Free A Fire Upon The Deep Ebooks To Download
A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale.Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit 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 the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue mission, not entirely composed of humans, must rescue the children-and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.A Fire Upon The Deep is the winner of the 1993 Hugo Award for Best Novel. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
Audible Audio Edition
Listening Length: 21 hours and 41 minutes
Program Type: Audiobook
Version: Unabridged
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Audible.com Release Date: January 19, 2010
Whispersync for Voice: Ready
Language: English
ASIN: B00355AR4Q
Best Sellers Rank: #47 in Books > Audible Audiobooks > Science Fiction > High Tech #212 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Hard Science Fiction #2040 in Books > Audible Audiobooks > Fiction & Literature
Finally, a science fiction novel that does actually live up to the hype. "A Fire Upon the Deep" is a fast-paced, exciting, and incredibly inventive book. As many others have mentioned, Vinge's unique vision of the future is one of the novel's biggest strengths. He has created a galaxy where different species are moving upwards through a series of "zones of thought" as their technology becomes more sophisticated. The catch is that once humanity has ventured into "the beyond", it's difficult to go back to "the slow zone" because the new spaceships and computers won't work there. Vinge's ingenious plot device is to have a spaceship carrying two children and some vital information crash-land on a planet that's right on the border of "the slow zone", forcing a ragtag group of spacefarers to attempt a desperate rescue mission. While almost all science fiction writers include intelligent aliens, the species that Vinge dreams up are quite different from anything I've ever seen in any other book. There are the Tines, a race where a single consciousness controls a group of several individuals, the Skroderiders, a species that was sessile until they were provided with mechanical carts, and numerous others that help add color to the book.But in addition to its remarkable futuristic world, "A Fire Upon the Deep" also contains an action-packed plot. The author springs a major surprise on you in almost every chapter: characters that you though were good turn out to be traitors and vice versa, certain groups turn out to be more powerful than you thought, etc... The bottom line is that you never know what's going to happen next, and Vinge manages to keep the suspense up throughout the entire book, despite its 613 page length.
Most of us are probably aware of how, as you read more and more science fiction, your stack of 'extremely good' books stays mostly level while the stack of 'acceptable' books outgrows your bookshelf. You start to appreciate the writers who have done their duty to science fiction by studying the Drexlers, the Minskys and Feynmans -- the scientists whose sheer extrapolative powers really push the borders of imagination. Vinge is one of those hardworking writers. He is the author of the hard-to-find "True names and other dangers..." which means you can credit him for adding several of the future- or tech-based memes most of us take for granted today. The ratings for this book waver between 6-10, with a '2' thrown in by some poor fellow. Don't worry about Vernor Vinge's grammatical capabilities -- he writes a mean sentence, and some of the best technical descriptions I've ever read. For a genre which pedestalizes Asimov, who could hardly string 6 words together coherently (guess he was moving too fast), some people are MIGHTY picky! Also, you won't find the "-oid" syndrome which you get with Bujold, for example, where contemporary items are made to sound science-fictiony just by giving them a new name. You won't read sentences like "He grabbed his key-oids and jumped in his car-oid..."Vinge's science is deep, and the ramifications of everything from the 'slow zone' to the 'unthinking deeps' to the 'agrav fabric docks' to the hi-tech of the beyond, to the cute extrapolation of an Internet of galactic scope, to the effect of radio upon the Tines (a sophont race), to the matter-of-fact acceptance of racial senescence... all of these things are well thought out and brilliantly presented.
This is tough. "A Fire Upon the Deep" is not for everybody. I read review after review trying to figure out if I should devote the time necessary to read such a tome. Now I understand the mixed yet overall positive reviews here.This read is not like a "York Peppermint Patty" commercial. I never got the sensation of "driving those huskies across the frozen tundra!" No. This read was more like "slogging through the jungle underbrush with nothing but a machete and a heavy pack." It's like reading Hamlet when you're not that crazy about Shakespeare. (By the way, I LOVE Shakespeare, but that's something that came over time). While reading "Fire" I got the idea that this was a great and important book but perhaps wasn't my type of book.Try as I might, I couldn't give a rip about the dog packs. Each pack is a character with sub-character individuals acting as only part of the whole pack. If a pack member dies, the pack will accept a new member into its character. The pack "character" is a little too fluid in this case to effectively sink into a reader's psyche. It is appropriately "alien" to the reader and the gap is never fully bridged from familiar to alien.The kid characters living with the alien dogs have child-like personalities and so are appropriately 2 dimensional.The most interesting conflict is between the main female character, Ravna, who is racing to save the children and thwart the evil Power and a resurrected Asian scoundrel, Pham, who has an affair with Ravna and who surreptitiously is acting as a Power's spy. Unfortunately, this conflict is in the back seat of the plot and is revealed in the first half of the book.
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