book review: The Children of the Sky

[psocoptera]

My overall reaction to this book was "why does it even exist?". Which is not the right way to formulate the question, because the answer might well be something like "Vernor Vinge needs to pay his mortgage" and, you know, I can't argue with that, good for him.

So let me rephrase: what, exactly, am I supposed to be getting out of this book? Here are some things I love about Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, a pair of books that I do love, have re-read several times, have used as the setting for an RPG, etc: Interesting, unusual aliens, and extrapolation of what their societies would be like. Epic conflict. Poignant heroism. Action sequences. Funny bits like the future of interstellar communication basically being Usenet.

Right off there is a problem. Given the setting, ten years later on the Tines' World with no possibility of travel in or out, there can't be any nifty new alien races, and the scale of any conflict is restricted to parties already on the scene. We've gone from galactic apocalypse to a neighborhood squabble, and it just seems petty and pathetic. And maybe that's part of the point - that the reader really *feels* the frustration of the Children, at being cut off from higher civilization, and the frustration of Ravna, at people losing sight of the Big Bad, because the reader is stuck in the text with them with the same constraints. But... what fun is that, exactly? Why do I want to read that book?

The first third in particular is dominated by this small-potatoes social maneuvering. Plus random bits of narration to recap key points from Fire and show key events leading to the state of affairs ten years later, which, look, maybe I am just spoiled from reading so much YA, where you can't dick around for a hundred pages before introducing the plot because teenagers will just go play with their phones instead, but there is a piece of writing advice to start your story as close to the end as possible, and I think it would have helped this book a lot. Vinge could maybe get away with making me slog through 170 pages of slow build before anything really started happening if a) his writing was very pretty or b) he paid it off brilliantly later, but a) it's not and b) he didn't.

Even once things start happening, the whole thing felt very... murky to me. Like I never had a clear sense of what was happening, or what I thought *should* be happening - like I was never quite sure what anyone's goals were, or how they hoped to accomplish them. If anything, Our Heroes' goal was "maintain the status quo, avoiding derailment by these evil people" which... okay, I guess that's a basic fantasy plot. But it wasn't like they even had A Plan or A Quest or whatever, just that sometimes the tornado of Evil would pick people up and throw them somewhere else and then they'd try to blunder their way back. I guess Amdi is kind of heroic and clever? But that all happens offstage and gets reported baldly in like a paragraph (like much of the most interesting action - look, Vinge, why even tell us there was a crazy slalom sled ride down a mountain if you're not going to show the damn thing?).

The evil characters were also problematic. In particular, it defied plausibility to me that Nevil would be that evil. Er, not that humans can't be evil, if only, but, in this particular case, this is someone from a community of 150 people, survivors of a major catastrophe, and he's really okay with *political murder*? Of *children*, who he would certainly personally know, given the tiny community? That's major sociopathy, what are the odds that you'd even have one of those in a group of 150? Plus these aren't just 150 random people - these are the children of a community who was hand-selected from their entire planet in a years-long interview process to possibly go become gods. Unless Straumli really fucked up who they sent to the High Lab, that should have been about the highest-functioning social group you can imagine, not just dedicated and brilliant but also compassionate and benevolent, because, you know, they might become gods, and who would you want as gods?* I'm really supposed to believe that these people, with their nigh-magical science, didn't notice they had a kid who was a sociopath, and fix that? (I guess we don't know canonically that Straumli has psych supertech, but at the point at which they all live for thousands of years and can fabricate anything they want, where else are they going to boost net wellbeing?)

(*Seriously, who would you want as gods? Patient people who care about kids and animals seems like a good start, as they might well view you as one or the other. Off the top of my head, I'm nominating Mr. Rogers.)

There were things I enjoyed about the book - some of the further development of the Tines was neat, like the stuff about Tines romance novels, or the Riderlets getting discovered and used to communicate with the Choir. But there was a lot of stuff I just didn't get (what was the deal with the Choir pyramids?) or that seemed like it was set-up that didn't go anywhere (the second Zone surge that Ravna never found out about) and even the interesting stuff wasn't so cool that it was satisfying in the absence of a good story. I would have preferred to not get a sequel at all than to get one so disappointing.

Comments

[irilyth]

> My overall reaction to this book was "why does it even exist?".

