Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky (Tor, 1999) wouldn’t be a tragedy if it existed alone. It’s a tragedy because it’s a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep (Tor, 1992) and the reader knows things about the universe the characters do not know. All the other things I can think of that make this trick work are historical or mythological. Deepness does it entirely within SF and entirely within Vinge’s invented universe. I think it’s an incredible achievement.
In A Fire Upon the Deep we learn early on that our immediate cosmic neighborhood is divided into Zones, working outwards from the Galactic core. In each Zone, cognition and technology work better. So in the core it isn’t possible to be intelligent at all, in the Slow Zone it’s possible to be as intelligent as a human but no better and you can’t go faster than light, in the Beyond you can have FTL and anti-gravity and enhanced intelligences, and in the Transcend you can have godlike intelligences and Clarke’s Law tech. The novel takes place in the Beyond, with an excursion to the Slow Zone, and concerns a problem from the Low Transcend risking upsetting the whole thing. (Vinge apparently thought up this brilliant universe as a way around his idiotic Singularity non-problem, which just goes to show that a) constraints can produce excellent art and b) every cloud has a silver lining.)
The whole of Deepness takes place in the Slow Zone, among characters, human and alien, who have absolutely no idea that their universe works that way. They don’t know there are other Zones out there, they think they’re part of a baroque and complex civilization that stretches for light-years, that’s held together by a thin skein of trading spaceships.
The universe they believe they live in has a long history of Failed Dreams — AI, FTL, really good life extension techniques — which have kept receding as they are chased. There’s a profession of “Programmer/Archaeologist” where your job is to excavate the underlayers of the old programs your computers are running — and they’re very old; in some cases, there are slower-than-light starships running on Linux.
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The plot of Deepness is an exciting one, with aliens going through an technological revolution, with two groups of opposed humans trying to use them and each other, and with tiny incremental advances in technology meaning a huge amount. Whole civilizations are perishing in the background because they’ve got as far as it’s possible to go–their planets are at the point where one little bit of overload will bring it all down around their ears. There’s mindwipe, and the fascinating idea of Focus (enslaving people and fixing their brains in one direction so that they become obsessive about it), and a carefully timed revolt, and secrets among the aliens. There are great characters and a great character-driven plot, and I didn’t even mention how terrifically alien and yet entirely comprehensible the aliens are, who have evolved on a planet around a star that goes out regularly and freezes even their air. There’s a happy ending.
But in the end what brings me back to Deepness again and again isn’t any of that but the terrible tragedy that surrounds that happy ending, that Pham Nuwen wants to find the secret at the heart of the galaxy and he sets off in the wrong direction to find it.
At the end of the movie Far From Heaven the hero, a black guy in a segregated 1950s US, leaves the white heroine and gets on a train in Hartford, Connecticut, towards the US South. “No!” I said in an anguished whisper. I wanted him to walk across the platform and get on the train going the other way. In Montreal even then he could have married the girl. He’s heading in the wrong direction and he doesn’t even know there’s a possible way out.
It’s a heck of an achievement for Vinge to make me feel the same way in an entirely SFnal universe, and without a word about it in the book.
Brilliant, Jo.
Thank you, Jo, that was a really beautiful piece about a character who’s haunted me ever since I realized just how ironic a tragedy his was. And I agree, that, despite both books having enough fascinating ideas each for ten other novels (the notion of Focus is a lot more than just a plot device; it’s a new and sympathetic way to look at a mental state that is very familiar to many of the people who read the book, including me), the tragedy is the thing that ultimately brings me back to them every few years to re-read and enjoy.
When the book came out there was a very interesting discussion about Focus on rec.arts.sf.written with people saying they’d use it themselves if it was available and reversible. Heck, I’d use it myself… except that the social implications for it existing really could lead directly to what we see in Emergent society.
Focus, under the control of the person experiencing it, seems a bit like what some people say they get, or expect to get, from certain stimulants. I’m not thinking of people with ADD so much as “normal” people who want serious energy and single-mindedness.
The danger in both is that the user doesn’t have as much control as they would want. And part of that is what you focus on: somewhere I read about a man who enjoyed amphetamines, and whose predictable reaction to using them was to go into a whirlwind of housecleaning activity. As far as I recall, he didn’t generally feel that he needed something to help him clean: he liked the uppers, and the clean house was an acceptable side effect.
Jo – Needless to say I agree with this completely. Whenever the topic of whether it was necessary to read FIRE before DEEPNESS came up in rec.arts.sf.written I would always strenuously argue that there was no reason, none, not to read FIRE first and that failing to do so was a terrible mistake.
The earliest I can find my reference to this is in 3bb13247.373954686@nntp.we.mediaone.net in September of 2001 right around the time the world went crazy. Anyway, you’d be surprised how many normally right-thinking folk don’t seem to see how much is lost if you haven’t read A FIRE UPON THE DEEP before the “prequel”.
Good to read your words again, Jo, rasfw and rasff haven’t been the same.
Yep, that’s it. Very nicely said. And your 1950s interracial marriage example is really chilling. I hope that helps bring it home who don’t get that directly from the books.
