A Fire Upon the Deep

Vernor Vinge
A Fire Upon the Deep
Shop all Science Fiction & Fantasy

A Fire Upon the Deep
ISBN: 9780812515282
Publication Date: 31 August 2010

"A Fire Upon the Deep" is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: 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 "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact 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 mission, not entirely composed of humans, must rescue the children-and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.
Vernor Vinge, author of several SF novels and stories, has twice won the Hugo Award. His novella "True Names" is widely acknowledged as a seminal cybernovel by general readers and scientists alike. Vinge is also a professor of computer science at San Diego State University.
A "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year
Winner of the Hugo Award
In this popular and widely praised novel, a rescue mission races against time to save a pair of human children being held captive by a medieval lupine race--and to recover the weapon that will keep the universe from being changed forever. As SF author Poul Anderson has written, ""A Fire Upon the Deep" evokes marvelously the strangeness of the universe, and of the human future as we venture forth into it, in a story that is both excit...