A Fire Upon the Deep

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(as of Jul 10, 2025 18:18:23 UTC – Details)


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, which began the Zones of Thought series, is the winner of the 1993 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Customers say

Customers praise the book’s creativity, with one noting its imaginative possibilities throughout the story, and appreciate its thought-provoking elements, particularly the innovative concept of zones of thought. The characters are well-developed and three-dimensional, and customers find it an awesome read that keeps them turning pages. While some find it extremely well thought out, others say it’s sometimes hard to understand, and though the story is generally fast-paced, some find it slow to start. The book receives mixed feedback about its length, with several customers finding it overly long.

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