A Deepness in the Sky

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
A Deepness in the Sky  

The first edition cover
Author Vernor Vinge
Cover artist Bob Eggleton
Country United States of America
Language English
Series Zones of Thought universe
Genre(s) Hard science fiction
Publisher Tor Books
Publication date March 1999
Media type print (hardback, paperback)
Pages 606 (Hardback), 775 (Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 0-312-85683-0 (Hardback 1st edition), ISBN 0-8125-3635-5 (Paperback)
Followed by A Fire Upon the Deep

A Deepness in the Sky is a science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge. Published in 1999, the novel is a loose prequel (set twenty thousand years earlier) to his earlier novel A Fire Upon the Deep (1992). The title is coined by one of the main characters in a debate, in a reference to the hibernating habits of his species and to the vastness of space.

Contents

[edit] Plot introduction

The book deals with the discovery of an intelligent alien species on a planet orbiting the bizarre, appropriately named OnOff star, which spends 215 of every 250 years almost completely dormant, releasing almost no energy. During this period, the planet freezes and its fauna goes into hibernation.

The planet's inhabitants, named "Spiders" by the humans for their resemblance to arachnids, have reached a stage of technological development very similar to that of Earth's humans in the early 20th century. Two human expeditions set out to trade/exploit the situation: the Qeng Ho traders (pronounced [Cheng Ho], named after Zheng He and his expeditions) who have been around for millennia; and the Emergents of the Emergency with an autocratic culture that literally enslaves selected human minds, a civilization which has only recently re-emerged from a Dark Age.

[edit] Plot summary

The Qeng Ho arrive at the On/Off star shortly before the Emergent fleet, a few years before the sun turns on, at which point the Spider civilization will "wake up" and continue its climb into a technological civilization. A reception held by the Emergents doubles as a vector to infect the Qeng Ho with a timed "mindrot" virus. The Emergents time an ambush to take advantage of the onset of symptoms.

During these events, a concurrent history of the Spider civilisation is developed mainly through the piqarescque, and then increasingly political and technocratic experiences of a small group of liberal-minded and progressive Spiders. Their struggles against ignorance, and soon-to-become irrelevant traditions, are coloured with oddly human-like descriptions and nomenclature, which prefigures some major plot revelations towards the end of the story.

Far above, after a close fight the Emergents subjugate the Qeng Ho, but the mutual losses to the now combined human community forces them to take the so called "Lurker strategy", in which they monitor and aid the Spiders' technological development, waiting until they build up the massive infrastructure and technological base that the visitors need in order to repair their vessels.

The mindrot virus originally manifested itself on the Emergents' home world as a devastating plague, but they subsequently mastered it and learned to use it both as a weapon and as a tool for mental domination. Emergent culture uses mindrot primarily in the form of a variant which technicians can manipulate in order to release neurotoxins to specific parts of the brain. An active MRI-type device triggers changes through dia- and paramagnetic biological molecules. By manipulating the brain in this way, Emergent managers induce a state they call Focus, in which Focused persons become completely obsessed with a single idea or specialty, essentially turning them into brilliant appliances. Many Qeng Ho become Focused against their will, and the Emergents retain the rest of the population under mass surveillance, with only a portion of the crew awake and not in suspended animation. The Qeng Ho trading culture gradually starts to dilute this totalitarian regime, by demonstrating to the Emergents certain benefits of tolerated and restricted free trade; the two human cultures merge to some extent over the decades of forced co-operation.

It's revealed that the founder of the Qeng Ho trading culture - Pham Nuwen - is actually living under an assumed identiy aboard the fleet as 'Pham Trinli'. He subverts the Emergents' own oppresive security systems through a series of high-risk ruses and his chameleon-like ability to adopt the persona of an inept and bumbling fleet elder. During his plotting he begins to admire the Emergent's Focus technology, and begins to evaluate its usage in his own plans for the future of the fleet.

