The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge (2.5 stars)

Latest and suckiest in Vinge's Zones of Thought series. In terms of plot flow this is the follow-on to A Fire Upon the Deep, returning to the world of the Tines and a bunch of stranded human children.

Compared to the epic space opera and universal scale of Fire, and the smaller-scale but fascinating dynamic of the Spider's rise and the Emergent-Qeng Ho cold war in Deepness, this book feels trapped in an irrelevant and not particularly interesting corner of the universe.

The novel starts with Vinge setting Ravna up as being generally fairly incompetent and politically naive. It's very clumsily handled and written in fine-grained boring detail. By the time Ravna finally gets to giving her speech, after so much boring lead-up I was ready to quit if there wasn't some sort of conflict. Thanks Nevil, who I found particularly unbelievable. Apparently he is a political genius because his parents were?!? Speaking of unbelievable, Ravna's attempts to learn spycraft are beyond comical - looking up 'sneakiness' in the ship's library? I don't care how good the library is, that isn't going to work.

While not working on Ravna uselessness, Vinge is setting Joanna up as some sort of populist queen of the Tines in a similarly boring manner. Joanna's actions at the Fragmentarium turn out to be of minor importance to later events, but aren't worth the many pages devoted to the arrival of the Tropicals and the breakout.

Amdi, Ravna, and Jefri's escape and trek back to the Domain was probably the worst part of the novel. I was expecting daring raids for food, struggle for survival, some smart thinking and innovation from Amdi, but no. They make themselves into a circus and parade all over the country. Apart from being the worst way to travel undetected in enemy territory ever, it was just stupid and boring to read.

We learn some more about the Tines, but an opportunity to describe their struggles in bootstrapping their civilisation into the technological age is sorely missed. Tycoon has invented sweatshops and industrialised the tropical choir into a production machine - but it mostly happens outside of the view of the main characters.

Tycoon turns out to not be a bad guy at all, and vendacious just doesn't seem sinister enough, he's lost most of his power from the original novel. And the big-bad-guy-in-the-sky remains completely unrealised. So basically this book was just really boring filler waiting for the Blight to do something.

2.5 stars