I had bought the hardcover when it first came out, but always wanted the CDROM version when I had heard of it. It is a shame it hasn't made it online somewhere convenient.
I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today.
At the time of publishing, Vinge was one of the very few people who had a good grasp of the limits of computation and molecular nanotechnology were. Up until that point in mainstream SF writing, highly advanced technology was more akin to magic, even in "hard" SF. Aside from FTL tech (necessary for a novel with galactic scope), and the Zones of Thought (an artifice to help tell stories centering on people), Vinge sticks close to what is physically possible.
The prologue alone is packed with realistic details that was exceptional for its time.
Definitely near the top of my list. The sequel wasn't in the same class but his "True Names" novella is seminal cyberpunk although it doesn't have all of Gibson's trappings. (Varley's "Press Enter" is in a similar vein and has been more anthologized; they're both really good.)
I find it odd that people tend to think that way about A Fire Upon the Deep. I rank it as some of the softest science fiction I have ever read. It’s a decent story, but falls heavily into the science as magic trap.
Contrast it with say The Cold Equations which as I recall has FTL and everything else is bog standard physics and yet it was still criticized as unrealistic from an engendering standpoint. You can’t make that kind of criticism of A Fire Upon the Deep because everything is handwaved.
I never liked this very much, because the whole "we can only take exactly this mass, and an extra 60kg or whatever will doom us" thing is such an obvious design and/or process flaw. If you really are dependent on that (though I don't think the author made the case that they were, convincingly), you need to ensure it (by, for instance, weighing the craft); it's ridiculously optimistic to think that someone never accidentally leaves a piece of equipment lying around, say.
And even if you accept the absurd premise, it still doesn't work; the stowaway would presumably have used consumables (oxygen, if nothing else), and if you're that weight constrained you won't be carrying excess consumables anyway, so you're still doomed even if you lose the stowaway.
If anything, it's the same thing that bothers me about some 'softer' sci-fi; take a story you want to tell, and construct some completely implausible rules to make it work. To add insult to injury here, it's... not a very good story, IMO. Also, I believe Clarke hinted at a similar scenario in Islands in the Sky, published two years previously, though it didn't actually _happen_ there.
I generally agree, though mostly as a failure of storytelling. An actual plague pushing things to the absolute limits isn’t implausible. Adjust things so the main character is freaking out about landing a cargo 20% over standard safety limits etc.
That said, what allows us to make such criticisms is an understanding of the physics and economics involved. We can’t reason about what say Iain Banks’s Culture is going to do on economic grounds because things aren’t fleshed our enough to make such judgements. Bat at least we can reason about distances involved. Even softer in say the Star Wars universe economics and physics is such an afterthought that we can’t objectively judge if say the Death Star was a sound use of resources or a pointless vanity project. Worse, because hyperspace lanes are so hand-wavy we can’t even reason about movement speeds and and distance.
/The Cold Equations/ is lambasted for being a story that's set up to make a point in ways that completely contradict any sort of good engineering practice. Given the situation as described, the simplest ordinary precautions would prevent the problem from happening.
0th level obviousness: weight is at a premium on the ship, yet there is a closet with space for a small person and a solid closet door that makes it a hiding location. If there is a need for storage space, netting is a much more sensible protection mechanism than a door.
There are literally dozens of similar objections, including those made by Tom Goddard, the author, who explained that he was writing specifically at the direction of John W. Campbell, the editor.
"The Cold Equations" is pretty much the sole story on a list of SF shorts I'm finishing writing up that I don't actually like and am pretty much just including because it's on so many lists--possibly for the same reason :-)
And not only is it completely unrealistic in order to make the point of the title but everything about the characters is so 1950s feeling that it feels incredibly dated.
As far as I can tell, it rates a 4 on Mohs scale, i.e. "one big lie" - the idea that the speed of light varies with the distance from the center of the galaxy.
It's not that the speed of light varies, it's that the "amount of computation" you can do varies. As you approach the center of the galaxy even the relatively efficient human brain starts to break down. The speed of light connection is that FTL requires so much computation that it breaks at a certain point relatively far out from the center. Other technologies have similar issues.
