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Advance praise for "The Children of the Sky"
"Imagine bootstrapping a fallen civilization into transcendence using nothing but a collection of hive-mind Machiavellis, a crippled hyperadvanced spaceship, and a pack of surly, scheming orphaned adolescents. Oh, and then there's the vengeful god ramscooping itself to relativistic speeds a mere thirty light years away. Vinge's explosive imagination and deft storytelling make epics sail past like hummingbirds--you'll steal daytime moments to read more, and lie awake at night contemplating what you've read." --Cory Doctorow, bestselling and award-winning author of "Little Brother"
"Vernor Vinge's stories and novels have always surprised and entertained me, and "The Children of the Sky "carries on that grand tradition!" --Greg Bear, bestselling author of "Hull Zero Three"
"No one has ever crafted a more complex, fascinating, and strangely realistic alien race than Vernor Vinge's marvelous Tines." --David Brin," "bestselling author of "The Postman "and "Startide Rising"
Raves for "A Fire Upon the Deep "by Vernor Vinge
"This is big-scale science fiction at its best." --"The Denver Post"
"With uninterrupted pacing, suspense without contrivance, and deftly drawn aliens who can be pleasantly comical without becoming cute, Vinge offers heart-pounding, mind-expanding science fiction at its best." --"Publishers Weekly, " Starred Review
"There are not too many novels that leave this reader screaming violently for more. Vernor Vinge's has done so." --"Locus"
"When I was young and had to write my address in a school notebook, I would begin with my street and apartment number and then go on through city, county, state, country and continent in a litany of ever more grandiose place names that did not end until I reached 'Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe.' In those days, it thrilled me that my small corner of the Bronx was just one part of the vastness I could see in the sky at night. This is the fe
Product Description
Ten years have passed on Tines World, where Ravna Bergnsdot and a number of human children ended up after a disaster that nearly obliterated humankind throughout the galaxy. Ravna and the pack animals for which the planet is named have survived a war, and Ravna has saved more than one hundred children who were in cold-sleep aboard the vessel that brought them. While there is peace among the Tines, there are those among them - and among the humans - who seek power...and no matter the cost, these malcontents are determined to overturn the fledgling civilization that has taken root since the humans landed. On a world of fascinating wonders and terrifying dangers, Vernor Vinge has created a powerful novel of adventure and discovery that will entrance the many readers of "A Fire Upon the Deep". Filled with the inventiveness, excitement, and human drama that have become hallmarks of his work, this new novel is sure to become another great milestone in Vinge's already stellar career.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I feel that "A Fire Upon The Deep" is the best SF story I have ever read, so it was always going to be a hard act to follow, as the cliché has it. Vernor Vinge's first step in that direction was "A Deepness In The Sky", a "prequel", which I also have. That isn't quite so superlative, but judged by ordinary standards it is another excellent book. Both are full of ideas, with a gripping plot and interesting characters. "Children of the Sky" is, by comparison, feeble. In "A Fire Upon The Deep" the antagonist is a transcendental being which threatens to reduce all intelligent creatures for a thousand light years every way to mindless slaves; in "A Deepness In The Sky" the humans must fight a dictatorship which can take control of their individual minds, while on the planet below an alien race is rushing through twentieth-century technology and on the verge of a nuclear war. In "Children of the Sky" the antagonists are a bunch of silly conspiracy theorists. Unlike "Deepness", the sections of the book that deal with human-human interactions are almost entirely tiresome: only when we are learning more about the Tines and their world does it become interesting and fun. The end of the story doesn't even resolve much: it looks as if Vinge has left himself hooks on which to hang another sequel. My own opinion is that, if he has another chunk of story in mind, he would have been much better putting it into this book and cutting out a lot of the material that just holds up the plot. I also felt that the "crusherbushes" were a bit of a deus ex machina, an implausible cheat to get the characters out of a sticky situation. Usually Vinge is much more rigorous than that.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favourite books. Reading this sequel I came to believe VV didn't know what is was that worked in that book. In Children of the Sky there is no sense of a galactic stage. No space opera. No practical theology or variable technology or net of a million lies. No sense of awe. The setting is all on the ground, the theme is a squalid little power struggle, the timescales, events and characters are all very mundane. OK, so there is an alien race, suitably alien, but with very little rewriting you could have had a kitchen-sink contempory realism soap opera. But at that point people would notice the poor characterisation and dull plot and it still wouldn't work. It was boring. I am so sad.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
"A Fire Upon The Deep" is one of the best SF novels of the last 30 years. It has a brilliant setting that immediately captures the imagination of the reader, perhaps the most stunning conceptions of alien lifeforms ever put in writing, and a plot that is engaging enough, albeit in the usual "quest against primordial evil" format of old fashioned space opera and thus possessing all its dramatic limitations, particularly in the denouement. Vernor Vinge was never much of a writer, literary speaking, but his writing there displayed an economy of words and a sense of humour that transcended the basic clunkiness of his prose.
Sadly, it is clear that this was an aberration. Already in the prequel "A Deepness In The Sky" many of the faults that doom this ultimate sequel were beginning to show: a slow and rambling plot that was frankly uninteresting, "good" characters that were emotionally unstable and inexplicably stupid, one-dimensional caricatures of "evil" sadistic masterminds, more clunky writing - and so, so much of it. In the "Children of the Sky", Vinge has given free rein to those aspects and the result is unbearably bad. The good guys are even stupider and more unstable, and the bad guys are all evil geniuses who can do no wrong -until they screw up in their big moment in the worst Bond villain tradition of course. The plot is slow, rambling and uninteresting, and the writing ponderous and completely devoid of any elegance. There is no evidence of Vinge's ideas that once seemed so fresh and far reaching. In fact they have all but ran out. This could have been easily condensed into a (poor) short story. As a full-scale novel it's one of the worst books I've ever read, in any genre. Avoid.
Sadly, it is clear that this was an aberration. Already in the prequel "A Deepness In The Sky" many of the faults that doom this ultimate sequel were beginning to show: a slow and rambling plot that was frankly uninteresting, "good" characters that were emotionally unstable and inexplicably stupid, one-dimensional caricatures of "evil" sadistic masterminds, more clunky writing - and so, so much of it. In the "Children of the Sky", Vinge has given free rein to those aspects and the result is unbearably bad. The good guys are even stupider and more unstable, and the bad guys are all evil geniuses who can do no wrong -until they screw up in their big moment in the worst Bond villain tradition of course. The plot is slow, rambling and uninteresting, and the writing ponderous and completely devoid of any elegance. There is no evidence of Vinge's ideas that once seemed so fresh and far reaching. In fact they have all but ran out. This could have been easily condensed into a (poor) short story. As a full-scale novel it's one of the worst books I've ever read, in any genre. Avoid.
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