Over the past weekend, we took the usual summer pilgrimage to Johnstown. This time, Berta’s sister Therese was in the process of moving, so while they packed up some of their things, I watched the kids. This turned out not too unpleasant. During the time going out and while the kids were entertaining themselves amicably, I was able to do some more reading.
When last Pat as in town, he loaded up my Kindle with a few sample books. I started reading one by Vernor Vinge called “A Fire Upon the Deep”. It was both interesting and strange. We also started listening to an audiobook prequel to the Tales of the Otori trilogy, “Heaven’s Net is Wide”, by Lian Hearn.
A Fire Upon the Deep is, as I said, strange. It’s been a while since I’ve read true space sci-fi, and this certainly qualifies. It will be difficult to explain some of the many layered characteristics of this book, which set to establish axioms by which Vinge’s world operates.
The book happens in two general spaces. First, there is the near crashlanding of a ship on a world of medieval rat-dog beasts. The rat-dogs have somewhat long necks, and share a pack mind using these sound transceivers (tympanum) in their head and shoulders to send brain waves as sound. These “tines”, as the creatures are come to be called, have certain restrictions in being close to each other in order to keep the mentality of their persons separate from each other.
In the crash landed ship are humans. There is a family of humans, the adults of which are killed early in the book, and the remaining awake children (there are many in a sort of cryo-sleep) are separated to two different Tine camps. A good remainder of the book is dedicated to these two factions using their claimed technology and human children to gain a combative advantage over the other. Meanwhile…
The reason the ship crash landed in the first place is because they were fleeing a human-run lab at the edge of the Transcend. In Vinge’s space, there seems to be strata of ability related to how far you are away from the galactic center. So you have a range between the Slowness and the Transcend called the Beyond, which itself is broken into three sections, the Top the Middle and the Bottom of the Beyond. The significance of this? You can only travel faster than the speed of light outside of the Slowness, and the closer you get to the Transcend, you faster and smarter your machinery can get.
In the Transcend there exist unseen Powers that can reprogram organisms or perhaps even whole civilizations. They may be the creators of what is known to exist in the book. They are not all benevolent, and during the lab’s excursion to gain knowledge from findings in the Transcend, they discover/create/awaken quite a powerful Perversion, a kind of Power that creates a Blight of large swaths of the Beyond.
It’s one of those deals with science fiction where you just have to say, “Ok, sure.”
In the Beyond, is a woman who receives the SOS transmission from the crashed ship, and finds herself aimed straight at the Slowness in an effort to retrieve what small bit of recovered and smuggled lab artifact might save the universe from the Perversion.
Like I explained, the book has two fronts. The toggling between the two was the usual harsh, “Aw, man, I wanted to know what would happen,” at every other chapter or so. The aliens of Vinge’s world were strange. I had the most difficulty imagining the skroderiders, a kind of plant-beast affixed to a mechanism that gives them the ability to think at a greater speed.
The book was an entertaining read, but I’m left somewhat unsatisfied with the ending. I really thought something more or better would happen. The Countermeasure in the crashed ship was kind of disappointing in its offering.
Also, and I’m sure this is just an oddity in my edition of the ebook, there were editing notes all through the novel. The notes themselves were 1/3 of its bulk. This led to a good bit of my surprised when I turned to the next page, hoping to see more of their return to the Beyond and instead found, “THE END.”
I’ll probably try some of Vinge’s other work. Pat has another queued in my Kindle. But I have some other things to catch up on before I get back into that high-space drama.
We have not yet finished Heaven’s Net Is Wide, but we’re about half way through. The audio book is a frightening 17+ hours, yet it’s quite good.
I don’t remember the story of the original trilogy as well as I’d like, but I do recall some of the characters who will eventually take part. This story takes place in a feudal Japan, and although they don’t mention Samurai or Ninja, it has those elements. Combatants with honor, lordly families, stuff like that…
The book is mostly about Otori Shigeru, the son of the middle country’s lord, trying to keep his family in power through his father’s inconsistent leading and his uncles’ treachery. He meets members of the Tribe, a secretive group of mercenaries and assassins with otherworldly powers that had been lost over the ages. There is also the Hidden, who strangely worship a single god and will not kill or take their own lives, but are yet courageous, which Shigeru finds uncommon. The intrigues of fealty grow through these groups and the taking of wives for marriages of alliance, and mistresses for… other needs. Of course, who knows who is a spy!
As I said, we’re not done the book yet, but it does have the flavor of the other three, which we did like when we listened.
I have a few new books in, based on some conversation online. I’ve started The Paradox of Choice, which should be a short read, and Get Back in the Box arrived today. Both of these will hopefully lead to more insight into marketing efforts in the future.
I’ve also got in the Kindle the last book of Jaqueline Carey’s Imriel series, which I’m quite looking forward to. Eventually, I’ll get to the other 80 books in there, too. It’s nice, at least, not to have an actual “stack” to represent my stacked backlog of books.