However, if you read carefully, and consider some of the consequences, it becomes clear that this is not a natural rule of the universe, but something technological, created by presumably one of the first civilizations to become highly technological as a defense against what would otherwise be a fairly vicious universe with constant high-tech civilizations fighting each other with frightfully powerful weapons, and perhaps a hint of compassion towards the not-yet-high-tech civilizations. That's why it can be manipulated with certain keys, in ways that would not be possible (lots of FTL signalling) if the Zones were truly a fundamental rule of the universe. (Notice also how the super-high-tech civilizations don't understand how the Zones work or why they exist, which if there were purely natural seems unlikely.) The Powers tend to last 10 years probably because that's how long it takes to either be accepted by the highly advanced civilization(s) that live in the galactic cores, or how long it takes to work out how to move there despite the Zones being in the way, or both. This creates an entrance gate against things like the main threat of the novel getting into your high-tech civ.
I don't deny I'm extrapolating a bit, but there's a lot of hints, especially if you add A Deepness in the Sky to the mix. Pham was probably sent from this central civ to fight A Fire Upon the Deep's main threat, if you read where he came from. The entire planet of A Deepness in the Sky is clearly from a super-high tech civ far beyond what Earth's depth could support, but it's from closer to the galaxy's core, not farther, which is why Pham went in to the galaxy's core after that story rather than out looking for more intelligent life. He in fact found it, or it found him, if you prefer.
Once you see there's a probably-even-beyond-Transcend civilization living under the Zones of Thought it mostly comes together.
I agree with a lot of this -- although I hadn't put the story about the galactic core together in the same way. A lot of this isn't made clear though. Can you point to some of the evidence you used to arrive at the conclusion that the high-tech civ is centered in the core, or that they're gating civilizations entering it? I think you might have picked up on some things I missed.
One correction: the Zones impact BOTH the speed of computation AND the laws of physics (whether FTL travel and communication are physically possible). They also make pretty explicit in Fire Upon the Deep that mechanical failure rates of certain complex systems (especially automation) increase rapidly as you approach the Slow Zone. And then within the Slow Zone they increase again as you approach the Unthinking Depths.
It is made explicit -- as you note -- that the Zones of thought are controlled somehow by the Countermeasure (or some Control System it speaks to). It is also clear that this system do not like the Blight and actively opposes it.
One other interpretation that struck me is that the Control System may have put in place the Zones of Thought simply because stars become so dense as one approaches the Galactic Core. Forcing the Transcend to the Galactic edges limits the rate at which any change can spread and allows for civilizations (and the System itself) to respond to threats such as the Blight.
"Can you point to some of the evidence you used to arrive at the conclusion that the high-tech civ is centered in the core, or that they're gating civilizations entering it?"
A high-tech civilization in the core is IIRC spelled out in A Deepness in the Sky because the planet there comes from the core. On its own that means nothing, but combined with A Fire upon the Deep it means there's more down there than the Upper Beyond realizes.
Gating civilizations entering it is a bit of my own interpolation. One alternative is that powers simply die out after 10 years because there is some reason they need to advance to the next level, but they're locked out by the Zones.
"BOTH the speed of computation AND the laws of physics (whether FTL travel and communication are physically possible)"
My read is that that is cause and effect, though, not two effects. The amount of computation you are allowed is limited; super high tech becomes impossible, then FTL, then our tech, then even any system that performs simple and meaningful mechanical computations. Even a car engine can be viewed as performing computations to stay running.
This is a particularly sci-fi element. I don't think it's immediately obvious how to separate the universe into "meaningful" computation and the sort of computation a stationary rock is "performing" as its atoms jiggle around, such that one can distinguish at the level of the laws of physics themselves between a rock and a car engine or other simple mechanical device. Then again, I'm not a superintelligent civilization with nearly unbounded resources and deeper access to the laws of physics than I have. (Arguably, under the circumstances, it could simply be an enormous computation of its own, in which they aren't doing it via clever rewrites of the universe, but basically by executive fiat, or, to put it another way, the standard may literally be "I know it when I see it" for some sufficiently intelligent "judge", rather than any sort of physical law.)