“idiotic Singularity non-problem” – you can’t make an aside like that and do a follow-up post explaining why you think it’s an idiotic non-problem. Not that I necessarily disagree…
Another cool piece of sf furniture Vinge introduced, besides Focus, was his theory of the Inevitable Fate of Democratic Government, that interest groups will squeeze the slack out of the system until one day it all falls apart at once, like the One-Hoss Shay.
I think it’s another non-problem—competing interest groups always and inevitably squeeze new slack into the societies whose government they try to perfect, at the time time as they are optimizing the thing they care about—but it’s a cute toy for fiction anyway.
I agree with everything, EXCEPT the aside:
“Vinge apparently thought up this brilliant universe as a way around his idiotic Singularity non-problem, which just goes to show that a) constraints can produce excellent art and b) every cloud has a silver lining.”
I will argue that constraints enable excellent art. Constraints are a form of literary/artistic conflict, somewhat equivalent to writing in iambic pentameter, or painting in the impressionistic style. Great art happens when the artist uses the constraints of his or her canvas as the subtle core of the work, not merely as an impediment to be overcome.
Jo, I don’t understand your “idiotic Singularity non-problem” statement, either. I’m one of those that fears the Singularity, because I don’t think we humans will participate in it. (See my post, The Technological Singularity at Ramblings On The Future Of Humanity.)
My version of the Singularity non-problem is roughly as follows. In the Slow Zone, the Singularity is not possible. Earth is in the Slow Zone. Therefore, Vinge believes that the impossibility of the Singularity is compatible with our current knowledge of the universe. Therefore, he could just as easily write fiction in which the Singularity is impossible everywhere instead of being impossible only within a few tens of thousands of light years of the centre of the galaxy.
I’ve had ADD probably since I was 13 or 14 (not actually diagnosed and treated until I was 50). Reading about Focus was like looking at my life through a funhouse mirror: distorted, but recognizably me. And the attitude of the Emergent Managers was not that different from some managers I’ve worked for in the software business. Vinge has been around the field even longer than I have, and as a professor teaching Computer Science I’m sure he’s met a lot of people from the private sector, so I think it’s pretty likely that’s a not-so-subtle dig at the way many corporations are run.
Well, that post has certainly pushed some things on to my “to re-read” list.
Very interesting, Jo. I’m actually just finishing up “Rainbows End” now and will definitely add both of these novels to my to-read list.
drplokta: interesting analysis, but I don’t think you can really claim Earth is in the slow zone. In reality there are no zones. In Vinge’s universe our zone may have more restrictions than our real-life universe has – It is never explained why AI is impossible in the slow zone.
Del, Vinge is very far from being the person who introduced the notion that democracies inevitably fall. Conservative political writers have been predicting for decades that “special interests” will destroy America. Heinlein argues along those lines in Expanded Universe. In a simpler form, the idea dates back thousands of years, to ancient Greece.
Del, avram
It may be false memory on my part, but my recollection of Deepness in the Sky is not that democracies always fail, but that any hi-tech, high population world must eventually suffer a cascade system failure, because everything they do is based on just-in-time, fully-optimized, minimum-safety margin systems. And as any systems engineer will tell you, just-in-time works great until that moment when it becomes just-didn’t-make-it. Following the cascade from the lost nail to the lost war is left as an exercise for the archeologist.
Vinge mentioned two failure modes for high tech planets: over- optimization and universal surveillance. There was nothing to indicate that this was a complete list.
The book doesn’t actually say, at any point, that Pham heads off to the center. He states in the closing pages that this is his current plan, but before pursuing it he plans to deal with the emergents and return to Arachna in 200+ years time. Plenty of time for new shit to come to light and turn around.
JoeBob: Yes, but sadly we know by the way he ends up in Relay in aFUtD that he did go in the wrong direction.
Thanks to your review, I’m reading Deepness before Fire. :-)
I didn’t see it that way. It’s an entirely different tragedy. Here’s my theory:
The presence of working antigravity on Arachna implies that it’s not in the Slow Zone – that they are in fact at the nearest edge of the Beyond. In the two hundred years between the epilogue and Pham’s prophesized return, I think that this must have been discovered. I think aDitS takes place just moments before Humanity breaks out into the Beyond for the first time. And so by the time Pham returns, he ought to know all he needs to know to not head into the Unthinking Depths.
But, we know from aFUtD that Pham never makes it to the Beyond. So, if I’m right about the other stuff, Pham must never make it back to Arachna. Only stories and histories of his life make it to be reconstructed by Old One. And therefore whatever happens at the Emergent worlds must be a tragedy.
Occam’s Razor comes into play. Do we need to multiply logical entities, in this case, tragedies?
In the novella “The Blabber”, we meet a shipment of antigravity materials from the Beyond to the Slow Zone. One character remarks that they won’t last in the Slow Zone, but they work for a while. We also see an ansible, a Transcendant artifact that communicates FTL from within the Slow Zone. It’s said to dim the local sun by about 1%. Also, in aFUtD, we see the Countermeasure manipulate the Zones, turning off the Tines star to do that.
