Personally I found the chapters about the spiders absurdly boring. They're just big sentient spiders; nothing novel like a group mind. Fortunately the other half of the Deepness plot more than made up for it though.
I quit that book at the dogs. I understand that it's a great book and I ought to pick it up again, but goddamn those chapters were bad. And to be honest, the glaring similarity between early internet and nntp and Vinge's far future networking was distracting. Perhaps I'm misremembering that part...
It's always a little sad when you can tell the things the author finds the most interesting about their fiction aren't the same things you find the most interesting. I wanted a lot more of the blight and the powers and the zones and a lot less dogs talking to children.
He's intentionally trying to make the superintelligences stay superintelligent by not describing them. I think it's pretty effective. He did the same thing in Across Realtime.
His first book Tatja Grimm's World was also about superintelligent people (or the whole rest of the planet except them was sub-intelligent, or something… it's not clear). That one is, hmm, not nearly as good as his later ones. So I think it's just as well he didn't try.
The third book -- while not nearly as good as either Fire Upon The Deep or Deepness in the Sky -- had even more fascinating insights into the practical mechanics of a group mind with physical bodies. Like the fact that romance happens on two separate levels!
