Masterworks Spotlight: A Fire Upon the Deep

Here’s your first SF Masterwork for 2016. And since 2016 is a Leap Year and has more days than most other years, what better way to kick it off than with a book that has more . . .  everything! . . . than most other books: Vernor Vinge‘s A Fire Upon the Deep.

The Hugo Award-winning masterpiece of modern space opera – 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 ‘zones of thought’, but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artefact 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 party, not entirely composed of humans, must free the children – and retrieve a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.

A Fire Upon the Deep is available as an SF Masterworks paperback and a Gateway eBook (which will be updated very soon with the Masterworks cover and Ken MacLeod’s wonderful new introduction).

You can read more about Vernor Vinge in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.