Fire before Deepness, but you wouldn’t know that without looking it up.

In Deepness Pham Nuwen has a purpose. I liked him as a character in that book. Actually “liked” is a strong word. He was not particularly likeable, but he was a compelling character with a strong arc. I really liked the fact that Nuwen could be as cold, calculating and ruthless as the main antagonist Thomas Nau. I liked how his arc culminated in a really interesting choice: to become same monster as his adversary or to give up on his dream of creating an interstellar empire.

In Fire Upon the Deep he seems out of place. I guess he is supposed to act as a fish out of water character. A human from the slow zone, through whom the readers explore the Beyond. But then Vinge gives hims superpowers – shards of knowledge bestowed upon him by a transcendent intellect. So throughout the book Nuwen acts mostly as a plot device dispenser. Whenever there is trouble he falls back on his “godshatter” knowledge, and does something random – and soon enough it turns out his random action was perfectly timed stroke of brilliance that was just the thing to get everyone out of the bind. In the end he ends up looking like a an author’s favorite character that was just borrowed, and forcefully inserted into new continuity. This is not the case, but that’s how it looks like. It was somewhat painful to read.

Did I hate the book though? Nope. I actually liked parts of it. The parts that take place on Tines World. You see, Pham Nuwen is part of a rescue mission sent from the Beyond to the very edge of the slow zone. A ship carrying an extremely important McGuffin crashed there, leaving the entire crew stranded on a planet that just recently reached medieval level of technology. What’s so interesting about this backward world? It’s the aliens that inhabit it.

In my review of Embassytown I have complained about Vinge’s entirely too human aliens in A Deepnes in the Sky. I felt that the spiders were not sufficiently different from us – both culturally and psychologically. I guess this was part of Vinge’s point – he wanted to play with the idea of having the human crews listen to translated radio broadcasts and developing attachments to spider politicians and celebrities only to suffer from extreme cognitive dissonance when seeing these frightening monstrous looking creatures in person for the first time. Unfortunately humanizing them, made them less interesting.

The aliens from Fire Upon the Deep are portrayed in the same way – very human and unremarkable – with the exception of the Tines. They are interesting, because they are unique. They are pack minds – only sentient in groups of 4-8 members. The individual members of the species are somewhat intelligent, but not self aware and not capable of rational thought. Their behavior is mostly animalistic and driven by instinct. But when a group gets together it can attain consciousness. The individual members communicate with each other via sound – they emit constant buzzing that allows the members to coordinate, and think as a single unit.

Most packs are mixed age and mixed gender. When breeding female members usually keep the young and raise them to become new members. The children learn the parent’s internal thought “language” by constant exposure and become part of the pack mind. Because of this, individuals that could be labeled as “children” by our standards are rare – most packs incorporate new young members as their oldest ones die off and thus their age average fluctuates.

In theory a pack mind can live forever as long as the new members can absorb and store memories of the dying ones. In practice however, new members often change the overall personality of the pack. A short tempered member may cause the pack to become quicker to anger, while a member with better logical faculties may produce a more analytical and scientifically minded pack. To reflect this, most Tines have two names: one which is simple concatenation of the names of the members, and another chosen name that represents the “soul” of the pack.

As you can imagine a species with a distributed intelligence like this must have some interesting philosophical insights on what exactly makes one sentience. We humans have been pondering what makes us human for ages, but imagine the theological and philosophical discussions that a species which can tangibly identify a “soul” or “essence” of an individual must be having. Vinge really digs deep into this, showing you how these creatures think and how they view themselves. For example, many practice selective breeding (including inbreeding inside one’s own pack) in order to produce offspring that inherits just the right mix of traits to positively impact the personality and abilities of the pack. Others practice “soul surgery” – an unethical, and trauma inducing practice of killing and replacing undesirable members.

Despite being group minds, Tines still seem much more than the bizarre aliens from Embassytown. But their strange segmented minds make them more interesting than the spiders. Hell, they are more interesting than the plant-like Riders devoid of short them memory that appear in the same book.

Overall, the book is average. It’s a McGuffin driven space opera with a Cannon Sue protagonist. Every time the action switched to Pham Nuwen and his crew my eyes would start to roll. But the bits of the book that take place on Tines World are quite decent. The aliens are interesting, the two child protagonists are rather compelling. The relationship between Johanna and Peregrine for example is handled very well – starting as bitter enemies only to become fast friends. The deal between Jefri and Mr. Steel on the other hand is very reminiscent of the Thomas Nau – Qiwi Lisolet situation. Vinge clearly reused it, but also managed to polish and improve it in his later novel. For the most part though, this setup works.

It is not a bad book. Deepnes in the Sky has a better story and better characters, but weaker aliens. If you find space opera jarring, you may want to skip this one.

