A FIRE UPON THE DEEP by Vernor Vinge
I tried in vain to find a cover to put here that wasn’t all mass-media and space opera, because I know that some of you guys talk trash about “genre fiction”. I failed.
Anyhow, A Fire Upon the Deep was one of the most incredible, thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. The intricate plot is galactic in scale and impossible to summarize, so I’m going to gloss right over the story and talk about the backdrop, which is where Vinge shines. (Who cares about story anyways?)
Vinge believes in writing plausible hard science fiction, but believes that the technological singularity will happen before the middle of this century, making it impossible for anyone to really set a hard science fiction novel very far in the future. In some Vinge’s novels, such as Rainbows End, he stays away from the prediction wall by writing about the near future. In others, like A Fire Upon the Deep, he’ll invoke a singularity-stopping deus ex machina. In this case, it’s laws of physics which don’t permit AI in our part of the universe.
So the galaxy is stratified. There are slow parts of the galaxy where people can’t get much more sophisticated than we are now. There are other parts where faster-than-light travel and all kinds of fancy AI are possible. Most races, given enough time, colonize the more permissive parts of the galaxy, experience a technological singularity, and then “transcend” into different kinds of existence, becoming angel/demon-like “powers” first, and then disappearing, for reasons that mere mortals could never understand.
And so this story is populated with everything from god-like creatures to unsophisticated bottom dwellers of the universe who make centuries-long voyages in “coldsleep” while civilizations and singularities pass them by.
It’s bewildering. After every two chapters or so I had to put it down and gaze at the wall, glassy-eyed, and contemplate the true possibilities of our future.
Our civilization’s history, mercifully free of planetary catastrophes and other game-changers, has always had me believe in a sort of unilineal cultural history of planets, culminating in a technological singularity and then happiness ever after.
Vinge, with a visionary mathematician’s erudition, took care to demolish my pompous simplicity with a half a dozen compelling examples of the different ways that a planet’s history might turn out incredibly weird. The combinitorics are unfathomable. Who the fuck knows what’s going to happen.
February 15th, 2010 at 5:58 pm
Sounds like a good book. I was just thinking today about how SETI is using radio waves to look for life. I think this is entirely silly and anthropic. Advanced civilizations probably abandon radio waves early on and use instead gravitons, neutrinos, or quantum communication. And that’s just one area where it’s impossible really to imagine what’s possible.