Yeah, I was somewhat dubious about it too, in that I felt like the first book ended in a pretty satisfying place, and I wasn't particularly excited about a direct immediate sequel. At one point, I thought it might be going to be about the Tines becoming spacefaring, which I thought might be interesting, but even then, I'm not all that interested in that.

> Interesting, unusual aliens, and extrapolation of what their societies would be like.

This seems to me like the most fertile ground here: A deeper exploration of the Tines and Rider societies, and how technology changes them. One of the best things in Fire Upon The Deep is the radio cloaks, that moment where you realize "holy crap, the packs speak via sound, which means that if you can transmit sound at lightspeed ... holy crap!" -- and then pays that off with a really good sequence describing Tyrathect-Flenser's experience of using the cloaks.

We do get some of this here, but only separated by long boring bits of expository narration. Fneh.

> Epic conflict. Poignant heroism. Action sequences.

Those were all good too, but for me, weren't as much what made the first two books really special.

I'd also add "control of information" as a theme in the first two books, between the Net Of A Million Lies business in Fire and the localizers in Deepness. Sort of relevant here, but not in a very exciting way. I liked the climactic scene where everyone's cards are finally revealed, but the whole "Vendacious is secretly controlling the Eastern nation, by manipulating Tycoon into thinking that Jo killed Scriber" business didn't really do it for me -- not in the way that Tomas's years-long manipulation of Qiwi was so gripping in Deepness.

Another theme from Deepness that I thought might show up here was the idea of a subservient class of people being used as computational engines -- the whole business with the Choir seemed like it was headed in that direction, that Tycoon had figured out how to turn the Choir into manufacturing and industry, and I was totally sure that Jo was going to figure out how to turn the Choir into a crazy supercomputer. But apparently not; and I didn't find the repeated "because that wouldn't work in the Slow Zone" comments (mostly from Ravna I believe) very compelling, because any time someone says "that crazy idea would never work!", it just makes it seem more likely that someone's going to find a way to make it work. :^) So when it turns out that "yeah, neat idea, but no", repeated over and over again, was actually true, that wasn't exciting at all.

> Given the setting, ten years later on the Tines' World with no possibility of travel in or out, there can't be any nifty new alien races, and the scale of any conflict is restricted to parties already on the scene.

Well, given what the setting turns out to be, yes. But it's not clear at first how far into the future it's going to run (after the two short segments at the start that are like one and three years later, I was thinking we might get ten and then twenty and then fifty and then a hundred or something), and it's not clear that the travel ban is permanent -- in fact there's a point where the zones shift, and I was all "holy crap this is about to change everything a lot", but then it totally didn't change anything at all, about anything. Deleting that scene would have had no effect whatsoever on the story, our any character's development, or anything and that's generally a bad sign.

(to be continued)

[irilyth]

> We've gone from galactic apocalypse to a neighborhood squabble, and it just seems petty and pathetic.

I think the politics and maneuvering can be interesting regardless of the scale, although in fact I didn't think they were very interesting in this case. Hampered by the fact that the big early-middle conflict, between Ravna and her allies vs the Deniers, is completely spoiled by the fact that we as readers absolutely 100% know that Ravna is right and the Deniers are wrong, and wicked to boot. It would've been more interesting if we didn't actually know for sure what happened at High Lab; or if the Deniers had clearly been more virtuous, e.g. if Ravna was clearly using the threat of the Blight to do wicked things, and the Deniers wanted to use their dreams of what High Lab "surely must have been like" as justification for doing awesome good things. And there's sort of some of that, that Ravna wants to build defenses against the Blight while the Deniers want to accelerate biotech, but I still never really felt any sympathy for the Deniers' side of that; their point of view was just completely unengaging to me as a reader.

> random bits of narration to recap key points from Fire and show key events leading to the state of affairs ten years later

This annoyed me a lot throughout the book, especially after you pointed it out to me (gee thanks :^) -- it's not just that Vinge needs to dump a bunch of information on us through exposition and narration in order to get us to the story he really wants to tell, it's that he takes whole exciting scenes and has some character describe them, instead of actually writing them as scenes in the book. It's like the thing in webcomics where hard-to-draw things happen off-panel, because the artist doesn't want to have to draw them; this is hilarious and funny when (a) it's Narbonic; and (b) the on-panel stuff is also awesome and funny. It totally fails here. The worst for me was the climax of Amdi's torturous (literally) campaign to undermine and overthrow Vendacious -- we don't get to see all that suffering and the incredible effort and complexity of the scheme come to fruition, we just hear about it. "Yeah, so we overthrew Vendacious, which took a while to set up, and let me tell you that part really sucked, but it was so worth it in the end. So anyway, what do you think about Woodcarver's new puppy?" How do you have that all happen off-camera?

