A Deepness In The Sky

http://hn-books.com/Books/A-Deepness-In-The-Sky.htm

by DanielBMarkham • 15 years ago

91 85 15 years ago

ekidd• 15 years ago

There's a great scene where young Pham, a kid from a medieval world, learns to maintain a 5000-year-old legacy code base on a starship:

http://books.google.com/books?id=GUUvxumMf6kC&lpg=PA226&...

Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. "The word for all this is 'mature programming environment.' Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here." She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. "We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don't have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I've been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need."

"Almost precisely." Bret was grinning again. "With some minor revisions."

pavel_lishin3• 15 years ago

I love the terms "programmer-at-arms" and "programmer archeologist." I wish more people read this book, so I could use the term and not have people look at me with a blank look in their eyes.

stcredzero2• 15 years ago

The above excerpt is actually an accurate description of what I do at my day job! ("program archeology") My coworker, who's been working on and off with this code base for over 12 years, never fails to point out if any of my ideas was already implemented once before. So far, everything I've suggested since starting this job 3 months ago has already been done in the past.

jsnell• 15 years ago

My job title at a previous job was Software Archaeologist, inspired by ADitS. Though my boss then went on to explain it to a customer more as an Indiana Jones of programmers than as someone working on old and crufty systems.

andrewgodwin• 15 years ago

My favourite part of the program archaeology is when he digs right down to the core and discovers the computers are still keeping time in seconds since the time when man landed on the moon (and then discovers it's really a time a bit more than five months afterwards).

I never did think of UNIX time as tied to the moon landings that closely, but it's a nice fact. It was still odd seeing small negative timestamps when we were working on spacelog.org, though...

powertower• 15 years ago

I started getting excited but then quickly realized that if I had to read a sci-fi novel about coding (or maintaining a codebase) I would throw up.

I spend my days coding.

lukev• 15 years ago

It's not what the book is about, just a few interesting/realistic scenes. The book itself is epic and brilliant and spans almost every genre.

vietor• 15 years ago

Fortunately, not everybody hates their job.

My worry about coding/hacking scenes in books is that authors usually do something dumb. That makes it all the more rewarding when they sidestep it with something amusing, as in the given example.

Having read 'A Deepness in the Sky', it is good, interesting, and not about coding. You can probably read it safely without having flashbacks to your life.

jerf3• 15 years ago

The first time I read this, the middle of the book tried my patience and I wanted it to just get to the conclusion; I started skimming a bit more until I got to the end.

The second time I read the book, I had planned on just skimming the middle again, but this time without the drive to know the resolution (since I remembered it from last time), I discovered that the middle of the book is really the best part. It's very detailed and well-thought-out, and the second time I didn't even have a problem with the pacing. It's just a very big book, in a good way.

The only other book I know of that I have had this reaction to was the Lord of the Rings series. The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time, but subsequently, the only thing I routinely skip over is the foot chase through Rohan. (Which I remembered as being 50-60 pages long but turns out to actually be only about 12. Still manages to feel 50 pages long to me. YMMV.)

Strongly recommend, and despite being listed as a "prequel" you do not need to have read A Fire Upon the Deep first; only a handful of throwaway details will be mysterious as a result and none of them matter much to you. Vinge does not fall into any of the usual "prequel" issues that for instance the Dune prequels did ("Remember that expansive universe you loved that so carefully managed to feel like just a small part of the totality? No, it was the entire totality and the only people in the universe up to that point were the direct ancestors of the people you loved.") or other things. This is truly a prequel, a story that took place before a later story, and temporal ordering is honored.

pavel_lishin3• 15 years ago

> The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time

Final denouement? Man, I gave up trying to read it after what felt like seventeen chapters of "they walked through a field."

pjscott2• 15 years ago

In Tolkien's defense, the man had some of the finest field-describing skills I have ever seen.

abecedarius5• 15 years ago

It works fine standalone, yes, but if you expect to read both then read them in publication order, because there's a powerful resonance/irony implicit in aDitS with aFutD as background: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2008/07/deepnessreview

stcredzero2• 15 years ago

I also recommend _A Fire Upon the Deep_ which is "space opera" written as intelligently as possible by "someone who should know better." (Vernor's words)

billswift• 15 years ago

You might find this interesting. An alternate fan-fic ending of A Fire upon the Deep (and what comes after for the direct participants) by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ulti...