As a mud-spattered youngster, Tatja quickly realized she was different from the stone-age primitives with whom she grew up. Her insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge could not be quenched among them; she had to explore and learn more about the strange world she lived on.

She finds the bastion of all culture, arts, entertainment and history for the entire planet, the seven-hundred-year-old science fiction magazine Fantasie, which is produced entirely aboard a gargantuan floating vessel the size of a small city. But despite the printing presses, sail-powered vessels, and mind-expanding technology, Tatja is still dissatisfied. Rising through the ranks, she finds that the people on the enormous barge are just as unintelligent as the primitives she grew up with. But others have come to the planet who not only challenge her intelligence, but offer her a tantalizing opportunity to uncover answers to mysteries that have long plagued her.

A super-bright girl from a low-tech culture thrown into a high tech environment grows up to realize people she idolized are idiots and eventually uncovers the truth about her world being a lost colony? Add to cart, shut up and take my money Amazon!

Book cover

Alas, the blurb is better than the book. I was really looking forward to reading the thoughts and reflections of this Taja character because I have soft spot for this archetype. I can’t easily relate to military gruff types, special agents, cops or space marines – but a bright youngster with a knack for technology, stuck in a world populated by semi-literate neanderthals with minds slow like molasses – that’s the story of my life. Taja was going to be my avatar – the freak, the outsider, the weirdo with the head full of ideas her peers won’t be able to grasp for decades. Unfortunately Taja is not a PoV character. Even though the book is about her, Vinge bends over backwards to avoid writing from her perspective. Instead he alternates between several protagonists (a magazine editor, a publisher and a young astronomer) all of whom end up fawning all over the barbarian girl in one way or another. I guess Vinge did this to make Taja seem strange, alien and aloof, but it doesn’t really work that well. She ends up seeming like a classical Cannon Sue – she is this near omnipotent mastermind, being able to hatch unreasonably complex plans that the readers are not privy too. When it is time for the big reveal, it always turns out Taja was six steps ahead of the game, factoring random chance happenings, and complex failures into her calculations – because she is just tat smart.

It is also very clear that Vinge didn’t really take much time and effort to merge the short story prequel and the novella proper. It’s almost as they were combined via the means of an editorial Swingline stapler. About a third of the way through the book, the story abruptly jumps a decade into the future. The main PoV character who was relaying the story of young barbarian princess vanishes and the book introduces a brand new protagonist. Apparently the erstwhile editor from the beginning of the book had some irreconcilable differences with Taja and left. We only know this because one of the characters mentions it as an afterthought. If you don’t know that the book was spliced together from two sources, you are left wondering if you somehow skipped a few chapters. I actually checked to see if my page numbers are consecutive, wondering if my copy was a fluke missprint without a dozen of pages. But no – it’s just that the the seams where two stories were sewn together are showing.

It only gets worse from there. The alien contact mentioned in the blurb I quoted above is beyond cliche. This might be a bit of a spoiler, but Taja meets an alien dude who claims to be a space cop of sorts. He is chasing another alien dude who is a space criminal, working for space slave trading cartel – but not everyone believes his story. I will let you guess what kind of twist Vinge has cooked up for the readers when Taja finally meets the second alien. And no, it is not surprising or original.

That said, if you are a fan of Vinge it might be worth picking up this title. When I was reading it, I could not help but draw parallels between Taja Grimm’s World and A Deepness in the Sky. It shows that the ideas that resulted in the awesome story about space traders and intelligent spiders were germinating in the author’s mind ever since the early 60’s. Taja’s story is almost like an early test run for these concepts. Don’t believe me? Lets talk about similarities:

• Both books are first contact stories featuring a backwards world on the brink of technological revolution being visited by an advanced space faring civilization.
• Taja Grimm seems to be a direct prototype for old Pham Trinli. They both have the same type of brilliance, drive and ruthless ambition bordering on megalomania. They both have a grand vision much, much bigger than themselves and will stop at nothing to achieve it. Trinli however ended up being a much better character – more nuanced, and much more relateable. Mainly because he did have PoV segments in the book, but also because he was flawed whereas Taja is perfect, and has only a single brief, somewhat justified lapse of judgement in the entire novel.
• The “golems” used by the slavers are vaguely reminiscent of the Focused slaves of the Emergents. Granted, they are noticeably different, but it is not a huge leap to envision how Vinge could go from a “brain in a box” to the “ziphead” concept by simple way of refinement.

For me, reading Taja Grimm’s World was basically an exercise in spotting parallels to a much better book. It is almost like reading a very, very early draft of Deepness – a rare look behind the scenes and into the authors mind. It contains threads of ideas that percolated, and matured into something else entirely. And as such it is a fascinating piece of literary history for any Vinge fan. But if you just want a good book, I would recommend staying away.

