Read via NetGalley and the publisher, Tor. This is a reprint so you might be able to get earlier printings, or this one is out in October 2023.

Where do I even begin?

I have never read a Vernor Vinge story before. According to Jo Walton’s introduction to this one, this and The Fire in the Deep are basically the culmination of his lifetime’s work.

Reading this (admittedly quite long) novel is like reading a trilogy that’s been refined down to just one volume. There is SO MUCH GOING ON – and it all works, and it draws you inexorably on. It’s not particular frenetic in pace – I didn’t feel like I was reeling from one explosion to another – but it’s relentless. It’s like an avalanche.

Partly this is because although the story takes place over decades, there are several well-placed time jumps. I think this is part of where the ‘trilogy refined to one book’ feeling comes from. There’s nothing extraneous. There are moments of people just being people – being in relationship, having families, relaxing – but they don’t feel like padding. It’s all adding together to make these characters intensely real.

There are three strands. Two are human: the Qeng Ho, a loosely connected and enormous group of people whose aim is trade; they travel between planets to sell whatever is needed, and call people on planets Customers – not in a taking-advantage kind of way, but in a ‘this is what we do’ way. Then there’s the people known as Emergents, and I wondered about this name for a long time… before I discovered it was because their society is the Emergency, named for a particularly dramatic time in their political history which has had cascading effects on their political and social structures (to become far more authoritarian than the Qeng Ho countenance) and honestly the name tells you a lot about them. These two groups of humans end up working together – much to the dismay and distrust of both sides – as they go to explore an astronomical anomaly. The third strand is the aliens who live on the planet around that astronomical anomaly, who are not bipeds and whose planetary and biological experience has led them to develop in some very different ways from humans… and yet, they are intelligent, and Vinge suggests convergent evolution in a lot of scientific and technological ways.

As I said, there is A LOT in this novel. Love and betrayal and family and war and technology… and then Jo Walton’s foreword tells me that if I read The Fire in the Deep it may completely change the way I understand this novel? I’m a bit sad that it took me until now to read this, AND YET reading it at this age was actually excellent.

I’m so glad Tor is reprinting this and I hope it gets a lot of love.