> This is a particularly sci-fi element. I don't think it's immediately obvious how to separate the universe into "meaningful" computation and the sort of computation a stationary rock is "performing" as its atoms jiggle around, such that one can distinguish at the level of the laws of physics themselves between a rock and a car engine or other simple mechanical device.
It sounds like what you’re asking boils down to “is entropy a real thing, or is it subjective / relative to our purposes and measurements.” And that the Zones essentially work by enforcing an “entropy quota” on things according to where they are in the galaxy- things in the Slow Zones must be very high-entropy (and somehow are forced to become so if they weren’t before) and things in the Transcend can be low-entropy in ways we couldn’t currently imagine.
IIRC the planet comes from the direction of the core, which the protagonists assume implies from the core... but it could have just been travelling through it, no?
As for the FTL limit, I always thought the causality is the reverse - that compute power that the Beyond has is because their computers run on the same physics that allows FTL travel.
If FTL was driven solely by compute, then you'd never have a clear boundary in the first place - just shorter and shorter hyperspace jumps, perhaps until the point where they become infeasible (because the amount of time it takes to make one, including compute, is more than just travelling there). But the way the book describes it, the boundary is qualitative, and FTL drives plainly don't activate once in the Slow Zone. Ditto for FTL comms.
Yes, that was my take too. "OnOff’s eccentric orbit had at least passed through those unseen depths." -- but the irony of the end of the book is that they're going to be going entirely the wrong way. The ellipse that describes its orbit is eccentric -- that means it can touch both points near the center of the galaxy and points outside the Slow Zone.
FTL alone is already at “one big lie” stage, it’s got plenty of other issues with established physics and arguably worse with consistency. Personally I would argue for rank 1, but I am somewhat of a curmudgeon about this stuff.
It doesn't appear to be available anywhere any more, though. I just requested it via the EFF donation, though (I would guess quite a few people did today after seeing this!), and maybe Brad would be amenable to it going on archive.org?
That's one of the main reasons why I love this book so much, that it sounds realistic. I'll be honest, I always struggled with suspension of disbelief with lots of SF. Does anyone know other SF books that are similar (aka believable?)
What people find "believable" or "realistic" will vary.
Within the genre of Science Fiction there is a sub-genre of Hard Science Fiction in which it's considered more important that it could actually work. Fire Upon The Deep probably wouldn't generally be considered at all Hard because it has Faster-than-Light travel, which is one of the things you generally would rule out of Hard SF because of how conservation rules in Physics work, if you can do FtL then you can do time travel (because space and time being the same kind of thing), and then what's your story?
"The Martian" a novel subsequently made into a movie is pretty realistic, turns out the setup (a storm on Mars separates Mark from the rest of the crew) is the least realistic part of that entire story.
If that's a bit too realistic, some of Liu Cixin's shorts are pretty wild while remaining down to earth about what's practical. "The Wandering Earth" for example.
Greg Egan is very Hard, but you may find you think Greg's technically possible stuff seems harder to believe than faster-than-light travel which isn't possible at all. The Clockwork Rocket couldn't happen here, but it's set in a universe with a different dimensional symmetry, the Amalgam stuff is set in this universe, but with a society far more advanced than ours.
But then if it turns out "realistic"/ "believable" counts like Star Wars style laser blasters and stuff then I dunno, lots of things, maybe you'd like Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch stuff, (or indeed Iain M Banks' Culture novels) which aren't Hard at all.
This one follows a common pattern where it has a single piece of magic (in this case FTL travel via magical portals) and everything else is reasonably hard. Another example would be pretty much anything by Peter Hamilton (also an aficionado of magical portals, sometimes with trains).
Banks also has a magical FTL portal novel, actually (The Algebraist); they're quite popular.
Cixin's name makes me curious about your scale for soft/hard. Would you consider "Three-Body Problem" to be hard sci-fi, or at least "down to Earth about what's practical"?
Mmm. It has been some time since I read Three-Body Problem and I bounced off The Dark Forest. This also means it's possible my impressions are either erroneous because I forgot something important or it's explained/ ret-conned in the subsequent books.
