The plot involves a murderous and power-hungry AI, inactive for billions of years, which comes to life in the computer systems of a human colony that tried to establish itself a little too far 'up' in the Beyond. In the right hands, it throws off implications and littler ideas in all directions. This is a classic Big Science Fiction Idea. Nobody has a clue what's going on farther out, in 'the Transcend', because anything that can survive out there has advanced to the point where it can no longer communicate with the dopey slobs farther in. In 'the Beyond', pretty much anything is possible. In the 'Slow Zone', it's possible for organic entities to think (it looks like that's where we on Earth are stuck). The region at the very center of the Milky Way galaxy is called 'the Unthinking Depths': You can't even have sentient life down there. Mostly, the phenomenon affects information ( Vinge is a CS prof, by the way). The farther out you get, the easier it is to make neat stuff. When you're too close to a galactic core, you can't travel faster than the speed of light, and you can't do a lot of other things either. Vinge suggests that natural law is affected by how much mass there is near by (for values of 'near by' that are measured in light years, not subway stations). The major premise in Fire is this: Speaking somewhat loosely, Mr. It's got an advantage over mysteries in that the defining characteristics of the genre aren't so cramped: 'It's about a crime' limits an author's options much more than 'it's about what things might be like if the laws of physics permitted such-and-such.' You can spin a greater variety of situations and conflicts out of the latter. In a way, hard SF is like detective fiction: Everything has to hold together logically. When it's done right, all things appear to proceed inevitably from the basic premise. It's all about imagination, folks, that and unity of purpose: If there's anything much in there that's just optional or arbitrary window dressing, you've got a dog on your hands. Vinge works (here, anyway) in the grand old hard SF tradition of making some interesting assumptions about physics, imagining how those might play out in terms of technology and life in general, and then writing a story which is inextricably bound up with all that stuff. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1993. A Fire Upon the Deep is a big old high concept science fiction novel, written by Vernor Vinge and first published in 1992.

A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge