Vernor Vinge - The Children of the Sky

Vernor Vinge's Hugo award winning A Fire Upon the Deep stands as one of my absolute favorite works of Science Fiction, an exquisite blend of big ideas and fast paced adventure. The novel's themes and protagonist, if not the rest of its setting, received further exploration in its prequel, the (once again) Hugo winning A Deepness in the Sky. I had problems with the plot and pacing of that novel, but it was still a fascinating and well crafted book. The Children of the Sky, though, is, at long last, a direct sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep that promised to continue the story past the cataclysmic events that ended that masterwork and to resolve what was probably best left unresolved. As you may have guessed from that last sentence, The Children of the Sky does not live up to its predecessors in either scope or execution.

We begin with Ravna and the children rescued from the Blight, who were stranded on a medieval world and are now waking from coldsleep. The Blight fleet that was pursuing them is still coming, but, due to their victory at that novel's end, will not arrive for centuries. By the time it does, Ravna knows that they must, using the information stored on their crashed ship (the Out of Band II)'s archives, advance to its technological level. But that's not quite as easy to do as it is to say, and there are problems along the way.

The vast majority of the novel is taken up by worldly political squabbling. The world is populated by the Tines, Vinge's fantastic group-minded and dog-like alien creation, but the Tines are not a homogenous whole. As if navigating the alien factions wasn't tricky enough, the humans, too, are splitting down the middle. The children, you see, quite literally slept through the events of the last novel. They don't feel the same terror that Ravna does at the thought of the Blight fleet. In fact, they aren't even sure if they believe Ravna's story. Their parents, after all, were the ones who unleashed the Blight, and they know that their parents were neither stupid nor evil. The faction that calls itself the Disaster Study Group reasons that, perhaps, the Blight was not evil but good and that Ravna and her ally Pham Nuwen were not heroes in stopping it but the perpetrators of a calamity on the scale of an interstellar genocide.

Like its predecessors, The Children of the Sky attempts to fill itself with numerous big ideas; alas, none  quite succeed. We get a few further insights into Tinish culture, particularly on the formation of packs and even on Tinish romance fiction. Those are all interesting, but none of it really rises beyond adding frills to their establishment in A Fire Upon the Deep. The one piece of new and Tinish ground treaded is that of the tropics, where innumerable Tines have merged together into a single massive whole. One of the choir's emissaries says: the Choir as a whole may not have what you call intelligence, but it is a happier way to know reality than is your stunted existence (p. 324). But we never delve deeper than that, never get more than vague hints and a few glimpses of how the choir really functions.

Like Tinish culture, the idea of recreating a star faring civilization from medieval routes is here on a far larger scale than it was previously but still adds little. In addition to Ravna's focused path, the inventor and businessman Tycoon begins what is called an industrial revolution in a far away land. Unfortunately, all of that stays in that far away land until the novel's ending. These developments should be beyond game changing for the Tines. Early on, one of Tycoon's associates admits that: Tycoon has lots of stupid ideas, including the notion of getting power by selling things (p. 53). That raises a fantastically interesting point, no? But we never return to it, never get to see how a Robber Baron might establish and conduct himself in the dark ages. Instead of focusing on massive societal changes, we see a bare handful of inventions and how they play into the bickering of the familiar factions.

Furthermore, one of the main ones of those factions, the Disaster Study Group, proves perpetually obnoxious to read about. I'll let them explain their foundation: The DSG starts from the position that we can't know exactly what happened at the High Lab and how we managed to escape (p. 77). To this, Ravna responds: When these deniers say 'we can't really know,' that is a lie. I know (p. 78). Nonetheless, the deniers, perhaps, have a credible reason for not trusting her. But Ravna is not the only one that knows what happened; the reader knows too. As a result of that, and as a result of how there is no new evidence or debate but simply two positions shouted at one another, the reader soon just grows annoyed at the deniers and wishes they'd finally find out so the novel could move on. It never does.

