A Fire Upon The Deep, Book 2

Vernor Vinge

Macmillan, Feb 15, 1993 - Fiction - 613 pages

A Hugo award-winning Novel!

“Vinge is one of the best visionary writers of SF today.” —David Brin

Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in 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. 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.

Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle.

Tor books by Vernor Vinge

Zones of Thought Series
A Fire Upon The Deep
A Deepness In The Sky
The Children of The Sky

Realtime/Bobble Series
The Peace War
Marooned in Realtime

Other Novels
The Witling
Tatja Grimm's World
Rainbows End

Collections
Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
True Names

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - antao - LibraryThing

“They sat for a time, human looking out to the sea, Rider looking he wasn't sure quite where, and a pack looking in most all directions.” In “A Fire Upon the Deep” by Vernor Vinge A galaxy divided ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - mkfs - LibraryThing

Didn't do it for me. Sure, it's a classic, and all the ingredients are there, but I kept putting it down - which wouldn't even be a fault, if the cover didn't praise how "riveting" the book is. The ...

Contents

• II: 11
• III: 17
• IV: 23
• V: 27
• VI: 45
• VII: 55
• VIII: 63
• IX: 76
• X: 97
• XI: 101
• XII: 108
• XIII: 118
• XIV: 130
• XV: 143
• XVI: 170
• XVII: 184
• XVIII: 197
• XIX: 209
• XX: 217
• XXI: 233
• XXII: 243
• XXIII: 258
• XXIV: 282
• XXV: 304
• XXVI: 310
• XXVII: 325
• XXVIII: 347
• XXIX: 349
• XXX: 357
• XXXI: 379
• XXXII: 385
• XXXIII: 395
• XXXIV: 399
• XXXV: 408
• XXXVI: 445
• XXXVII: 460
• XXXVIII: 487
• XXXIX: 507
• XL: 509
• XLI: 524
• XLII: 543
• XLIII: 557
• XLIV: 572

Popular passages

Page 6 - Interrupt handler running, looking out, receiving more light from the laser far below ... a backdoor into the ship's code, installed when the newborn had subverted the humans

About the author

Vernor Vinge has won five Hugo Awards, including one for each of his last three novels, A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), and Rainbow’s End (2006). Known for his rigorous hard-science approach to his science fiction, he became an iconic figure among cybernetic scientists with the publication in 1981 of his novella "True Names," which is considered a seminal, visionary work of Internet fiction. His many books also include Marooned in Realtime and The Peace War. Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin and raised in Central Michigan, Vinge is the son of geographers. Fascinated by science and particularly computers from an early age, he has a Ph.D. in computer science, and taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University for thirty years. He has gained a great deal of attention both here and abroad for his theory of the coming machine intelligence Singularity. Sought widely as a speaker to both business and scientific groups, he lives in San Diego, California.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A Fire Upon The Deep, Book 2; A Tom Doherty Associates book; TOR SF; TOR science fiction; Volume 1 of Zones of Thought
• Author: Vernor Vinge
• Edition: reprint, revised
• Publisher: Macmillan, 1993
• ISBN: 0812515285, 9780812515282
• Length: 613 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Science Fiction / Alien Contact; Fiction / Science Fiction / General; Fiction / Science Fiction / Hard Science Fiction; Fiction / Science Fiction / Space Exploration