The Children of the Sky (Zones of Thought) Mass Market Paperback – April 24, 2012

Two of the best science fiction books of the last few decades were written by Vernor Vinge. These are the classic titles A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky (see MadProfessah reviews by clicking on the links.) These books were published in 1992 and 2000, respectively and are now generally described as being part of the Zones of Thought series. They both won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in the year of their release. Now, nearly 20 years after the first book in the series, Vinge has published a sequel called The Children of the Sky set in the exact same setting as A Fire Upon The Deep, with several of the characters from the earlier books returning, albeit in a time which is 10 years past the events in the first book.Most fans are usually disappointed when a long-awaited sequel to a beloved book is finally produced. The reasons for this are unsurprising; in the intervening years both the audience and the author have both aged and changed and thus it is very difficult to recapture that spark which inflamed readers the first time. Happily, in the case of The Children of the Sky, Vinge is able to seemlessly drop us right back into the world he created with A Fire Upon the Deep decades before as if only a few moments had passed by.The basics of the story are that a horrible disaster has befallen civilization. In Vinge's Universe there are Zones of space in which different levels of technology are possible. There is the Slow Zone, where faster-than-light speed is not possible due to the limitations on computational complexity and speeds, the Beyond in which FTL travel and communication is possible and the Transcend where the beings are so advanced they are for all intents and purposes Gods. These Zones of Thought are not sharp delineations and there is some variation even among the Zones. For example it's possible (and devastating) for planets to slip from one zone to the other, causing functional technological levels to vary by thousands of years of development in just a few seconds. In A Fire Upon The Deep a long-dormant evil intelligence (known as The Blight) is awakened in the Beyond and begins to cause unimaginable havoc to the civilized species who inhabit the Zone, resulting in the deaths of billions. A space ship carrying a few hundred children in "sleepboxes" (suspended animation) crashes on a planet and that story revolved around how the brother and sister Jefri and Johanna Olsndot survive their first contact with the intelligent species which inhabit the planet, called Tines World. The Olsndot siblings' parents were part of the scientific team that discovered and accidentally released The Blight into the Beyond. The Tines are 4-legged furry animals resembling dogs who communicate telepathically and through subsonic signals and when spatially close in groups of four or more form a group intelligence equivalent to humans. The Tines have a basic medieval form of society when suddenly they are exposed to the existence of modern technology from The Beyond. Additionally, a space ship (called Out of Band) from the Beyond lands on Tines World in order to rescue the children and get information on where the Blight came from in order to protect and save the rest of civilization from its devastating effects.In The Children of the Sky, Tines World is now firmly in the Slow Zone and ten years have passed since the events of the A Fire Upon The Deep and most of the children who were in coldsleep have been awakened and are starting to form a society with the realization they may never get back to The Beyond and ever experience those familiar technologies again. One of the fascinating aspects of A Fire Upon The Deep (and A Deepness in the Sky) is the incredibly detailed and complex society that Vinge is able to produce, in a completely alien context. Here we have humans interacting with dog-like hive minds and the characters are drawn with such fully realized motivations and emotions that you are forced to empathise with them. Another feature of Vinge's writing is the ambiguity of his characters, especially his villains. In A Fire Upon The Deep it is not very easy to distinguish who the "good guys" are from the "bad guys" and it is a central tension of the book, which returns in the sequel Children of the Sky that just because we are getting a first-person perspective on events from a particular character does not necessarily mean that that character is a force for "good." In fact, central to Children of the Sky is who gets to decide what is "good" or the best course of action for a group of people? How are those decisions made? There are (at least) two main factions and they both feel they are doing the correct thing for the Children and Tines World as a whole. Eventually it becomes clear that one faction is willing to commit horrific crimes (of violence, kidnapping and murder) to achieve its ends and so the reader (or at least This Reader) made a choice as to which faction to support. Then the tension is will the good guys win or will the bad guys win? This is quite a suspenseful question which basically kept me up reading until 5am to finish the book, and by the end several questions (but notably not all of them) are answered, which leads most observers and reviewers to think that there will probably be a sequel (or sequels) forthcoming.Hopefully, it won't take another 20 years for Vernor Vinge to write it!Title: The Children of the Sky.Author: Vernor Vinge.Length: 448 pages.Publisher: TOR Books.Published: October 11, 2011.OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).PLOT: A.IMAGERY: A-.IMPACT: A-.WRITING: A.