In the absence of big ideas, The Children of the Sky becomes a shallow thriller, and I doubt you'll be surprised when I add in that its plot isn't all that great either. The main problem with it is simply that it is long and bloated, something that is made a thousand times worse by virtue of the fact that it is almost perfectly predictable; my only incorrect assumptions were my continued hopes that the Blight's fleet would ever arrive, that the industrial revolution would take center stage, or that something  interesting would happen. At one point, Ravna is kidnapped. She and a few allies escape, but they are lost in the middle of nowhere. To survive, they decide (for some unfathomable reason) to be travelling performers. The section, like many of the novel's better ones, is effective but silly. Afterwards, they are recaptured again and, after that brief digression of roughly seventy-four pages, we go back to exactly where we were heading and Ravna is brought, captive, to the kidnappers' employers.

But the novel's real problem is character. There are multiple villains here, but every single one of them is of the moustache twirling variety. To give a small example, we learn that one of them always enjoyed (p. 369) throwing prisoners out of its air ship. The narration itself calls characters villains, every character in the book can agree without a doubt that they are evil (p. 231), and the debate is not on the issues or on the people themselves but rather on who is villain-in-chief (p. 304). To be fair, not every villain is simple, at least insofar as the word implies a lack of complexity. Some are idiots. Take this exchange between two of Ravna's captors as they stand over her:

"So you've told her about the radio link to the orbiter?"

"No, but you've done that now."

"…Oh." Gannon thought about that for a second and then laughed. "Like you said, it doesn't matter what she knows now." (p. 216)

It's not just the villains that are one dimensional. The main characters each have one or two dominant traits or interests, and that is all they are. The deniers may be wrong about the Blight's intentions, but they are right on the money when they say that Ravna is so obsessed with the threat that she cares about nothing else. More than it's a matter of goals, the problem is that Vinge's characters don't seem to have emotional lives. Johanna is betrayed by her fiancé, and we see her express anger, but the reader can't, despite their best effort, feel all that shocked by it. We don’t see a single scene of the two together, and we saw no affection for him in her thoughts even before the betrayal; the text would be fundamentally unchanged if we heard that the two were mortal enemies from birth on.

The characters' shallowness – and every one of the novel's other problems – is exacerbated by the prose. In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge wrote in a childlike tone when writing from a child's perspective, and, the rest of the time, wrote with a generally easy air filled with clever turns of phrase. Those are, very occasionally, visible here; Tinish group minds and their merging, for instance, can bring literal truth to the idea of a rumor having a life of its own. But it's not enough to save the mess that we've got.

Only one of The Children of the Sky's viewpoints is particularly young, and the vast majority of it is told from Ravna's perspective, which is to say that of a woman many decades into this whole living business. Yet she and every other character (the narrator most certainly included) talk like overexcited preteens. Devious aliens tell themselves to Be cool (p. 53). A human's Tinish companions are known as their Best Friend (p. 79). A supposedly clever human manipulator visibly reminds himself that the Tines are seriously not human (p. 127). The Out of Band II (or OoBII) is here always referred to as Oobii (p. 82). World leaders are described as geeky (p. 412).The occasional bit of not so surprising dialogue is followed by breathless interjections like: That was Jefri! (p. 419) Dialogue and narration are constantly interrupted by shouts of Hei! (p. 63), perhaps used as a preventative measure to drag back one's flagging attention.

If I was slightly more inclined to play the game of coincidences and portents, I might point out how this is the first volume of the series to not include the word deep in its title and how, no doubt as a direct result of that, it is the first to not be, in any sense of the word, deep. Whatever the fate of that conjecture, The Children of the Sky is nowhere near the level of either of its predecessors. Stripped of the overawing backing of one of Vinge's mammoth ideas, the plot and characters here are revealed as shallower than skin, and that's not at all helped by the author's juvenile diction. Even removed from the comparison to Vinge's other works, this is simply not a good book.

Vernor Vinge - A Deepness Upon the Sky

So high, so low, so many things to know. (p. 775)

A Deepness in the Sky is the prequel to his fantastic, Hugo winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. But unlike most prequels, A Deepness in the Sky doesn't blandly putter about the backdrop or spend its time retconning with sledgehammer subtlety. Though we are exploring Pham Nuwen's history, we're doing so in a fashion far enough removed from the earlier (/chronologically later) novel that A Deepness in the Sky has space to become its own story. In fact, the closest connection between the two is thematic, with A Deepness in the Sky presenting a claustrophobic counterpoint to the mind-boggling expanses of its predecessor.