I would lump Rainbows End in the same category as Halting State by Charles Stross, which I reviewed very recently. It is not a bad category to be in mind you. Both Stross and Vinge have overlapping fields of interest and every once in a while their work converges around the same themes. Halting State and Rainbow’s End were published around the same time (2007 and 2006 respectively, with Vinge being the first one to tackle the subject). Both aim to depict very near future – you know, stuff that’s just around the next corner and beyond the horizon. Both use political intrigue and international espionage as an excuse for exploring social, political and cultural impact mobile technology will have on future generations. Stross focuses on MMO‘s and ARG‘s while Vinge seems to be entirely obsessed with Augmented Reality and its applications. Stoss is worried about organized cyberterrorism and breakdown of modern cryptography while Vinge is more concerned with bioterror and smart bio weapons.

Book Cover

As you can see there are many parallels between these two novels. When I was reading Rainbow’s End I could not help but to compare it to Halting State. So this is more or less going to be review by comparison. Perhaps it is not fair to Vinge whose book was published first, but then again fair reviews are usually not that interesting. Good reviews are subjective and opinionated.

The technology in Halting State is rather conservative compared to that in Rainbows End. Stross predicts that HUD glasses that talk to your cell phone will be the next big thing. Vinge goes step further and tries to imagine stuff that will replace our boxy old phones. He comes up with HUD contact lenses and wearable computers woven into the fabric of your clothes. You put your jacket on, and you are instantly online.

Rainbow’s End’s main character, Robert Gu is a world famous poet who has succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. Fortunately, recent medical breakthroughs have granted him a sudden reprieve. The experimental new treatments fully reverse his loss of memory, restore his mental faculties and rejuvenate him. One of the sharpest and most brilliant minds of his generation is suddenly roused from his few decade long “comma” and decides to add a few notches to his belt before old age gets the best of him. One of the things on his bucket list is adding a final chapter to his collection of poems by chronicling his return from the land of the dead. Unfortunately things are not longer the way he remembered them from before. The progress did not wait for Robert Gu – it bypassed him and left him behind.

His son’s house where he is recuperating has no TV sets, no books, no magazines and no paper and writing utensils. Computers are no longer the clunky beige boxes he remembered, but are now woven into clothing and operated via subtle muscle movements and eye tracking provided by special high-tech contacts. And elderly poet, who was never good with computers is now stranded in the analog realm – half deaf and half blind compared to everyone else. He must adapt to a strange new world he does not fully understand or once again fade into obscurity.

In his former life Gu would be the type of person I would openly dislike – a guy who flaunts his computer illiteracy as if it was a badge of honor. Someone who dislikes technology as a rule, who has no respect for work of IT people despite constantly relying on their expertise to get any work done. The kind of guy who would call the help desk every day, and insist you send someone to his office to power up his virus ridden PC. But this kind of attitude is no longer tolerated in Vinges near future. People like Gu are marginalized and swept under the rug. The old poet is smart enough to realize this.

Much of the book is basically a story of an old technophobe who is forced to finally suck it up and learn to live a modern lifestyle. Gu doesn’t merely become proficient – he gets sucked in, and enamored by the technology and it’s capabilities. He tinkers, he dabbles in programing and revels in new found power. And it is quite interesting to watch this transformation, because it gives you hope for the future of all the stubborn, cranky cyber-muggles we all harbor in our households.

Of course the miraculous resurrection of the erstwhile literary legend does not go unnoticed in the über connected world of tomorrow. Fans and literature students want to interview him, publishers are interested in his new work. Foreign intelligence communities take note that he is living in a house with two high ranked military officers who work with homeland security on securing a local biotech lab that is conducting some top secret experiments. It is only a matter of time before confused and future shocked Gu becomes a pawn in a much bigger game of international espionage.

The espionage hook is fairly interesting but I liked the book mostly because of Vinge’s insights into mobile technology evolution and other insightful guesses. He makes some very interesting observations of current trends, and extrapolates their future implications.

For example, the chief theme is Augmented Reality. Stross touched upon it in Halting State with various live overlays the characters used to navigate streets in foreign cities – stuff not much unlike we already have right now (see Yelp phone app or Google Googles). Vinge however goes all out on this topic. His characters are no longer fully bound to meat-space and experience their world through a myriad of augmented reality filters. Public buildings have AR furnishings and ornaments that make them look more festive. Billboards are replaced by streaming advertising overlays. Schools and office buildings have their room numbers replaced by online tags that can be pulled up or hidden at will.

Whole alternate realities are built and in massive collaborative projects by the local tinkerers. Your local town may have a medieval town layer, cyberpunk version, or even a alien bio-hive layer all available and explorable via your wearable computer. Amusement parks eschew traditional “rides” for fully immersive virtual reality simulations with tactile feedback.