I argue that the presence of working antigravity on Arachna, and the on-off nature of its star are related. Something on Arachna shares the property of manipulating the Zones, and also of using the energy of the local star. So Arachna can still be in the Slow Zone. Pham is proposing, after the Emergents, to head for the center of the galaxy, which is where the Wild Goose will be recovered from according to aFutD. We don’t seem to need any other tragedy other than Pham is committed to heading in exactly the wrong direction.
“I think aDitS takes place just moments before Humanity breaks out into the Beyond for the first time.”
We know, from Fire Upon The Deep, that all of humanity in the Beyond is descended from “Tuvo-Norsk” miners from Old Earth, by way of Nyjora.
The culture of the guys in Deepness – Emergents, Qeng Ho, Spiders – is completely absent, even as rumor. Thy never make it out of the Slow Zone.
So it’s 2017 now, this book has been around for years, and I’ve probably read it 20 times, both as a reader for the pure enjoyment of the thing, and as a writer trying to understand how Vinge creates such compelling books. Pham Nuwen is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction, and yes, knowing his eventual fate adds incredible depth to the universe, without ever once mentioning the other story explicitly.
Very interested to see the comments above re Blabber (which I haven’t read), On/Off and Transcend tech breaking the Zone laws, especially the further development of the idea that such tech drains power from local suns.
If we can all agree that the Distorts of Khelm are indeed the remains of something very old and powerful that is not bound by normal constraints, then consider what follows: when he disappears into the altiplano (where the ‘impossible’ anti-gravity substance Cavorite is mined, let’s not forget) Sherkaner is pretty clearly going to discover the secrets of the Distorts. He pretty much says so, if you’re paying attention: “the poor crappers [humans] think they know what is impossible… they are trapped in a cage they can’t even see.” That cage is of course the Slow Zone – and Sherkaner is setting out into a region (the altiplano) where we know the laws of that cage do not fully apply. The whole saving-the-world plot turns on Sherk pretending to be old, pathetic, lost – while secretly discovering and exploiting a prize none of the other characters even knows about. The exact same thing is happening here.
Sherkaner’s disappearance into the depths to find the truth about the Distorts (based on correct assumptions) is tragically mirrored by Pham’s disappearance into the depths of the Galactic Core on the same quest (but based on flawed assumptions). This is beautiful in itself and one of many examples of “as above, so below” structuring in these two novels (e.g. Flenser mirrors the Blight in Fire; Pham and Sherk both Lurk for a long period of time before revealing their hands at the last minute in Deepness; and the humans in general have their own “Deepness” (in the Spidery sense) in the sky, complete with coldsleep, in which both they and the Spiders wait out the years of the Dark). It’s all the more beautiful that this final, epic mirroring only becomes clear in the final page or two. That’s economy for you.
I’d suggest that there is a further development of the links between the two books – and between Pham and Sherk – that is only revealed in the last two sentences. The book closes with various characters speculating as to Sherkaner’s fate; and Pham has an epiphany. He “understands” that Sherk is alive and “beginning on his greatest Lurk of all.” That’s the penultimate sentence. Now a Lurk implies a Pounce, and Countermeasure’s Great Surge at the end of Fire is the ultimate Pounce (coming after a pretty great Lurk, too); and given the similarities between the distorts (who Sherk is about to contact/awaken) and Countermeasure (both uniquely able to break Zone laws; both drain power from local suns to do it), is it too fanciful to suppose that Sherk has a hand in bringing his old ally/irritant back from the Unthinking Depths for one last job? It’s quite plausible that the Distorts and Countermeasure are one and same; nothing else in the universe of the books shares the same characteristics.
A final thought on the final sentence, which is an artistic triumph up there with anything you’d care to mention as far as I’m concerned. For a start, it’s just so resonant. “So high, so low, so many things to know.” Heights and depths being conjured here include: the highs and lows of the various searches we see in Deepness; Sherk’s alternating obsessions with outer and inner (subterranean) space; the depths of the galactic core where Pham will be lost, and the heights of the Beyond to which he will be lifted in Fire; the orbit of On/Off – from the Core to the Low Transcend – and all the secrets it encompasses… this, to me, is the “moment of wonder” when the crushing dramatic irony of the entire book (ie our knowledge, shared by none of the characters – poor crappers – that this entire story takes place in the Slow Zone and there is *so much more* to the galaxy) lifts. Having gone “so low”, Sherk is destined to go “so high”, outlast “all the mysteries” and know “so many things” (in fact, given the “poor crappers” speech, he’s almost certainly worked out the key insight already). So in these final two sentences, Vinge manages to create a close, intricate and deep connection between the two books, and also affirm, in poetic, childlike diction, a beautiful truth about sophont nature, science and the search for knowledge – either of which feat would take a lesser writer chapters and chapters. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. Now *that* is what I call economy.
Regarding the ending, the characters speculate that Sherkaner Underhill has some plans of his own: “the greatest lurk of all”. Any speculation as to what these plans might be?