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.

Pacing! Contrivances!

Before I actually start talking about the book, I'm going to take this moment to state that I actually mostly liked this book. I enjoyed it more than Cosmonaut Keep. But it's by no means a favorite, and I don't feel inspired to read the rest of the books in this particular arc. I guess I 70% liked it. Not that it gets a score of 70%, but I 70% liked it. I put this preface here because most of what follows will be complaints.

Pace and contrivances. These are the two biggest issues with this book.

The first; contrivances. I realize that any thing that is not a factual retelling of a real event will be totally contrived, not in a negative connotation, but in a literal connotation whereby I mean to create a desired outcome through a scheme or planning. So, I was talking to my wife about why I didn't like Harry Potter, and ultimately it comes down to the number of contrivances. A staggering amount. In order for Z to happen, A through Y must happen, and to top it off, we discover C through H, M through R, and T through W through horrible exposition. As I said before, I realize that any kind of story is at base level, contrived, but with the best books, there's a particular balance where the contrivances feel natural. And these Deepness in the Sky and Harry Potter are not that.

In fact, reading Deepness at times felt like I was back in art school, and that one kid wouldn't shut up about his undercover super spy hoagie wizard anthropomorphic fairy kitten dog samurai epic. I kind of just go, “oh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah. I see. Uh huh. Uh huh.” That is: I don't feel engaged. Everything feels so planned and plotted that it doesn't really feel like there's any room for me to speculate or even just simply be curious. Or, to use another metaphor, it would be like listening someone say something like, “The radio is indeed a marvel and a mystery!” and then listen to them then follow up that statement with an excruciating explanation of how the stereo really works. And anticipating that explanation. I can't wonder because I know it's about to be sapped from me.

And then pacing. I'm not entirely certain what to say on this, other than it wasn't quick. Even the parts I found interesting (the history of Pham Nuwen) got stale and old after 20 pages of listening to Pham argue the practicalities of an empire. I get it: he wants an empire. Next chapter please. And the spiders! I hope they actually live in slow motion, because otherwise there's no real reason for their chapters to just seem like endless chasms across which I must bravely leap.

And let me discuss the spiders really quick. I understand that there is a number of us who actually enjoyed those chapters, even if those numbers may only number in the “couple” or the “few,” but honestly, they were completely unnecessary. All the information you learn in the spider chapters, you completely relearn in all the space chapters. Literally. I think not only was my time wasted by reading those particular chapters, but space was wasted. I would often skip entire spider chapters, and I never once felt like I needed to go back and reread what I skipped because I was still told everything.

Their civilization in general wasn't really spider like either. It felt like his intentions were confused: try to humanize something completely inhuman. Which is probably a worthwhile goal in literature, but when you pretty much just write this equation: spider X human + 1950/human = 1950 spiders, you've not exactly gone through many pains to make the alien civilization seem all that alien. Or human. It was an operation that, to me, failed on both fronts. And the names were stupid too. But that's really moot.

Back to the pacing: it's been my experience that as something moves closer to the end, it's pace quickens. Your interest is piqued, more things are happening, a multiplier effect happens. In this book, I definitely felt the first two, but for some reason, it still felt like it did when I knew barely anything about the characters or the events. It kind of felt like how they keep prolonging Battlestar Galactica by putting a year long commercial break smack dab in the middle of season 4.

Spiders humanized, humans de-humanized

Through reading A Deepness in the Sky, a single thought kept crossing my mind..."the spiders seem to be more human and deeply characterized than 90% of the actual humans in this book". That might just be a product of the author introducing a device which strips humans of their natural personalities...or of the fact that the author deliberately chose to completely remove most emotions from most of the humans. Sure, you get good characters like Pham Nuwen, or the occasion emotional outburst from Ezr...but on the whole, i felt that the human side of the book was very inhuman, and fell into the analytical trappings that bind most science fiction. In my experience this seems to happen often in this type of science fiction...the author gets so hung up in the science, and the overly drawn out plot, that he often forgets that what makes a story great are the characters that drive it.
On the converse, you have Sherkaner Underhill, a brilliant mad scientist far ahead of his time. I felt that he was the best character in the book, simply because he had a human aspect that nobody else had; the desire to explore. everbody else had these paper thin motives...i want to rule everything...i want to get my 45 year old girlfriend back...i want Thomas to love me because apparently i am a 30 year old with a 13 year olds emotions...but not Sherkaner, he had the completly human desire to explore the possibilities that his imagination had thought up. And one of those possibilities was complete social reform on a deep level. It was if he was Einstein, Oppenheimer, Columbus and Joan of Arc all rolled into a spider...who didnt actually know any real science. He even had an evil religious antagonist to bring him down.

all in all i found the book interesting, but the length was not needed...at all. it was well written (unlike this blog), but the story just didnt want to get to the story till about 200 pages from the end. i give it possibly a B+...A-?