The story has wit and style, but it's the ideas that maintain a grip on the reader. Ultimately the issue becomes whether humanity should be eliminated for being responsible for the murder. A wide-ranging debate on the fate of the galaxy unfolds following the unprecedented event of the murder of one of the higher beings. What is the meaning of a plural "self"?Īmong the fun elements of the book is the literary device of creating a galactic computer teleconference, which itself becomes an actor in the story. Vinge explores what it is like to have a mind that endures and evolves even as the components in it mature and die. Perhaps the most inventive concept in Vernor Vinge's science fiction novel A Fire Upon the Deep is the group mind created by the integration of the individual consciousnesses of a species resembling a cross between wolves and ferrets on a distant world (also in the "slow-zone"). The thing that makes A Fire Upon the Deep so great is that is has all these things and more.
Further out that axis, beings of higher and higher mental capability inhabit the galaxy, their thought processes not inhibited by living in the "slow-zone." Unfortunately, we inhabit the slow-zone and so can't even imagine a world of faster-than-light travel and higher-order intelligences. Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep Jo Walton. As we move further out the axis the speed limit increases until the speed of light is no barrier.
Not since William Gibson gave us the fully realized world of cyberspace in Neuromancer has anyone given us so rich a diet of new ideas: Imagine a universe where the laws of physics vary along the axis of the great wheel of the Milky Way galaxy.
0 kommentar(er)