> Vinge could maybe get away with making me slog through 170 pages of slow build before anything really started happening if a) his writing was very pretty

Yeah, and I felt like that was different from the first two books too, that there were some really evocative descriptve scenes there. Maybe again due to over-narration -- instead of describing the stunning landscape and letting the reader feel amazed, he asserts that the landscape is stunning and describes how the characters feel amazed. This seems like basic stuff from a high school Creative Writing class.

> Even once things start happening, the whole thing felt very... murky to me.

I didn't have that problem so much; I thought the few scattered action scenes (and sequences of scenes) worked well.

> But it wasn't like they even had A Plan or A Quest or whatever, just that sometimes the tornado of Evil would pick people up and throw them somewhere else and then they'd try to blunder their way back.

That only really happened once, and I feel like that's a legitimate story-starter: You open with the idyllic scene in which everything is copacetic and our heroes are valiantly toiling away to keep that so, and then all of a sudden they're blindsided by some serious villainy, and have to fight their way back and set things to rights. So when that finally happened, I was like "all right, here we (finally) go"; I just wanted it to be sooner than page 200 of a 440 page book.

(to be continued)

[irilyth]

> The evil characters were also problematic. In particular, it defied plausibility to me that Nevil would be that evil.

I kept being sure there must be something else going on there. That in fact there would be some explanation for why he was a sociopath; or that he would turn out to be secretly infected with the Blight; or directly under the control of Vendacious; or something. But no, he's basically just a bright guy with a ton of charisma and no conscience who wants to be king.

And it's not even clear that what he wants is "to be king". I feel like the core of the Deniers philosophy is "we should be focused on uplifting our society, not defending from a Blight that may or may not even exist", but Nevil seems very interested in seizing personal power and killing his enemies. Until the end, when he's suddenly content to peacefully coexist with everyone, yay! And no one thinks that's kind of weird? I was 100% sure that his whole "Best Hope" community, with his propaganda videos and his "let's all meet at my place, where I will deliver to you your wildest dream, trust me!", was going to turn out to be a huge scary evil trap from hell, and having bought at this point that he was a sociopathic monster I was sort of morbidly curious to see what he was going to spring... But nope! He's really a naive idealist who just wants to go off with his friends and live in peace. What?

> (*Seriously, who would you want as gods? Patient people who care about kids and animals seems like a good start, as they might well view you as one or the other. Off the top of my head, I'm nominating Mr. Rogers.)

Hee.

> There were things I enjoyed about the book - some of the further development of the Tines was neat, like the stuff about Tines romance novels

That was cute, but felt throwaway. I really liked the Choir, which I felt like had previously been written off as "oh yeah those crazy Tropicals haw haw haw", and I was psyched that they were going to turn out to be this amazingly powerful force, a pivotal player in the story, except then they didn't really, they're basically just fuel for Tycoon's factories and an ally for Johanna.

> or the Riderlets getting discovered and used to communicate with the Choir.

Again cute, and I was super happy to see Greenstalk and her descendants, but I also wanted them to play a more pivotal role, and to learn more about what kind of society they were creating for themselves. And they did kind of have a pivotal role, but it was entirely off-camera -- we get one scene with Remasritlfeer and Chitiratifor and the balloon and the bucket, and then the narrator tells us "and that was just the first step in the long and fascinating story of how Tycoon harnessed the awesome power of the Choir, which was really amazing and exciting, boy howdy". Plus, Jo also figures out how to communicate with the Choir, making it the Riders even less relevant -- I mean, I thought that Jo's story was cool, but when there are only three or four cool things in the whole book, having one of them essentially negate the impact of the other is kind of annoying.

> I would have preferred to not get a sequel at all than to get one so disappointing.

Well, one thing that occurred to me is that this ending felt to me a lot like it left open the door for another sequel, which leads me to wonder if his new plan is basically to crank out a few more of these. To which I say, ugh. :^(

So, I dunno. I think I'd still recommend that fans of the universe should read it, but I'd probably say (even if it's a little spoilery) that they shouldn't have too high expectations.