Eliezer2• 15 years ago

That's fundamentally fanfic of Permutation City rather than AFutD.

russnewcomer• 15 years ago

Vinge is, in my opinion, the preeminent hacker SF writer. He was a CS professor at SDSU and both the two ZoT novels and Rainbows End show that he really grasps the end-to-end nature of technology and how hackers interact with the world. I also thought that Rainbows End was a great story about how hackers age, and it's just as well worth reading as Deepness.

CoffeeDregs• 15 years ago

I'm really curious what draws people to these two books (and I've read both books and the review). I found them both to be somewhat slow and about half-wasted with all the stuff about the "Tines". While I love Vinge's writings on the future of technology, his books (including Rainbows End and The Peace War) have never worked for me.

I have a pet theory that people who really like Stross' Accelerando (super-fast, super-speculative buzz-wordy, hard science fiction), Banks' Culture books or Morgan's Market Forces would have a harder time with A Fire Upon The Deep or A Deepness In The Sky. Yes/No?

endtime5• 15 years ago

I haven't read Market Forces, but Vinge, Stross, and Banks are my three favorite sci-fi authors, so I'm a counterexample to your theory. I didn't find the Tines boring...honestly, the Zones bothered me more, because it was so central to the story and so unscientific. But it still didn't really bother me, and I enjoyed both Fire and Deepness a lot.

arethuza5• 15 years ago

I thought Zones were a great idea - what did you find "unscientific" about them? (Allowing for the fact that this is all fiction).

arethuza5• 15 years ago

A definite No I'm afraid - I love most of Stross' work (particularly Accelerando, which has an insane idea density), the Culture books in all of their socialistic contrarian splendour but I also love all of Vinge's work - particularly A Fire Upon the Deep (for its sheer sensawunda) and Deepness.

Vivtek3• 15 years ago

Another counterexample here. I've loved everything of Vinge's to date, and even like the stuff Charlie wrote before he got published (it's pretty damn freaky stuff for idea density). Don't like all the Culture books, but I do like many of them.

gort• 15 years ago

"socialistic contrarian splendour"

They're really post-scarcity; they have no need for capitalism or socialism.

CWuestefeld2• 15 years ago

I loved the Vinge novels, and I'm also a fan of Accelerando. I looked at a couple of Culture books, but really didn't like them. So here's one data point saying that things don't break out that way.

Never heard of the Morgan books before. Looking them up, it looks to me like the author is playing on popular conceptions of capitalism, without a solid grounding in real economic theory. Is that a fair impression?

arohner• 15 years ago

Yeah, both a Deepness in the Sky and Fire upon the deep didn't do a whole lot for me.

The Aliens in DitS were too "human", which was a problem for me because he went to great lengths to describe what their planet was like, and their physiology and how and when they reproduce. Oh, and they have a major world war, and discover the exact same technologies in the exact same order as humans on earth!

Additionally, Vinge has very litte "reward" in his stories. Very few deep insights.

For my money, Neal Stephenson is a much more entertaining SF writer. Every time I read Anathem, it changes the way I see, well, everything, for weeks after I'm done.

tripngroove• 15 years ago

Initially, I also thought the spiders were a bit too "human"... however, in thinking about the way Vinge portrays them, it was important for me to realize there's a point later in the story where he reveals that the focused translators are heavily anthropomorphizing everything they relate to the rest of the crew. I think this is a really strong suggestion that everything told from the point-of-view of the spiders is passing through the same narrator. There's a point where he specifically mentions that the translators seem to know about events and conversations they shouldn't, and we can infer this is because they've been covertly communicating with the Underhill for a long time and he's given them the back-story.

Also important, I think, is that a huge contributing factor to events and technologies developing similarly to those of human civilization, is that the humans were actively manipulating information and events on the planet from the moment they arrived.

I agree with you about Stephenson being fantastic; his books make you think. While I've enjoyed what I've read from Vinge, in some sense it feels much closer to the fantasy genre.

I'm curious as to what folks here thought of The Baroque Cycle. I loved Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anathem... but Quicksilver seemed to drag, and I didn't have the heart to pick up the next one in the series.

kbutler• 15 years ago

> Every time I read Anathem

shudder

I've liked some Neal Stephenson, and I wanted to like Anathem, but just could not get "into" it. Maybe I'll have to try it again.

