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.