A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (5 stars)

The prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, can he pull it off? YES.  Pass Go, collect another Hugo.

Vinge introduces us to the Spiders, a civilisation defined by their on-again off-again star that plunges them into catastrophic winter with a periodicity of a century or so, forcing the entire population to hibernate in primitive frozen pools called 'deepnesses'.

 I loved the Spiders, but I began to think that they were a little too easy to identify with.  What are the chances that arachnid aliens turn out to think and act essentially like humans once you understand their language?  What are the chances that all their technology is developed in the same way: radio, computers, cars, aeroplanes, nuclear power (with a mini Manhattan project) etc.  Pretty low I would think. But there were super-cute little baby spiders climbing out of their Daddy's fur to go play in the jungle gym, so hey.

I thought the idea of having to wait (mostly in cold-sleep) for a civilisation to reach a technology age so they can repair the space-faring equivalent of a flat tyre was intruiging, and would encourage lots of meddling, and civilisation fast-tracking. The Qeng Ho and Emergents certainly don't have any Prime Directive-style hangups.

It was an old, old problem: to build the most advanced technological products you need an entire civilisation - a civilisation with all its webs of expertise and layers of capital industry.

And we find out that our old friend, and one of the few links to A Fire Upon the Deep, Pham Nuwen is much more than reassembled body parts in this story.  In fact he is a superstar, I mean he invented smartdust.  Well, they call it 'localizers' but whatever.  Pham has a low-level backdoor into this system, which is kind of like having a backdoor built into libc:

The medieval prince in Pham Nuwen was entranced by this insight.  If only one could be at the ground floor of some universally popular system... If the new layer was used everywhere, then the owner of those trapdoors would be like a king forever after, throughout the entire universe of use.

Vinge's dedication to science and passion for computer science continues to shine through.  Here he describes the code cruft that makes a spaceship run, and the inherent danger:

So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support.  Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations.  Every so often the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents.  Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

The idea of 'Focus', a kind of virus-delivered autism that can be controlled with MRI was fascinating.  It was amazing to think of a civilisation whose 'automation' consisted of a large part of the populous enslaved to act as really really smart middleware to computers.  Here Trud explains why 'Focus' is so effective:

But you know about really creative people, the artists who end up in your history books?  As often as not, they're some poor dweeb who doesn't have a life.  He or she is just totally fixated on learning everything about some single topic.  A sane person couldn't justify losing friends and family to concentrate so hard.  Of course, the payoff is that the dweeb may find things or make things that are totally unexpected.  See, in that way a little of Focus has always been part of the human race.  We Emergents have simply institutionalized this sacrifice so the whole community can benefit in a concentrated, organized way.

The Anne Reynolt character was a brilliant opponent for Pham Nuwen: ruthless and amazingly talented.  I enjoyed watching their plotting and manipulation targeted at each other.

One more cute quote to leave with.  The Qeng Ho are irrepressible traders:

in pure Qeng Ho Nese, the term "black market" existed, but only to denote "trade you must do in secret because it offends the local Customers."

Even though it was less epic than A Fire Upon the Deep, I think I enjoyed it more.  5 stars

A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (4.5 stars)

On page 19 I was already impressed.  It was at about that point that I realised I was seeing the world through an alien pack intelligence's eyes, which struck me both as a very innovative concept, and for the skill with which it was delivered.  I gradually learned more and more aspects of the Tines' anatomy, communication, social norms, and even reproduction, all starting with the sentence:

He brought up another member to get a parallax view.

 and more like these:

A few yards into the mob and Peregrine Wickrackrum could feel consciousness slipping from him.  If he concentrated really hard, he could remember who he was and that he must get to the other side of the meadow without attracting attention.

And the technology aspects are great.  You can see Vinge is a comp sci professor.  Relay struck me as sounding a little like Google, and the text is littered with references to one-time-pad crypto, and gems like this:

Blueshell had a humor fit at Pham's faith in public key encryption....

...and the creature fell apart like some cheap, center-topology network. 

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience 

I was slightly weirded-out by Pham Nuwen being from Canberra - a once great civilisation fallen back to medieval times.  I lived for some time in Canberra, Australia.

For Pham Nuwen really was a barbarian.  He had been born on a fallen colony world - Canberra he called it.

The silly humans awake an extremely advanced and deadly artificial intelligence 'a perversion', which is fascinating to anyone interested in computer security.  It is like they have unleashed a super-intelligent piece of malware that begins to take over the universe.  Even the defences suggested in the text parallel modern-day content sanitisation.  This sounds a little bit like converting between document formats to break any embedded malware:

...then there are obvious procedures that can give relative safety: Do not accept High Beyond protocol packets.  At the very least, route all communications through Middle Beyond sites, with translation down to, and then up from, local trade languages.

 Also, the 'Usenet' discussion was really entertaining, and captures the often farcical misunderstanding and miscommunication of computer security issues on the Internet, and the spirit of a mild flaming:

...Who is a fool? [probably obscenity]  [probably obscenity] Idiots who don't follow all the threads in developing news should not waste my precious ears with their [clear obscenity] garbage.  So you think the "Helper Symbiosis" is a fraud of Straumli Realm?  And what do you think cause the fall of Relay?  In case your head is totally stuck up your rear [<-probable insult], there was a Power allied with Relay...

Sadly we are still some way from voice activated controls that:

...responded consistently to sarcasm and casual slang.

Slight spoilers ahead...

I was a little surprised by the ending.  I was expecting 'Old One' to turn out as a front for the Blight itself.  Also I completely agreed with this statement:

In some ways the Revenge was a worse thing than the Blight itself.

Sticking a huge hunk of the galaxy into slowness, stranding millions of vessels forever.  Somehow, this didn't sound much like 'saving' the galaxy to me.

But overall, a fantastic book, I endorse the Hugo decision :)  4.5 stars