Eliezer2• 15 years ago

I read Vinge but not Stross. Can't begin to tell you how much I hate buzzword fiction.

khafra2• 15 years ago

I'm surprised at the lack of Stross--Accelerando describes a fairly Hansonian singularity.

technomancy• 15 years ago

I love everything I've read of Vinge and can't stand Stross, so that theory sounds reasonable.

geuis• 15 years ago

You pegged me perfectly. I've been reading Ian M. Banks since I was a kid. Love most of Stross's novels, not just Accelerando. I thought Rainbow's End was weak writing at best. Fire was decent, as was Deepness, but overall Vinge is hit or miss with me.

Ezku• 15 years ago

I love Stross and Banks (have not read Morgan yet), but also have a profound love for both of the Vinge books you mentioned. Other Vinge's material, not so much. :( I hope he'll continue with the zones of thought saga some day.

Vivtek3• 15 years ago

Number three is nearing publication - this year! (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706449)

geden• 15 years ago

No. Vinge fits rather nicely into the Banks/Stross/Reynolds/Gibson/Stephenson fold of decent recentish SF.

zem• 15 years ago

no, not read any of morgan, but i love all three of stross, banks and vinge. 'accelerando' felt like a far more minor novel than, say, 'player of games' or 'a fire upon the deep', though. if you want super-fast, super-speculative hard-science fiction, check out baxter's xeelee sequence ('vacuum diagrams' makes an excellent starting point)

bonafidehan2• 15 years ago

> I'm really curious what draws people to these two books (and I've read both books and the review).

As far as ADitS goes: it's the epic arc of human civilization over time and also the clash of different civilizations that really brings out the hidden assumptions we make based on our human condition.

Especially memorable was the history of the Qeng Ho, and how the customer planets die off as civilizations rise and fall.

abecedarius5• 15 years ago

Accelerando was all right, but unexciting if you already read of most of the ideas back in the 90s (in Extropy, etc.). Similarly Vinge's _Rainbows End_ was a much bigger deal to me than Stross's _Halting State_. I do read Stross, just without the same avidity.

I like Banks; he's a first-rate writer, as a writer. Not really in the same category for me of writers who hit my hacker sweet-spot: Vinge and Stephenson.

Haven't read Morgan.

A bit of a Blub paradox here wrt Stross and Vinge. My author can beat up your author?

Dylanlacey3• 15 years ago

I'm going to have to disagree with you, all of those are some of my favorite author/books

rst• 15 years ago

So, what do people think of "focus"? (A drug treatment regime used by the "emergents" to turn people into monomaniacs.)

Vinge goes out of his way to show how it could be abused --- but I sometimes get the feeling that people crunching in early-startup mode would willingly use it, at least for a time, if they had it...

spaznode2• 15 years ago

It's called adderall, I'm a fan.

arethuza5• 15 years ago

Greg Egan has a similar concept ("neural mods") in his book Quarantine:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_%28novel%29

pontifier• 15 years ago

What I thought was extremely interesting was the way the way the some focused were used... as components behaving as the intelligence behind computational tasks. The creator of Mechanical Turk undoubtedly read this book... I sure thought about creating something like that after I read it.

Vivtek3• 15 years ago

If I had a timer on it, I'd sign up for Focus in a heartbeat.

bonafidehan2• 15 years ago

The concept of focus was mesmerizing. It's well-accepted that our brains do amazing things under the covers, and the idea of bending our brains to a single focus speaks volumes about human intelligence and genius. Very evocative.

spaznode2• 15 years ago

F- yeah! This (don't forget to read the other book first - a fire upon the deep) is my third favorite sci fi novel series of all time. Right after foundation series and dune collection.

A must read for all hn readers.

gwern• 15 years ago

> At one point I think Vinge showed his manuscript to somebody else, because after that he spends a bit of time defending his description of some of the aliens The author protests a bit too much. Because it's a prequel, there is just a bit too much detail.

Almost surely. He had a number of consultants and others go through _A Fire Upon the Deep_ (which I liked better), as one can see from the annotated edition: http://news.slashdot.org/story/03/09/18/0411259/Review-A-Fir...

me_again• 15 years ago

It's kind of interesting that the review (and the other comments here so far) doesn't even mention the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs the evil socialistic Emergency. Is that view just so ingrained that it's not even worth mentioning?

CWuestefeld2• 15 years ago

the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs the evil socialistic Emergency

I enjoyed that in the books, but I'll point out that his Realtime books are much more explicitly anarcho-capitalist.

As an aside, I think you're wrong to characterize the economics as politics. It's very common to assume that such as "minimum wages increase unemployment at the margin" as a direct condemnation of minimum wage policies. But that presupposes a given set of values. It's quite quite possible to make a political statement in favor of minimum wages (for example), while acknowledging the economics of it.

