Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Averted with distance, and the aversion is one of the biggest reasons why civilizations in the Beyond avoid going anywhere near the Slow Zone. The Spiders in A Deepness in the Sky have a larger visible spectrum of light than humans, referring to infrared frequencies as "far-red" and ultraviolet as "far-blue". Human display technologies, designed only to display what we can see, look like simple and underdeveloped technology to them, despite our otherwise advanced capabilities. Some Spider dwellings also appear dark to us, due to being lit with light outside our visible spectrum. On one occasion, Spiders are also shown to be able to "hear" vibrations in the ground through their feet.

The Children of the Sky, a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, came out in October 2011. It primarily follows Ravna, one of the main protagonists of Fire, as she attempts to prepare Tines World for the arrival of the Blight despite opposition from some of those who were in coldsleep during the events of the first book, and who are beginning to doubt her account of the events. It is clearly the start of a new series, as it ends in a cliff-hanger with multiple arcs truncated. Ritser Brughel's final fate in A Deepness in the Sky. At the end he's the only human at the disposal of the Spiders, so they're going to keep him alive as long as possible to run tests on him. And he's arachnophobic.The Slow Path: In A Deepness in the Sky, Thomas Nau spends no time in hibernation, so he ages faster than everyone else. Gambit Pileup: In A Deepness in the Sky, Sherkaner Underhill and Pham Nuwen accidentally steamroll each other with their simultaneous Batman Gambits, giving Nau an opening to execute his own plan and nearly kill them all. He fails, but at the possible cost of Sherkaner and his wife's life, as well as many of his friends and staffers. Expy: Based on the Tines' World's level of technological development in A Fire Upon the Deep, Woodcarver is essentially based on Queen Elizabeth I, and Pilgrim is an explorer similar to Walter Raleigh or Francis Drake. Flenser and Steel occupy a position in history analogous to Oliver Cromwell, but they're more explicitly intended to parallel Hitler and Stalin. ("Stalin" literally means "Steel") I have never taken the time to write a review before this one. I know we all have different tastes and many have reviewed this book in a positive light (that is why I bought this in the first place). This is the first audio book where my mind would wander. My own thoughts about what to eat for dinner or which route to take home from work were more engaging than the story. Very disappointing. I have about 9 hours left and just can't finish it.

Last-Minute Hookup: A Deepness in the Sky has two mild examples. There is some foreshadowing of the relationships involved, but it's still pretty sudden. Giant Spider: A Deepness in the Sky features a whole race of them, and they think humans are absolutely adorable. Our big, googly eyes remind them of their own children. Deceptive Disciple: Flenser was Woodcarver's offspring/creation and most brilliant disciple, until the nature of his experiments was revealed. Some characters including Flenser!Tyrathect even call out Woodcarver for creating such a monster and then just letting him go. Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. Sealed Evil in a Can: In A Fire Upon the Deep, the Blight/Straumli Perversion is a program inside a multi-billion year old archive, let loose by unwitting archaeologists.Space Nomads: In A Deepness in the Sky, the Qeng Ho traders are a loose collective of interstellar traders that travel via slower-than-light ramscoop-powered sleeper starships. The Qeng Ho hold that if they start to use the local time system (days/months/years) instead of their UNIX-time based system (seconds, kiloseconds megaseconds, etc), they've been in the system for too long. In Children of the Sky, "They're Rider larvae, Jef," revealing Tycoon's "cuttlefish" as Skroderider larvae. Very shortly thereafter, she realizes that Greenstalk is among the adult Skroderiders in the colony, making it a double Wham Line. Oddly, this changes the plot not at all, save for one key thing: keeping Ravna and Jef out of Vendacious' claws. The Madness Place: In A Deepness in the Sky, the Focus biovirus traps people in this as a permanent condition, so they can be used as brilliant but unquestioning drones for the Emergent dictatorship.

Faux Affably Evil: Master villains can be distinguished by ability to be charming and polite up to the moment the Cold-Blooded Torture starts, and maybe even after, while inferior underlings and pretenders have trouble hiding their true nature. Cute Is Evil: A Fire Upon the Deep has the Aprahanti species. They are humanoid with soft features, big round eyes, butterfly wings, soft downy fur, and cute sing-song voices. They are also militaristic fascists who make their first appearance pushing around a shopkeeper and later take a flimsy pretext to attempt genocide on humanity. Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence.Occasionally the [human characters] say things that reveal what their societies are like. … The example I really wanted to mention of that is when they’re at this place called Harmonious Repose, and they’re negotiating with aliens to fix their ship, and the Skroderiders are haggling with the aliens, and Ravna has never seen haggling before because she’s only ever been in societies where everyone always has perfect information about what everything is worth, and so there’s never any negotiating. “We both know this is worth this, and so this is what the price is going to be.” And I thought that was a really interesting idea. In A Fire Upon the Deep, there is a race of beautiful butterfly-people with huge shining eyes. They're genocidal fascists. Morality Pet: There were hints in A Fire Upon the Deep that Flenser-Tyrathect develops parental feelings towards Amdiranifani by the end, the sequel confirms it. Vernor Steffen Vinge is a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels A Fire Upon The Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999) and Rainbows End (2006), his Hugo Award-winning novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004), as well as for his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.