A Deepness in the Sky

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge is a loose prequel to his earlier novel A Fire Upon the Deep. It features the previously-introduced character Pham Nuwen when he was still living his actual life. He's far from being the sole viewpoint in the story, though. After the prologue he's barely even mentioned until he eventually floats into the spotlight.

The zones of thought setting is not utilized, barely even as a vague backdrop: the civilizations featured in the novel are blissfully unaware they're living in the Slow Zone. Based on having read two of his novels now, it seems that in Vinge's stories, the initially presented detail of interest doesn't get explored or explained. It's pretty odd science fiction in that way. In Deepness, that detail is a star dubbed OnOff.

OnOff spends most of its 250-year cycle dormant and then turns on -- predictable to a second. Why that is? Who knows but sentient life has been detected on a planet orbiting the star. The human civilization mentioned in Fire, Qeng Ho, decides to send in an expedition. They're traders, and being the first contact is a prime opportunity for profit.

The humans call the sentient species Spiders for their resemblance to arachnids. The latter spend the star's dormant years hibernating in the planet's caves, emerging after the violent restarts of OnOff to continue their advancement, a bit like Liu Cixin's Trisolaran civilization did after their planet got into a tolerable position in their three-body problem.

The Qeng Ho fleet arrives few years before the sun is about to flip on. They're not the only party there, however: another human civilization called Emergents have also sent an expedition. Initially they negotiate an agreement of co-operation but the situation spirals into a conflict that results in the parties having to lurk in Arachne's orbit in an extreme unease, waiting for the Spiders to reach space age. Repairing huge interstellar spacecraft can't be done without a ready infrastructure for it.

I already forgot the exact reason why the humans wanted to stay hidden until then but it was something logical. Maybe too early a contact would have destabilized the Spiders' civilization in some way. Or maybe it would have made them too reliant on the humans. But whatever it was, I know it made sense.

Few Spiders are also viewpoints in the story. They get to have kind of, not very spider-like names, and the reason for that gets an explanation much later into the novel. Until that you just have to hold on to your eyebrows that threaten to rise at stuff like a Spider being called Sherkaner Underhill. The whole sentient spider species thing made me wonder if Adrian Tchaikovsky had perhaps read the book some time before writing Children of Time.

When the novel got exploring Pham Nuwen's memories, I wondered if Alastair Reynolds too had been inspired by Deepness when writing his House of Suns. The Qeng Ho civilization, as it turned out, is also based on familial lines, houses (though not clones). Vinge presented an idea on how to have a lasting interstellar society that doesn't have access to superluminal means of communication nor travel.

That was probably the most interesting part of A Deepness in the Sky. It was quite the thriller to read but that's not the primary reason I enjoy science fiction.

Hannu Tervaharju was once again the Finnish translator. The vast majority of the translation was without fault but once again he hadn't found a good expression for a word and had left it in English. This time it was 'hardware'.