A Fire Upon the Deep

By: Vernor Vinge

Narrated by: Peter Larkin

Length: 21 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit 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.

Fleeing the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue mission, not entirely composed of humans, must rescue the children-and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.

A Fire upon the Deep, which began the Zones of Thought series, is the winner of the 1993 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

©1992 Vernor Vinge (P)2010 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

• Hugo Award, Best Novel, 1993

Eh it’s ok

The sci fi in this book is minimal, most of it is on a primitive alien planet from the perspective of two kids. Each time it cuts to the characters in space I think oh ya, that’s also happening. Which is disappointing because it’s the most interesting part of the book. If you can suffer through the Joanna and woodcarver parts you might like it.

I just read the publishers summary, it is incredible misleading. It makes it seem as though the focus was the space rescue mission. It’s not.

hard to understand

i think if i had read the story rather than listening to it i might have been able to get it, but i don't think i liked the story enough to read the book. I'll just wait for the inevitable movie.

Perfect epic sci-fi performed impeccably

First and foremost aside from the amazing story, Peter Larkin did an amazing job with this book. The range of characters he was able to deliver a unique personality to was something I don't hear done this perfectly.

The book itself was great. It starts off completely alien in almost every way. He was able to capture and depict post singularity beings, hive minded delepaths, and plant beings in a way that was incredibly weird to listen to, but completely understandable. A lot of parts in the book Vinge spent on crash courses on how these completely inhuman characters think. Some of the concepts warrant some further understanding like the zones of thought itself, but even in the book it is meant to remain a mystery.

Planning finish the series as it's set up with mysteries I'm hoping get touched on, and hoping to hear more of Larkin's voice acting

Sci-fi with medieval parallels

I like world building that makes sense. If you’re going to use new world relevant terms then you have to do us the curtesy of explaining them. The author emphasizes the importance of each zone but fails to define them or their inhabitants at all. So instead of remaining important the zone concept becomes vague and irrelevant to the reader.

A fun exploration of a different perspective

this was very well done and gave me an escape from the stuff going on. it was a very fun observation of things from a different angle. greatly developed characters and something I revisit about every 3 years because it's that cool.

don't believe the negatives

I'm not sure why everybody is so bent out of shape regarding the narrator's choice in vocal performance.

there's only one or 2 characters that's got weird voices and theyre alien.

The narrators performance in no way detracted from my overall experience.

The stories epic the characters are fleshed out pretty well it's thought-provoking with regards to how civilizations can be set up.

great book

A classic big idea SF novel

This was an influential novel at the time it came out for the ideas it advanced and the huge contours on which it painted its story. For much of it, the focus is split between the galactic view of a Blight that threatened enormous stretches of space reaching down from the Transcend and the one planet where a family fleeing the Blight landed on a planet of non-spacefaring sophonts, soon reduced to only two children unaware of the secret their cargo vessel was carrying. In the middle section of the novel there is a slow motion voyage to bring the two plotlines together and at the end an action section to show how both groups manage to solve the desperate situations in which they were enmeshed. This is a book with big ambitions which influenced other authors to produced their own big concept books.

I enjoyed the worldbuilding in the space opera sections, but found the planet-based portions less compelling. The level of emotional investment I had with the characters was only just enough to pull me through the whole book, however, and I'm afraid that the big climax was for me marred by plot and character elements I disliked. The resolution at the very end, with the surviving High Beyond characters stranded on the planet, is something hard for me to accept as having solved all their issues in a satisfying way, despite the author's best efforts to tell me otherwise. He mentions the enormous side effects of the way the magical technological solution reshaped the nature of a large section of the galaxy and I wondered whether the probably suffering of any advanced inhabitants of those places was being soft-pedaled. So while I admire the profusion of new ideas found here, these cracks in the storytelling bothered me enough to keep from giving it a top rating.

I listened to the interesting sections at 1.5X speed in my audiobook and the other sections at 2X. I am glad I made it to the end but I do not plan to read the other books in the series.

Give it twenty minutes

Vernor stories are a challenge, not because they lack, but because they demand much from their audience. He doesn’t explain or describe, he immerses and expects that you’ll begin to understand what alien characters take for granted. The narrator came off initially somewhat harsh, but their masterfully consistent portrayal helped me lock in and really enjoy the story. A+

Too Long for Too Easy an Ending

It was okay. The aliens and concepts were interesting. How the Tines worked and how the zones of thought existed sounded cool, but it read like an overwrought epic fantasy between two warring fantasy creature factions. The cartoony narrator voice and the long repeated names didn’t help.

The ending was so lackluster. Basically the deus ex machine arrived and fixed the mcguffin so automatically that it made the rest of the development seem pointless.

Truly creative

It is rare that a book with such deep, unique creativity is still easily accessible and enjoyable to listen to. The structure of the novel is traditional but characters and approach to themes are novel even for the sci-fi genre. The narrator has a pleasing timbre but lacks a variation for child and female voices. All in this is a great value of a listen.