Vernor Vinge has a fun time imagining it though, trying to divine what the interaction of sentient societies would look like when spread across such vast distances. I can't comprehend infinity, but I can't comprehend that either. These incomprehensibly massive objects are just pinpricks in the overall vastness of space. My computer's calculator started showing me letters when I tried to figure out how many Earths would fit inside VY Canis Majoris. How big is that? About 1.7 trillion times larger than the Earth. How about VY Canis Majoris? It's what's called a hypergiant star. Even Rebecca Black probably sold a million downloads of that terrible days of the week song for toddlers. Kind of makes you feel insignificant, right? But a million, that's not that many.

Like, you have probably heard before that something like one million Earths would fit inside the sun. Text of message: Space is really, really, really big. Key phrases: Mind-Bending Galactic Scope, Smooth World-Building, Bogs Down in the Middle, Characters are kind of flat, Telepathic puppy aliens Subject: Books to talk about with my wife when she can't fall asleepĭate: 4.5 days before the Fall of BookSwap Language path: Stream of Consciousness Babble→Poorly Considered Argument→LOLcats→Goodreads In-jokes→Only Funny to Me→Irony→English A rescue mission, not entirely composed of humans, must rescue the children-and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization. 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.įleeing 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. 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. 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.

A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge