A Fire Upon the Deep: 1 (Zones of Thought)

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Two Aliases, One Character: A justifiably partial example occurs in The Children of the Sky. What's left of Steel is disguised as Screwfloss using fake dyed pelt-markings, but when one of his members is killed, he loses some cognitive capacity, which causes him to be lax in keeping the disguise maintained. Long Game: At the end of A Fire Upon the Deep, the Blight's fleet has been trapped lightyears away from Tines World, but it's still coming. In The Children of the Sky, Ravna is frantically trying to develop the technology that will allow them to defend themselves or at least escape, but she knows that the humans need to dedicate their resources to certain types of technology, to the exclusion of more immediate concerns like anti-aging and technology that will keep them comfortable. Unfortunately, all of the other humans were children in an extremely comfortable society, so they resent this. Ravna's single-minded focus on the Long Game and her mistaken belief that everyone else understands this is what allows Nevil Storherte to stage a political coup, portraying her as unreasonably obsessed with the Blight and removing her from power. The Slow Path: In A Deepness in the Sky, Thomas Nau spends no time in hibernation, so he ages faster than everyone else. Children of the Sky isn't quite as dark as its prequels, but still makes it clear that its characters still have some very dangerous foes and obstacles to face in the near future; there are also some bittersweet partings.

Alternative Calendar: In A Deepness in the Sky, interstellar traders have done away with not just years and months, but also with days, hours and minutes. All timespans are measured in (appropriate powers-of-thousands of) seconds, with dates simply being the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch (with some unspecified but explicitly mentioned relativistic frame corrections) — though in-universe it is most commonly thought that the zero-second was at the first moon landing. Settled planets all have their own calendars. One way the traders know they have stayed too long is when they start using the locals' calendar. Danger in the Galactic Core: The laws of physics vary based on distance from the center of the galaxy, and can be divided into Zones of Thought due to the fact that the farther out you go, the more technology is possible. The innermost Zone—the galactic core—is known as the Unthinking Depths, because the laws of physics there are so restrictive that conscious thought isn't even possible—upon entering the Depths, most sentient life forms would simply die immediately due to their brains shutting down. In A Deepness in the Sky it's the collision and canceling out of Pham Newen's and Sherkaner's Batman Gambits, which results in the destruction of Sherkaner's home, and ultimately (?) Sherkaner himself. Vinge makes this complicated novel work by starting with the Blight, the threat at first to a lab full of human scientists at the edge of the Transcend, and then to the whole galaxy. We start close up and small with a freighter full of children escaping, and the threat of the Blight is always relentlessly there, throughout the rest of the book. Whenever a lesser writer would have a man come through the door with a gun, Vinge has the Blight destroy something big—or in one case, some aliens reacting to the Blight destroy something big. The universe is very complicated, and there are braided stories ratcheting along, but the shape of the story is very simple—the swelling threat of the Blight, the treasure at the bottom of the Beyond, the chase and pursuit.The Blight expands, taking over races and "rewriting" their people to become its agents, murdering several other Powers, and seizing other archives in the Beyond, looking for what was taken. It finally realizes where the danger truly lies and sends a hastily assembled fleet in pursuit of the Out of Band II. Space Opera seems to be like Soap Opera, watch on Monday and Friday, skip through the week cause nothing new is going to happen. There are too many good books out there for me to beating myself in the head waiting on something to happen that I care about. Each "soul" can survive and evolve by adding members to replace those who die, potentially for hundreds of years, as Woodcarver does. The novel is set in various locations in the Milky Way. The galaxy is divided into four concentric volumes called the "Zones of Thought"; it is not clear to the novel's characters whether this is a natural phenomenon or an artificially produced one, but it seems to roughly correspond with galactic-scale stellar density and a Beyond region is mentioned in the Sculptor Galaxy as well. [4] The Zones reflect fundamental differences in basic physical laws, and one of the main consequences is their effect on intelligence, both biological and artificial. Artificial intelligence and automation is most directly affected, in that advanced hardware and software from the Beyond or the Transcend will work less and less well as a ship "descends" towards the Unthinking Depths. But even biological intelligence is affected to a lesser degree. The four zones are spoken of in terms of "low" to "high" as follows:

Brain/Computer Interface: Such interfaces are noted in passing in A Fire Upon The Deep. They don't work very well below the High Beyond, but their users still don't like taking them off. How long must a fish study to understand human motivation? It's not a good analogy, but it's the only safe one; we are like dumb animals to the Powers of the Transcend. Think of all the different things people do to animals— ingenious, sadistic, charitable, genocidal—each has a million elaborations in the Transcend. The Zones are a natural protection; without them, human-equivalent intelligence would probably not exist." She waved at the misty star swarms. "The Beyond and below are like a deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We're so far down that the beings on the surface—superior though they are—can't effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper levels with poisons we don't even understand. But the abyss remains a relatively safe place." She paused. There was more to the analogy. "And just as with an ocean, there is a constant drift of flotsam from the top. There are things that can only be made at the Top, that need close-to-sentient factories—but which can still work down here. Blueshell mentioned some of those when he was talking to you: the agrav fabrics, the sapient devices. Such things are the greatest physical wealth of the Beyond, since we can't make them. And getting them is a deadly risky endeavor." Plot [ edit ] The Hive Mind nature of the Tines means that an individual can incorporate new members as old ones die off, maintaining a continuous consciousness for many times the lifespan of an individual. Although it's not given how long a member would live, Woodcarver is over 600 years old and has seen glaciers advance and retreat over his/her lifetime. It eventually extracts a terrible price, though, as the only way to maintain one's identity after enough years is inbreeding within one's own members. Vinge first used the concepts of "Zones of Thought" in a 1988 novella The Blabber, which occurs after Fire. Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky (1999) is a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep set 20,000 years earlier and featuring Pham Nuwen. Vinge's The Children of the Sky, "a near-term sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep ", set ten years later, was released in October 2011. [9]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. The outermost layer, containing the galactic halo, is the Transcend, within which incomprehensible, superintelligent beings dwell. When a "Beyonder" civilization reaches the point of technological singularity, it is said to "Transcend", becoming a "Power". Such Powers always seem to relocate to the Transcend, seemingly necessarily, where they become engaged in affairs which remain entirely mysterious to those that remain in the Beyond. The Blabber is set at at least millennia later, on a human-colonized planet near the top of the Slow Zone. A young man has grown up with a very strange pet who is suddenly an object of intense interest when a shipful of Beyonder sightseers arrive. It was out of print for a long time but is now available in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001).