The plan to wrest fleet control from the Emergents, however, requires the co-operation of a much younger Qeng Ho who - due to attrition - has become the Qeng Ho 'Fleet Manager'/ His unique position as liaison officer between Qeng Ho and Emergents is a source of great despair to him, and he seizes upon Pham Nuwen's offer of cabal as a path to redemption as well as revenge against the Emergents. However, due to personal reasons, his own understanding of his Pham's ambitions on the Focus technology draw to an inevitable confrontation between them on the issue of future use of Focus by the Qeng Ho.

Coming to an understanding, the two seize upon the historic node when the Emergents attempt to engender a nuclear war on the Spider home-world, in order to seize power. By subverting the Emergents management systems, and relying on luck and human resilience, the ruling class of the Emergents are defeated.

The combined Emergent / Qeng Ho fleet now negotiate with the Spider civilisation as a trading partner. Pham announces his plans to free all of the Focused in the entire Emergent civilization, and, if surviving that, to go to the center of the galaxy to find the source of OnOff star and the strange technology remnants that have clearly travelled with it. The story of that quest is briefly told as part of the backstory in A Fire Upon the Deep. The later novel also shows that Pham had misidentified the center of the galaxy as the likely source of the artifacts, as the outer portions of the galaxy were the ones with greater technological sophistication.

[edit] Themes and technology

The book discusses some of the problems of trying to maintain an interstellar trading culture without access to superluminal travel or to superluminal communication. Time-measurement details provide an interesting concept in the book: the Qeng Ho measure time primarily in terms of seconds, since the notion of days, months, and years has no usefulness between various star systems. The timekeeping system, uses terms such as kiloseconds and megaseconds. An interesting feature of the Qeng Ho's computer, and hence, timekeeping, systems is the "programmer archaeologists"[1]: the Qeng Ho are packrats of computer programs and systems, retaining them over millennia, even as far back to the era of Unix programs (as implied by one passage mentioning that the fundamental time-keeping system is the Unix epoch, retained for backwards compatibility). This massive accumulation of data implies that almost any useful program one could want already exists in the Qeng Ho fleet library - hence the need for computer archaeologists to dig up needed programs, work around their peculiarities and bugs, and assemble them into useful constructs.

Only one concrete connection links A Deepness in the Sky with A Fire Upon the Deep: the character of Pham Nuwen, the "Programmer-at-Arms", who appears in both books. Hints occur about the "zones of thought" mentioned in the earlier book; the story takes place in the Slow Zone, though Vinge does not explain the connections, and the characters in the story remain unaware of the zones' existence. The sun's inexplicably strange behavior, the unusual planetary system (with only a solitary planet and several asteroid-sized diamonds), and the discovery of "cavorite mines" on the planet indicate the system originated in the Transcend, though it is currently moving outward from the Unthinking Depths. Vinge's characters speculate that the Spiders descend from an ancient star-faring civilization, and that the antigravity material and other strange artifacts have connections with that civilization. For readers of A Fire Upon the Deep, however, an alternate explanation seems more likely: the OnOff star is a probe sent by some Power to explore the Slow Zone and Unthinking Depths. In Fire when the Countermeasure activates, it draws power from the Tines' sun, which dims temporarily; and in the short story "The Blabber" an ansible used in the Slow Zone causes a local star to go out for a short period, even though it should not be able to work at all. This suggests (though Vinge never makes this explicit) that something in the OnOff system (perhaps the massive diamonds) is Transcendent technology that can operate in the Slow Zone when supplied with massive power.

[edit] Localizers

With this work, Vinge introduces "localizers" to his set of science-fiction concepts. Localizers are tiny devices which can contain a simple processor, sensors, and short-range communications. Vinge explores how intelligent control can use mesh networking of these devices in ways quite different from those of traditional computer networks. (See also: smartdust.)

[edit] Awards and nominations

These awards make A Deepness in the Sky one of the most honored science fiction novels in recent history.

[edit] Release details

  • 1999, United States of America, Tor Books, ISBN 0-312-85683-0, Pub date March 1999, Hardback
  • 2000, United States of America, Tor Books, ISBN 0-8125-3635-5, Pub date January 2000, Paperback

[edit] Translations

[edit] External links

Preceded by
To Say Nothing of the Dog
by Connie Willis		 Hugo Award for Best Novel
2000		 Succeeded by
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
by J. K. Rowling
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky"
Personal tools