I consider Fire Upon the Deep & Deepness of the Sky to be among the greatest sci fi books ever written. So it was disappointing for me to see how inferior this book was. It is simply not in the same league.Positives:Hard Sci Fi: The world is interesting as always, and Vinge expands on the Tines by giving a variation of their species. That was well done. He further expands on the technology, its limitations in the Slow Zone and all the impossible technology the "Children" (survivors of the crash) miss so much. Also interesting. His creation of the alien Tines is thorough and mostly well done, although I felt their civilization bears far too much similarity to our own considering how very different they are from us. Still, I enjoyed them.Plot: Plot was actually both positive and negative. Sometimes, the plot would race forward and you would hang on the edge of your seat. But other times - most times - it was a chore to read; all in all, very haphazard and amateurish. Many parts dragged, or were highly repetitive. It felt like a case of a lazy or indulgent editor. With top editing, Vinge would have been told to re-write much of it and scrap other parts. Many sections were utterly unnecessary - the same thing would be said later, or the conflict presented was repeated later - and this was especially frustrating given that IT DOESN'T HAVE AN ENDING!Negatives:The main negative was what I just said: No ending. I mean exactly what I say, not "no ending for some major points" I mean "no ending." It just ends in the middle of the major conflicts. Really this is just inexcusable, particularly since so much of the book could have been removed with zero difference in plot or conflict. I really, really, really resent books that end without resolution. It is supremely self-indulgent of the author - sorry, guys, I was just too lazy to finish this! - and it is dishonest to present the thing as a discrete book.Rainbows End ALSO lacked an ending - no resolution of ANY of the main plot questions - and we still haven't seen a sequel. So it's especially annoying given that this is the SECOND book Vinge disappoints.Characterizations: His villains are preposterous. They are just Evil in a silly, cartoonish bad guy way. As in, 'Bwa ha ha, I vill take over ze planet!' One of the humans is supposed to be some political genius simply because his parents were -- this was another very silly thing Vinge kept insisting that if your parents are x, you are x. He did this with every Child character. For instance, another child's parents were the equivalent of janitors, with practical hands on skills, so therefore, ipso facto, his son was exactly the same. I don't know where Vinge learned genetics, but he needs to go back to school for this one. Anyway, the character that was supposed to be this political genius plotted on a cartoonish level so that you could see his machinations a mile away. Actually, in some ways he exhibited the same foolish hubris the Straumli folks were supposed to have, but rather than pursue that angle, Vinge just kept asserting - via other characters - that he was a genius and also 'evil.'Most other characters are the same level of shallowness, particularly the humans. (I was reminded of Asimov, whose robots often seemed to have greater depth than his humans. Here, the Tines were more complex than the humans. Back to the preposterous 'genetics,' Vinge makes this big deal that the Children's parents were supposed 'geniuses' so therefore the children are 'geniuses' too. This was cloying and not believable. Yes, if your parents are very intelligent, you stand a higher change of being smart too-but not a guarantee by any means. If you have a large enough sample, you should find a range of intelligence in the "Children" even if we accept the parents were all supposed geniuses. But even that assertion was just annoying. Who CARES if the parents or "Children" are all 'geniuses"? How does this forward the plot in ANY way? According to the previous book, they let loose the Blight due to Hubris. This has very little to do with "genius" and indeed the 'genius' part makes it less interesting as it is not universal (and anyway, their whole society funded their Lab so the hubris was in their civilization.)Ravna was also really annoying to me. After Ravna does a series of stupid, passive things, another character tells her she's not a 'fool' but rather a pure heart. Um, where did this Ravna come from? She certainly wasn't like this in Fire. I felt like Vinge wanted her to act in such a way that would further the plot he wanted to write, so he changed her character. In other words, characters (also Jeff & Amdi) arose from plot necessity rather than the other way around as a pro should write.I'd recommend the book but with the caveats that a) it has no ending b) large parts are very slow and weak c) some characters are really silly. You will need accept that this is not up to Vinge's usually brilliant standards. You can still extract an mildly interesting read, with some very good parts, and a few great parts.I wish Vinge would get a better, more honest and brutal editor, someone who is willing to tell him the truth rather than merely flattering him. He has the potential to be an absolutely brilliant sci fi writer. It's painful to see his gifts so squandered.

First off this is not a bad book. it's not a great book, but it is an enjoyable romp with some familiar characters. The massive grumping by some that it is a poor sequel to A Fire Upon The Deep is justified only in as much as we all expect the next book to be more epic than the last, Vinge has taken it down several notches on the space opera scale and made a very different and more human novel, and yet the existential threat is still there. I look forward to see if Mr Vinge is taking us somewhere with this, I hope so. We shall see.

Arrived promptly from the USA, in absolutely immaculate condition.

No dust cover but book is perfect

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.

If I could give it zero stars, I would. As a novel unto itself it is an excruciatingly boring read. I literally had to force myself to keep reading it, and I just gave up around three quarters in.However, it is once you observe it as a sequel to the brilliant A Fire Upon The Deep that the true extent of this novel's tragedy becomes evident. Where A Fire Upon The Deep was an imaginative space opera with so many ideas that each could be a book unto itself, endlessly twisting and turning while taking you through what is probably one of the most imaginative plots of SciFi, The Children Of The Sky is just endlessly flat line of nothing happening at all. The only moment where at least a shadow of former grandeur shows is just that....a moment. A short chapter that promises the book will pick up the pace and return to the former glory. And then the chapter is ower and we're back to the boring medieval politics and conspiracies.It is sad that such a great story has been led to such a dead end direction.