A Deepness in the Sky

This book was long, and while I liked it more that Cosmonaut Keep, I still felt disastified by it by the end. Many of the concepts were fantastic, but like Cosmonaut Keep, the characters and story were so so. A shining light in this brown sea of sameness was Pham Nuwen. Sure he may be the quintessential badass "I've seen more than you can possibly imagine, kid" character, but at least he and his motives were complex and interesting. The idea that shone through with him is
the using of selective radio transmissions to effectcultures to advance, but still depend on you while you slowly glide across space in cold sleep was just sheer brilliance. However, and idea that started off interesting and debased into Deus-Ex Machina was the localizers, which started off and data collectors and manipulators and became an omnipresent control device for Pham.

Overall, Deepness was more flawed than polished, and while I don't regret reading it, I certainly would not read it again.

Deepness in the Sky

I really don't have a whole lot to say about this book because it is one of those books where it was o.k. to read it once, but once was enough. I was annoyed by how the spiders were almost exactly like humans in every way. It is my opinion that if you are going to use a species with no human characteristics they should not behave like humans. The book also seemed too long for the amount of complexity and details it contained by about 400 pages, maybe more. A book as long as this one should be like "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton which is even longer (I haven't read the sequel to that yet). I probably won't read anything else by Vernor Vinge, at least not until I run out of books that I want to read, by authors I like better.

Deepness in the Sky- Far out...

First of all, let me just point out that I didn't fully appreciate how space opera-y this book was until I started reading the Neuromancer book. Already I can see that space opera and cyber punk are massively different. In Deepness in the Sky, the story is soaked in drama, while this new book is so lush with details I wouldn't be able to pick drama out of it if the story was a remake of Romeo and Juliet.
Frankly I liked this book a bit; at least in comparison to Cosmonaut Keep anyway. In truth much of the drama that kept occuring with the humans got in the way of my real interest in the book- the Spiders. I mean different worlds, space flight, Focus; it all got pretty boring in comparison to the aliens and all of their different yet similar problems. The reason I like this book so much was because of the completely different way of life the Spiders lead.
With the OnOff star always shaking things up, they had to hibernate for decades at a time, only to wake up to different extremes of weather. I loved the effects on the Spider society and traditions this odd sun caused. Like how the babies had to be born at the start of the new sun and how some were expected to be killed off during the next Dark. And the war- God I loved the war. Especially how in depth the author went as to how the Spiders fought each other.
Drilling toward each other, trying to stay awake longer than the enemy, and eventually walking in the oh-so-scary Dark; gotta love it.
In the class dicussion I heard some arguments or complaints or what-have-you concerning the author's inventiveness and the number of similarities between the Spider technologies and our own. Things such as Spider airplanes, cars, and nuclear power were all seen as unoriginal concepts. Now while it is understandable how some might perceive the author as lazy, one really has to ask, what should the aliens be using? I mean is it really that unbelievable that at some point an alien race would invent something like a car to make travel easier? The Spiders didn't have wings (although apparently the cats did), how else were they going to fly through the air? I know it is hard to accept such similarities, but how can one man really speculate anything so incredibly alien that it entirely unlike what mankind has already invented? Let's see you do it... I rest my case.
Well, all in all, I rather liked this book, although it may just be because it was better than that laughable read Cosmonaut Keep. Regardless, I have managed to pull some things from Deepness in the Sky that I may be able to apply to my own writing in the future. My goal in this class is to expand my reading interests as well as hone some sci-fi writing skills. Though my journy is still long from being over, I feel that after this read, I am that much closer to realizing a truly unique style of writing.

book is over yay

the one thing this book truly lacked over all else is description. it did not explain what any of the human characters looked at all and barely explained what the spiders in general looked like.
also it was to long for what it was. other than that it was a good book albeit confusing.

It's finally over, and what a long strange trip it's been.

You know what the length and pacing of this book reminded me of? Hours of level grinding in an old-school RPG to beat a boss that totally trashed me the first time I tried him, only to discover there's a wicked simple and quick strategy to win without power-levelling. This book was dragged out for almost no reason. Seriously, it's good to plan out a story a bit, maybe storyboard it a little, but this was too much. My advice to Vinge would be to flesh out the characters deeply before even starting the story, and then plug them into a setting and writing the story based on how the characters interact, it's that simple.
The humans were shallowly made, but the spiders, while more deeply developed, were just odd. Star Trek has shown us that we can make aliens easily be slapping weird clothes and make-up on a human and having them not get along with the "real" humans and somehow they got away with that, but the spiders were too close to being like humans to be believable despite what Star Trek did.
Now the story is over, and the ending was reasonably satisfying. Mostly it was because of what happened to the Emergents and how I love to see the bad guys suffer, but also because of the nice hook up between two important Qeng Ho, who shall remain nameless to avoid spoilers. It didn't really surprise me that they ended up that way, after all is it not normal for a teenage girl to endlessly pester the older guy that she has a crush on? Oops, said too much, must go now.