High school students don’t learn programming – they are already expected to know how to program their wearables and how to put together augmented reality multimedia presentations. They have classes in crowd sourcing and data mining techniques instead.

Big data mining corporations are grinding up world’s libraries and museums racing to digitize and lock up these treasure troves of human knowledge behind DRM pay-walls. Their methods are irreversibly destructive, polarizing popular opinion between those who want to save antique books, and those who want to preserve and digitize their context before they deteriorate and are lost forever.

Vinge also describes an amusing, clueless PHD student who gets his wearable completely compromised but does not have enough common sense to clear the intrusion. More than one interested party uses his wide open security to remotely chat with the legendary poet.

It is a relevant and interesting book. Relevant to my interests, but also interesting to read now that mobile technology is taking over the world by storm. Perhaps not yet visionary, but close to it. It is not mind blowing, mind you – but Vinge does make a lot of very good arguments and interesting predictions. With respect to quality, it is about the same level as Halting state, though perhaps smoother and a bit more mature in topic selection. Then again he does reinvent some sort of pokemon like fad that plays a major role in the third act, which is about as silly as Stross’ MMO gameplay descriptions.

Rainbow’s Ed is not nearly as good as A Deepness in the Sky or Marooned in Realtime but at the same time not much worse. It turns out that Vinge can produce very compelling near future prose that does not contain space opera elements and does not mention singularity at all. Pick it up – I recommend it.

Book Cover

In a way, the setting of Deepness, reminds me that of House of Suns. Just like Raynolds, Vinge predicts that planetary civilizations don’t last very long. All over galaxy, empires rise and fall and then rise again rebuilding on the ruins. The only way to escape this merciless turnover of civilization is to take to the stars.

Enter the Queng Ho – a culture of interstellar tradesmen. They spend most of their lives in cold sleep, their fleets traveling for thousands of years between inhabited systems. Wherever they go, they constantly broadcast their culture ahead of them. Their tongue, is the lingua franca of all the advanced space faring civilizations. Their data banks contain close to the total sum of the human knowledge. Wherever they stop, they recruit, resupply and trade. They pick the best a given civilization has to offer – technological advances that did not arise anywhere else, unique local art, exceptional biological specimens found nowhere else, novel philosophical ideas, etc… They are archivists and knowledge seekers as much as they are traders.

Then suddenly they discover a radio broadcast of an alien origin. For the first time in the history of human-kind there is an irrefutable evidence of a technologically advanced sentient life of non-human origins. What’s even more exciting is that their signal originated from a planet so inhospitable, that it is hard to believe that life would evolve there naturally. All evidence points towards a species that colonized the world thousands of years ago, and then saw their civilization crumble and fall as it so often happens. Naturally, a number of wealthy Queng Ho families become interested in this discovery and assemble a fleet to investigate and initiate contact with the aliens.

When Queng Ho expedition arrives on site, they are not alone. A newly created star faring civilization calling itself the “Emergents” has also intercepted the alien signals, and sent their own fleet. The Emergents built up their technology based on their own archeological findings, and the ever-present Queng Ho broadcasts. Their fleet is more than a match for that of the space traders. And they have different plans for the planet-bound aliens. They are planning to invade, subjugate and exploit the newly found species while they dig deep to find the secrets of their space faring ancestors.

The book alternates between two narratives. One focuses on the brewing conflict between the Queng Ho and Emergents in the orbit. The other, focuses on the alien inhabitants of the planet itself. We see these spider-like beings through the eyes of the Queng-Ho and Emergent translators. To make the spiders and their culture more comprehensible to human minds, these specialists have developed various conventions that help them translate the clicks, whirrs and rapid leg moves into human sounding names and concepts. So a prominent spider general is named Victory Smith, and a major university town is dubbed Princeton. This is a rather cool trick that allows Vinge to develop the alien characters, give them very human-like personalities, and put them in a very human-like civilization – and then claim this is all translation bias. In fact, he often intentionally pulls away this veil and has the characters experience a shock when they see a live feed of spiders in their natural environment. A luxurious rug turns out to be revolting, organic like hairy moss. The grand spiral staircase is a winding tunnel. A distinguished night gown is an assembly of tattered rags that partially cover the spiders carapace.

It is a good read. Vinge’s philosophical digressions on the civilization turnover actually seem more mature and thought out than those of Raynolds, and his universe is actually more realistic. Plus, he hints at the idea that the failed dreams of singularity may yet be revived. The spider world holds untold secrets, some of which may hold a key to unlocking dreams that humanity long abandoned. The book is probably not going to blow your mind, but it is definitely worth checking out. If nothing else, it is notable for the little trick Vinge does to “humanize” the utterly alien spider characters. It is quite brilliant actually – write your aliens as if you were writing humans, and then claim the familiarity is due to translation bias.