This hefty novel returns to the universe of Vernor Vinge's 1993 Hugo winner A Fire Upon the Deep--but 30,000 years earlier. The story has the same sense of epic vastness despite happening mostly in one isolated solar system. Here there's a world of intelligent spider creatures who traditionally hibernate through the "Deepest Darkness" of their strange variable sun's long "off" periods, when even the atmosphere freezes. Now, science offers them an alternative... Meanwhile, attracted by spider radio transmissions, two human starfleets come exploring--merchants hoping for customers and tyrants who want slaves. Their inevitable clash leaves both fleets crippled, with the power in the wrong hands, which leads to a long wait in space until the spiders develop exploitable technology. Over the years Vinge builds palpable tension through multiple storylines and characters. In the sky, hopes of rebellion against tyranny continue despite soothing lies, brutal repression, and a mental bondage that can convert people into literal tools. Down below, the engagingly sympathetic spiders have their own problems. In flashback, we see the grandiose ideals and ultimate betrayal of the merchant culture's founder, now among the human contingent and pretending to be a senile buffoon while plotting, plotting... Major revelations, ironies, and payoffs follow. A powerful story in the grandest SF tradition. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk


From Library Journal
A war between two rival civilizations over trading rights to the planet Arachna results in the virtual enslavement of the Qeng Ho by the victorious Emergent culture. As the Spider-folk of Arachna evolve in their customary cyclical pattern, unaware of the threat that lies in their near future, a few Qeng Ho rebels work desperately to free themselves and save Arachna from conquest. This prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep (Tor, 1992) demonstrates Vinge's capacity for meticulously detailed culture-building and grand-scale sf drama. Recommended for most sf collections.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
A distant prequel to Vinge's 1992 masterpiece, A Fire Upon the Deep, with a single character in common. Some 8,000 years hence, the Qeng Ho interstellar trading fleet investigates the enigmatic OnOffa star that shines for 35 years, then extinguishes for 250; once understood, its weird physics may yield an improved star drive. Meantime, its single planet harbors intelligent aliens, the Spiders, divided into warring factions, but thought to be descendants of an advanced starfaring civilization. During the Dark, they survive frozen solid in pools of ice. Also arriving at OnOff are the acquisitive, ambitious Emergents. Cooperating at first, the Emergents later mount a treacherous sneak attack, defeating the traders and enslaving the survivors. The Emergents' overwhelming advantage is Focus, the result of a brain-infecting virus that can be induced to secrete mind-controlling chemicals. Those Focused are instilled with unswerving loyalty. The Emergents are led by a smiling deceiver, Tomas Nau, his sadistic assistant, Ritser Brughel, and personnel genius Anne Reynolt, once Nau's greatest adversary, now enslaved and Focused. The Qeng Ho resistance is thin, consisting of legendary genius and onetime leader Pham Nuwen, whose failed dream of a Qeng Ho galactic empire forced him into exile; young trader Ezh Vinh; and, secretly, Ezh's love, linguist Trixia Bonsol, now Focused and translating the Spiders' language. Both the Emergent and Qeng Ho fleets lost interstellar capability during the battle, so the humans must wait until the Spiders develop technology advanced enough to help them. As the OnOff star reignites, the Spiders emerge from their ``deepnesses'' and, galvanized by genius Sherkaner Underhill, burst into a frenzy of technological development. Nau plans to trick the Spiders into destroying themselves in a nuclear war. Pham, meanwhile, schemes to defeat Nau but sees in Focus the key to realizing his old dreams of empire. Huge, intricate, and ingenious, with superbly realized aliens: a chilling, spellbinding dramatization of the horrors of slavery and mind control. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Huge, intricate, and ingenious, with superbly realized aliens:a chilling spellbinding dramatization of the horrors of slavery and mind control."--Kirkus Reviews (pointer review)

"A feast of imagination. As always, Vinge satisfies with richly imagined worlds and a full-flavored story."--Greg Bear

"Wonderfully engaging!"--Cleveland Plain Dealer

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
A richly textured hard-SF novel that combines adept characterization with action and insight into alien civilizations, Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is a provocative portrayal of an outlandish world on the edge of great advancement that must stave off civil war and exploitation from other planets. A story set in the same universe as Vinge's Hugo Award-winning A Fire Upon the Deep, the highly charged A Deepness in the Sky is an even more complex and involving examination of human expansion into distant galaxies. Here the balance between trade, corruption, and deliberate destruction is blurred as three separate societies come into fiery contact.

The Qeng Ho, a fleet of interstellar traders, are in a race with the Emergents, another band of traders, to the planet Arachna. Located in the On/Off star system, a place where the sun inexplicably goes out for two centuries before reigniting for another two, Arachna is the home of spiderlike inhabitants known as the Arachnids; they are only the third nonhuman sentient creatures found in the universe. Although the Arachnids are in hibernation for another year, their civilization remains on the verge of taking great technological leaps, making them the perfect race for the trading worlds to control. The Emergents are outwardly friendly to the Qeng Ho and are willing to share the ripe planet, but not all the Qeng Ho commanding officers are willing to trust them.

Eventually, after a brutal Emergent ambush destroys half the Qeng Ho starships and troops, Ezr Vinh, a young Qeng Ho crew member, is ordered by theEmergentsto take command of the remainder of the fleet. While his love, Trixia Bonsol, remains hospitalized under the cryptic term of "focused," Ezr must do whatever he can to save his people, even if in doing so he looks like a traitorous Emergent lackey. Pham Nuwen, a mysterious old man who is at once a historical figure of the Qeng Ho but not truly one of them, remains an enigma as he works to free the enslaved forces.

