Words&Dirt

I picked up Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep as part of my due diligence for understanding key moments in the history of science fiction. As the first writer to popularize the idea of a technological singularity in fiction as well as nonfiction, Vinge has proved himself one of scifi’s most intelligent and prescient minds. A Fire Upon the Deep is more than two decades old––long enough to qualify as outdated in this genre––and while the novel contains some dated elements, its central concepts and themes are still relevant to humanity’s ongoing discussion about what technological development is for and where it might be taking us.

Like many sprawling scifi tales, A Fire Upon the Deep has its fair share of obscure moments. Vinge is a competent writer capable of communicating complex thoughts with relatively simple language, but I found many of his descriptions of space travel, and especially of spaceships themselves, annoyingly opaque and often yawn-inducing. My visually-challenged brain and Vinge’s staggering intellect couldn’t always find common ground. Books like this emphasize that, for a reader of my capabilities, trying to fully grasp the vision of hard scifi writers is like trying to map an anthill by only scrutinizing it from the outside––the guesswork might be stimulating, but there’s no guarantee of accuracy. Fortunately, the story and characters are engaging and well conceived, so the bits that were over my head didn’t quash my overall enjoyment. Vinge also exhibits a sense of cosmic wonder that brings the reader back when the novel threatens to stray from itself.

Although this book seems to have aged well, I was struck by one critical issue that’s come to play a much bigger role in scifi since the early 90s: human augmentation. A Fire Upon the Deep takes place in a diverse galactic society (or group of societies) in the far future. Humanity is still around, and has become technologically advanced since leaving Old Earth. However, humans are still…well, human. Despite our ability to travel between the stars, colonize planets, and give birth to superintelligent “Powers” (one of the story’s key plot points), we don’t seem to have tampered with our genome or significantly integrated our bodies with machines. The lack of such modifications doesn’t detract from the story or make it seem hopelessly quaint, but it does reveal just how radically our attitudes about augmentation have changed over the last couple decades. These days, anyone envisioning a human civilization thousands of years in the future will necessarily have to deal with the question of whether its inhabitants would be recognizable (by us 21st-century nitwits) as “human” at all. Conscious evolution and technological augmentation are taken as a given now, but perhaps that was not the case when this book was first published.

Those puny critiques are my only complaints about this delightfully interesting novel. There is much to celebrate about A Fire Upon the Deep, most notably Vinge’s concept of the Zones of Thought. The Zones refer to discrete (but not fixed) areas of galactic space, roughly correlated with stellar mass distribution, where the laws of physics allow for different kinds of technology, and therefore different kinds of commerce, communication, and consciousness. The Zones range from the Unthinking Depths (limited life, mostly unintelligent) to the Transcend (occupied solely by Powers). The story takes place mostly between these two extremes, in the Beyond and the Great Slowness, where advanced technologies function with varying success, depending on their design and current location. The idea of Zones took me a while to internalize (reading the novel’s Wikipedia page helped), but eventually I realized that this is one of the cleverest scifi ideas I’ve encountered. Describing the relationship between the Transcend and the rest of the Zones, Vinge writes:

The Beyond and below are like a deep ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We’re so far down that the beings on the surface––superior though they are––can’t effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper levels with poisons we don’t even understand. But the abyss remains a relatively safe place…And just as with an ocean, there is a constant drift of flotsam from the top. There are things that can only be made at the Top, that need close-to-sentient factories––but which can still work down here…Such things are the greatest physical wealth of the Beyond, since we can’t make them…There are always little ‘fish’ edging close to the surface…Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood…and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it. (loc. 1804-12).

Pretty neat, huh? This oceanic metaphor is a great tool for grokking the Zones, and returns with majestic clarity during the novel’s impressive climax.

The Zones designate a natural galactic hierarchy––one possible way future humans might experience the universe. Vinge complements this idea by obliquely scrutinizing humanity’s medieval past. About half of A Fire Upon the Deep takes place on a primitive planet in the Slowness that is occupied by Tines, intelligent dog-like creatures evolved to form a unified consciousness when integrated in packs generally containing 4 to 8 individual members. When we meet them, the Tines’ civilization is a feudal system, with power dynamics modeled after analogous periods in human history. Tinish leaders have begun exploring how to consciously adapt packs by way of rigorous (and sometimes brutal) trial and error, resulting in experimental combinations of “singletons” designed to serve particular purposes or express desired traits:

The crafting of souls was nothing new. Brood kenning was a limited form of it, though mainly concerned with gross physical characteristics. Even kenners agreed that a pack’s mental abilities derived from its various members in different measures. One pair or triple was almost always responsible for eloquence, another for spatial intuition. The virtues and vices were even more complex. No single member was the principal source of courage, or of conscience. (loc. 1042)

This style of alien mind is fascinating in its own right, but Tinish psychology is even richer when likened to the human brain, which is also the site of competition and cooperation between diverging desires and impulses. The Tines exemplify a novel alternative route to consciousness, and also reveal the persistence of universal predicaments faced by creatures saddled with self-knowledge.

Tinish society is irrevocably altered when a family of human refugees crash-lands on their planet. The humans are trying to escape the Blight––a human-made Power bent on dominating the galaxy’s processing power––and their small ship contains a special Countermeasure that might be the only thing that can stop it. As two young human survivors become embroiled in a Tinish power struggle, several citizens in the Beyond learn of the Countermeasure’s existence, and mount a desperate rescue mission to reach it before the Blight. The basic storyline is nothing special, but Vinge’s execution is terrific.

Best of all, Vinge’s grandiose tale is tinged with a special humility that comes only from recognizing one’s insignificance in the scheme of things. Although the following lines occur within the context of the story, they seem to address the reader directly:

It’s always amusing to see people who think themselves the center of the universe…These people think somehow that their disaster is the end of everything. Life goes on, folks. At the same time, it’s clear that many readers are not paying proper attention to these events––certainly not seeing what is truly significant about them…Well, people, we now have an opportunity to view things while the truth is still manifest. With luck we may solve some fundamental mysteries. (loc. 9978-93)

It doesn’t feel like overreach to suggest that these simple, profound words represent the core mission of all science fiction, and of the scientific worldview for which scifi imaginatively speaks. Writers like Vinge have a special talent for “paying proper attention” and “seeing what is truly significant.” The rest of us are fortunate enough to be whisked along.

Rating: 8/10