A Deepness in the Sky is a book of humanity constrained. By the time of its occurrence, humankind has grown far beyond what we can now imagine, but true greatness – the ends of misery and suffering, the permanence of civilization and justice – remain out of reach, nothing more than impossibilities and "Failed Dreams" (p. 323). We've learned much through all these thousands of future years, but mainly we've learned of limits (p. 770). Unable to go beyond the speed of light, no culture can survive between planets and systems, and so planetary civilizations rise and fall. At the height they're wonderful things, but there is so much darkness. (p. 770) No matter how great a civilization may grow, it cannot be eternal. A Fire Upon the Deep showed a path of potential and nigh endless ascension, of mobility and transcendence if only one could overcome the dangers. A Deepness in the Sky, taking place entirely within what that other novel would call the Slow Zone, has the rises and falls without the possibility of growth or apotheosis. It shows humanity endlessly struggling against the "wheel of time" (323) and humanity being endlessly broken upon it. 

It is this inevitability that the outsider, planet-born Pham Nuwen strives against. He dreams of a single Humankind, where justice would not be occasional flickering light, but a steady glow across all of Human Space. He dreamed of a civilization where continents never burned. (pp. 556-7) Motivated by that dream, Nuwen approaches the disparate Qeng Ho trading culture and tries to meld them into a unifying force. But his dreams prove impossible. Mere organization is not enough; humankind is fundamentally outmatched by time and space.

Outmatched within its own boundaries, that is, for the novel's main action takes place far past the establishment of this cycle of rises and falls, takes place as humankind reaches something utterly alien: the On/Off star (which emits no heat at all for 215 of every 250 years) and, on the one planet that orbits it, the Spiders, a nonhuman technological race. Then there's the fact that the Qeng Ho expedition to this star is not the only one. The Emergents have also arrived, a disparate human civilization that possesses its own dark secrets and strengths. 

After their so ominous introduction, it's not that surprising when the Emergents prove villainous and betray the Qeng Ho they'd pretended to coexist with. The Qeng Ho expedition must not only struggle to survive under the Emergent's tyranny but also, in Pham Nuwen's case, struggle to find a way to finally overcome the necessity of these endless and unwinnable life and death struggles. Nuwen, though, is not the only one striving.

Nuwen's counterpart in the space borne part of the story is Tomas Nau, the Emergent's leader, who has reached his own solution with the aid of Focus, an Emergent science that allows once-free individuals to be turned into hyper efficient slaves. This transcendence through cruelty is efficient, allowing not only short term miracles but also the long term coordination and stability that would be needed to truly enact the kind of justice and greatness throughout space that Nuwen envisions. But, though he's initially drawn to use of the Focused, Nuwen eventually realizes that the cost is too high and that any utopia created with such inhumanity at its center is not worthy of its own immortality.

The far opposite of Nau's practicality only approach might be Sherkaner Underhill's. Sherkaner's one of the sentient spider-like creatures that the whole story revolves around, but his role isn't that of a prize passively sitting by while his betters fight over him. No, Sherkaner's busy with his mad ideas, playing the role of the resident and eccentric mad genius, spouting out a thousand flights of brilliancy and fancy a second and then moving on before they're all the way out of his mouth, a tireless flirting around what might just be possible without ever letting the difficulties of reality in, a job that falls those around him to face in order to make use of his mind.

It is, eventually, something like Sherkaner's method that triumphs. No matter how well meaning or ruthless we are, Vinge shows us that we alone are not enough to triumph over time, fate, and inevitability. No, for that we need technology and an endless search for what is possible. In the end, the On/Off star doesn't give Pham Nuwen the answers, but it does show him that answers are not impossible, and, as readers of A Fire Upon the Deep know, that is eventually enough to get him (and all of us?) the rest of the way. As Nuwen himself puts it, "We've finally found something from outside all our limits. It's a tiny glimpse, shreds and drags of brightest glory." (p. 770)