Vinge's narrative splits into several threads as we follow various characters through a diverse series of events. In a flashback scene we witness the last few years of Arachnid life before the coming of the Deep Dark, when the entire population of the warring world settles deep into the frozen earth to hibernate for the two centuries before the coming of the New Sun. Sherkaner Underhill is a brilliant scientist who attempts to do something none of the spider folk has ever dreamed of doing before: Through the use of chemicals and machinery, he plans to awaken before his natural time in an effort to catch the other side unaware. Instead, upon awakening from the Darkness, he and his team discover that aliens are in the process of ravaging their world as their fellow Arachnids sleep.

With great ingenuity and proficient command, Vinge winds these elements together into a powerful and cohesive plot, tightening the meshed accounts of conflicts and slavery into a gripping, finely honed tale of suspense. From its most basic components to the full tapestry of the wars at hand, the multilayered and epic structure presents ingenious speculations of alien life, with skillfully interwoven parallel story lines full of high drama and action-packed escapism. Vinge is a master at using scientific theory to create a real sense of apprehension, never letting up on the intrigue throughout the entire lengthy novel. The Qeng Ho fight against not only their servitude but also their own despair, sorrow, and loss as they watch the remnants of their identities being absorbed into the Emergent community. The Arachnids are fearful of the alien invaders as well as their own changing destiny in the galaxy, realizing that a new path must be taken in order to preserve the past. Character and culture are never lost in the dramatic and moving quality of the book.

High-octane concepts abound throughout, covering a wide range of ground, from minor details of the Arachnid's poetry and belief systems to the escalating psychological persuasions of the Emergents upon the remaining Qeng Ho. These particulars do more than merely flesh out the plot twists, as Vinge capably threads these ideas into the narrative and breathes memorable existence into this universe. His insight and ability to build tension will carry the reader through devastation and captivity into the heart of redemption. This is space opera taken to an entirely different level, full of engaging, immense, and bizarre wonders.
— barnesandnoble.com

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Vernor Vinge's Hugo Award-winning novel, A Fire Upon the Deep , established him as one of the field's elite. Now Vinge returns to that cosmos of infinite variety in a spellbinding novel of masterful suspense and originality; a visionary epic with the complexity and breadth of the universe, and the joy and pain of the human heart.

Thirty thousand years before the events of A Fire Upon The Deep , Pham Nuwen is living in anonymity among the Qeng Ho interstellar trading fleet. In high orbit above the planet Arachna, they wait for the awakening of its dormant population, the Spiders, who have burrowed deep into the planet, awaiting the relighting of the On/Off star their planet orbits. For when light returns, Arachna will at long last explode into a Golden Age of technology and commerce.

But the slumbering Spiders' vulnerability has attracted another lurking presence-the Emergents, a band of traders whose plans for Arachna are more sinister than anything the Qeng Ho could envision.

Reluctant to share their spoils with the Qeng Ho, the Emergents unleash an attack unlike any seen in the Qeng Ho's millennia-long history of exploration, reducing their fleet to serfdom￯﾿ﾽand then to something far worse.

Reaching into memories so old and painful he can barely recall them, Pham gathers the other "survivors" about him and makes a final attempt to be worthy of a reputation as ancient and storied as the history of the Qeng Ho itself. But time is running out, for soon the Emergents' assault will strip Arachna bare.

As Pham's underground resistance cell struggles against its torturers in space, a wondrously gifted clan of Spiders on the planet below fights another battle-to advance their technology quickly enough to defeat their terrestrial foes, and to somehow overcome the invisible enemy lurking above.

FROM THE CRITICS

Gerald Jonas

...[S]hrewdly interlocking plot lines with [a] surprising yet satisfying resolution. —The New York Times Book Review

Russell Letson - Locus

...Vernor Vinge adds another title to the canon of Big Picture space adventures that Gardner Dozois has called New Space Opera....presents a careful mix of the dire and the comfy...

Peter Heck - Asimov's Science Fiction

...[A] reader needs little or no familiarity with the author's previous work to pick this volume up and enjoy it....[W]hile the backstory, designed to tie this novel in with the previous book, may disorient a reader fresh to Vinge's work, the story does eventually work on its own terms....Very strongly recommended.

Publishers Weekly

In this prequel to his Hugo Award-winning space opera, A Fire upon the Deep), Vinge takes us to an era some thousands of years in our future, when humanity has just begun its exploration of intergalactic space and has as yet no inkling of the complex physics that rules the galaxy. Although human beings have settled on dozens of worlds and created societies ancient enough to have achieved greatness and collapse several times over, only the most limited traces have been found of alien cultures. Now, however, the Qeng Ho, a band of human interstellar traders, have discovered the Spiders, an alien race poised to enter its own space age. Unfortunately, the Qeng Ho must compete with another, less beneficent spacefaring human culture, the Emergents, who are bent on conquest rather than trade. The Spiders have just come out of a two-century-long suspended animation made necessary by the fluctuations of their erratic sun. Their culture is entering a period of explosive growth that could end in tragedy, due in part to a dangerous nuclear arms race and in part to the Emergents' desire to enslave them. Vinge, a professor of mathematics and computer science (at San Diego State), is among the very best of the current crop of hard SF writers, producing work that is not only fast-paced and intellectually challenging, but also stylishly written and centered on carefully drawn characters. This long, action-packed novel should fully engage any SF reader's sense of wonder, and likely will win the author his sixth Hugo nomination.

Library Journal