I'm writing this review several months after finishing Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky in a few breathless days, so this will be necessarily short on detail and long on general impressions.

When I began reading A Deepness in the Sky, I was skeptical. Deepness is a prequel (of sorts) to Vinge's exciting and award-winning A Fire Upon the Deep. But I know that Vinge's other books have been less good, e.g., his atrocious True Names. At base, the problem is that Vinge is only a mediocre writer, capable of some pretty atrocious dialogue and mind-numbing exposition. But when he gets a good idea, man, he's on.

Fortunately, Deepness is one of those books where Vinge latches onto both a good idea and a good plot device, and the combination is a thrilling and intense book that, surprisingly, often surpasses A Fire Upon the Deep.

Deepness takes place centuries before A Fire Upon the Deep, when the legendary Qeng Ho trading fleet is still a misfit operation running at sub-luminal speeds across a tiny portion of the galaxy. For centuries the fleet has known about a mysterious cosmological entity: the On/Off star, whose luminscence simply turns off at fixed intervals, only to flare back into its normal luminosity centuries later. Finally, a Qeng Ho delegation decides to undertake the decades-long journey to visit the On/Off star. When they arrive, they discover two surprising things: first, that there is life on a planet that orbits the On/Off star; and second, that there is a second group of humans who have just arrived--the Emergents, a vicious and treacherous breed.

It is Emergent treachery that Vinge fixates on as the plot device that converts a rather langourous introduction into a tautly suspenseful battle between Qeng Ho and Emergents over the resources of the On/Off planet and the loyalties of the barely developed aliens who live on its surface. And even as the plot ramps up with this singularly ingenious (and evil) act of treachery, Vinge continues dropping hints about the larger mysteries behind the On/Off star: Why does the star turn on and off at fixed intervals? How did the aliens on the planet evolve to deal with periods of sudden ice and sudden raging fire? And so on.

Unfortunately, too few of these big questions are answered by the end of the book. And, even as Vinge drops the ball in the hard-science area where he shows the greatest strengths, he also displays his genuine weaknesses in myriad other settings: a poor ability to convey the vastness of time that the humans spend waiting (decades pass between chapters, with little sense of time moving); a very cheesy romance that occupies the minds of far too many important characters at far too crucial a moment; and a blatant anthropomorphic treatment of the aliens that is explained plausibly, but too late. I should also say that the ending is a little swift, with lots of loose ends being tied up all at once. And there are some hasty explanations that Vinge gives right as the book closes that don't make a whole lot of sense.

Still, these weaknesses fall by the wayside in the midst of a rollicking plot that plays with lots of nifty ideas. Vinge is definitely at the top of his game in Deepness. Highly recommended for fans of A Fire Upon the Deep.

Copyright © 2004 Steven Wu