Tying into all this is actually the question of classification. I've seen A Deepness in the Sky often called Hard Science Fiction. That's, well, rather bizarre. Let me remind you, oh venerable and impossible to pin down internet classifiers, that this is a novel that contains a star that turns itself off every once in a while and genuine antigravity, to name just the two most obvious case-breakers. My point here goes beyond simple quibbling with genres, though. A Deepness in the Sky is not a work grounded in the current trends of scientific thought, and one could go so far as to say that that's the entire point of it. This is not a novel about what we know, but rather about what we don't know, and Vinge is damn careful throughout to divorce it from the strict boundaries of 21^st century plausibility. As such, and making full use of Clarke's third law and all that goes with it, Vinge makes frequent references to the "magic" of such incomprehensible things things, be they the On/Off star (p. 197), the previous and inconceivably advanced prior dwellers on Arachna (p. 254), or even Focus technology (p. 294). There's even a mention of the Weird (which, though this is certainly not Horror in either its methods or its mindset, is a rather related field) in the form of a reference to your typical Cthulhonic horror (p. 297).

But, my thousand plus word reveling in Vinge's fascinating thematic arc now past, there's also a story here, and, though I've no doubt done my inadvertent best to convince you otherwise with all my blathering, it's not a pretentious one at all. At its best, it's fantastic. Vinge plots like a hunting hound given flight, free to go anywhere he can imagine and downright damned if he won't explore ever interesting nook, cranny, and consequence of what he's dreamed up. But there are flaws, too, and some are, alas, quite grievous. In my review of A Fire Upon the Deep, I said that "Vinge’s characters, and even his plots, are well overshadowed by his ideas" and that "once just about all’s explained and understood […] a bit of the excitement leaves the affair." In A Deepness in the Sky, we, alas, reach that point far sooner, a likely result of the novel being far more stationary, with much less stage space, and so running out of new and totally out there sights to throw at us far sooner. Once that point's reached, and with the exception of Pham Nuwen's flashbacks, things are up to the plotting and the characters. And things don't go nearly as well.

Once its fantastic opening is done, and once we've settled into its middle section, A Deepness in the Sky proceeds to trudge along for a truly incredible amount of time. There is a climax coming, of course, but we know roughly what shape it'll take from a quarter or a third of the way through, and the vast majority of the character's actions aren't so much bringing it about as they are talking about what they'll do when it hits them of its own volition. This idle and often almost eventless pacing is highlighted by the timescale. Years and years pass over the novel's course, which just seems to turn the character's profitless determination and motionless enthusiasm into, well, nothing at all. Then there's the bewildering way that so many of the novel's intermediate game changers happen entirely off screen and are only alluded to in passing. This is bad aboard the ships, where we spend the majority of our time, but is far worse on the Spiders' world of Arachna, where gaps and skips leave the villain developing somewhere totally out of view and inconsequential feeling and, because of it, undefined by anything but uninteresting blanket statements like Whatever was evil, Pedure was very good at it. (p. 583)

Characters in general prove, if not a problem, not exactly a strength. Like in A Fire Upon the Deep, they're wholly ruled by the forces around them, but here there are long periods where none of those forces are particularly evident and we're left with not much but the characters themselves sitting around. Vinge is decent at creating believable and realistic individuals, but, whether by design or by virtue of falling short, the reader never comes to grow close to any of them. This works for characters like Pham Nuwen and Sherkaner Underhill, both of which are too much larger than life and to scheming to serve as easy points of reader identification, but it does end up leaving the work without any real emotional center, with a bunch of characters that make certainly well realized minor characters but none that the reader ever truly lives through.

Despite these flaws, though, A Deepness in the Sky is a stunning and expansive read. It's not quite as breathtaking or simply excellent as its predecessor, but it still does show off Vinge's skill and imagination, still stretches out and smashes (delightful!) holes in your imagination. Though A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are separate enough to be read individually, their combined effect shows both the possibilities for greatness and for disaster in the author's vision of the future, and each is a daring and powerful work of Science Fiction. Put in order, the two show a probable arc for technology's progress. Most of this novel is a seemingly endless stagnation that follows that technology's brief arrival, but just because the answers are hard to find does not mean that they are not there, and Vinge seems sure that technology will eventually able us to succeed at our most fundamental goals.