In Three-Body Problem as I recall there's some pretty hand-waving stuff about sophons in particular. They're basically a MacGuffin which is used to explain whatever is necessary to the plot so as to have the Trisolarans able to interfere in Earth's affairs essentially at whim yet not obviate the invasion itself. So that's not very Hard SF.
My issue with TBP is not so much the hand-waving, it's the attempts to explain things that quickly become ridiculous, because the author is clearly out of their domain of expertise. Sophons are one example - they would be more believable unexplained, but when they're explained as a circuit on the surface of an unrolled elementary particle, well...
Or sometimes it's the way something is set up in a particular way, only to be abandoned when it becomes inconvenient. For example, when they come up with a plan to set up a trap using monomolecular filament, it is specifically stated that it can only be made in that shape. But literally one page later, when the question of how to tie it to something without cutting through that something comes up, it's immediately dismissed by the same character saying that they can also make sheets of that material, so it can be used as a backstop. Either take is believable per se, but they're clearly mutually exclusive.
On the whole, the science in Three-Body Problem kinda felt like gratuitous insertion of random (and ften misunderstood) pieces of popular science into the story as a deus ex machina.
I liked the first part (technically first 2 parts) of Seveneves. But then [POTENTIAL SOMEWHAT SPOILER] it felt like vastly unlikely events come to pass and Stephenson spends the back part of the book telling the completely different story he wanted to tell.
yeah, hence the "mostly" in my comment. FWIW I really liked the whole thing, but 100% agree it's almost like 2 loosely-related works that ship together. It's the 1st (longer) part that I thought "felt" realistic given the premise.
Red Mars is exceptionally slow though. I made it through the first novel, but I had to stop somewhere a quarter into the second because there was just nothing interesting happening (or maybe too much of it?).
Dragon's Egg is a hard sci-fi that documents an encounter with an alien race that lives on the surface of a neutron star!
In all-to-typical hard sci-fi fashion, you don't really care about any of the characters, but the concepts are truly mind-bending (what looks like a circle to creatures on the surface is an oval to an outside observer due to the extreme magnetic environment; extreme gravity leads to ultra-fast metabolism; etc).
Interstellar travel, yes, but slower than light! In the Revelation Space books, it's either fusion powered starships of the "big cylinder full of people hibernating" variety, or admittedly somewhat magic relativistic starships (Bussard ramscoops in the earliest stories, but this was retconned out, and indeed a Bussard ramscoop shows up in a later story as a prototype that never really worked properly).
He has some sort of jump gate in at least some of his stories. I actually discovered him fairly recently based in part on the Love, Death, and Robots series on Netflix.
"I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today."
I enjoyed tremendously _A Deepness in the Sky_ and continue to find the ideas interesting and thought-provoking - especially the localizer networks, etc.
Based on that I read _Fire Upon the Deep_ and found it very enjoyable and interesting throughout, but then deeply disappointing at the end. I was expecting explanations and resolutions of the deep background events and actors that were shaping the story and none were given.
"then deeply disappointing at the end. I was expecting explanations and resolutions of the deep background events and actors that were shaping the story and none were given."
If you read carefully, and make a couple of reasonable deductions, I think you can come to mostly satisfactory conclusions. There's room for a couple of different interpretations of what's in the center of the galaxy, but not all that many, really.
Could you explain your own deductions, please? What are the possible interpretations?
I have read both novels, but on that reading do not feel I could be sure of understanding what's at the galactic center at all. In fact, I recall feeling puzzled and wishing it was explained, much like the parent poster. I'd love to hear some deductions and to find out what hints in the book I missed.
I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today.
At the time of publishing, Vinge was one of the very few people who had a good grasp of the limits of computation and molecular nanotechnology were. Up until that point in mainstream SF writing, highly advanced technology was more akin to magic, even in "hard" SF. Aside from FTL tech (necessary for a novel with galactic scope), and the Zones of Thought (an artifice to help tell stories centering on people), Vinge sticks close to what is physically possible.
The prologue alone is packed with realistic details that was exceptional for its time.