Economics and politics are two separate things. They are related, they inform each other, but there's always a case to be made for things like "I accept that doing X would have a negative effect on total economic efficiency, but we have a moral obligation to pay that price."

wnewman• 15 years ago

For some evidence that your point "it's quite possible" isn't merely some idle hypothetical, search for "Webb" and "Seager" in

http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf

The same author (Leonard) also published a paper in _History of Political Economy_, "More Merciful and Not Less Effective." I remember it as similar, but I'm not finding an ungated version online.

wildwood2• 15 years ago

The Emergents were socialists? I've always seen them much more as fascists. For me, the sensor network plus 'focused' monitoring was a pretty terrifying exploration of a technologicially perfect fascist state.

koevet• 15 years ago

Ah, the Kindle version is not available in Europe.

AndrewGreen• 15 years ago

What most impressed me about ADITS was how I was brought to feel great empathy and even affection for the spiders, not till the end do we see just how truly alien they and their environment are.

wildwood2• 15 years ago

I agree, the 'golden age' narration was a great inversion, where the spiders seemed more human than the humans did.

simonista• 15 years ago

Daniel, you've really fleshed out the site since last time I looked at it -- I think when you first posted it here. It's looking really good. Any update as to how the project as a whole is going for you?

leon_2• 15 years ago

> Your search "A Deepness In The Sky" did not match any products in: Kindle Store

Oh come on. I'm thinking about selling my kindle. Not one of the books that really interest me are available for it :/

frossie• 15 years ago

?? It's there, and also on the B&N nook:

http://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-ebook/dp/B002H8ORKM/

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Deepness-in-the-Sky/Vernor-...

leon_2• 15 years ago

Oh, yes. You're right.

But when I click on your like I get:

> This title is not available for customers from your location in: > Europe

keithburgun• 15 years ago

Just want to point out, that the reason he cites is NOT, at all, the reason why most sci-fi sucks.

The real reason that most sci-fi (and fantasy and romance and most 'genre' novels) suck is that they focus too much on the "stuff", and not on the things which actually matter in narrative fiction writing.

The things that really matter in a story are characters, strong motivations, good dialogue, plot, conflict, etc... techniques of the writing craft. These are what make a book good or not, but they are kind of an afterthought to all the "STUFF" in Sci Fi books.

CratosGodOfWar• 15 years ago

I found it really really hard to gather with it and never finished it. Same was with "A Fire Upon Te Deep", but after the first quater it was okay for me, and I finished and liked it.

What I really found hard was, that this takes all place in it's own Universe with it's own Rules. And no where is described/explained what the these things or rules are. Just like you would dive into e.g. Star Trek TV Show for the first time and see someone beam. The person would disapear and repear somewhere. Due to the fact that you see it, you understand what this beaming thing is. Not so in Vinges Universe. Same applies to Gibson and the Sprawl. It's hard to mess around with it, when no where things are explained. Mabye this is due to the translation of these books (I am a german reader). Any others experienced the same/similar ?

BoppreH• 15 years ago

It may be a different medium, but I was impressed with the technobabble in Mass Effect. It actually made sense.

Every single detail, from astrobiology to weapon systems and shields, had a plausible explanation if you cared enough to visit the Codex. The whole game seemed like it was expanded from a giant "what-if element zero".

Maybe I'm deeply wrong about all this, but I think the game is not receiving enough praise for this side.

khafra2• 15 years ago

All my physicist/video gamer friends love it for that.

Dylanlacey3• 15 years ago

I think the entire game was a labor of intense depth. The internal fantasy was watertight, from the technology, to the politics, to the way the story changed dynamically depending on your choices.

abecedarius5• 15 years ago

The author has a sequel to _A Fire Upon the Deep_ coming out in the fall -- Children of the Sky. Set in the same universe.

AlexC04• 15 years ago

I've read all of Vinge's work and it really is phenomenal. It's been years since I read it and can only remember vague concepts now... the singularities, the 'focus' drug that makes his programmers super-human.

I really must read them again. Quite excited to hear a new book is coming out.

istari• 15 years ago

Blabber is a short story, Vinge's first foray into the Zones of Thought Universe, and features several cameos from A Fire Upon the Deep:

http://books.google.com/books?id=txBNZiQw2GUC&pg=PA78...

A Deepness In The Sky

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