Tine Team

Aug 2017
A Fire upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge – Gollancz, 2013
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Any author trying to write space opera has to deal with its plausibility problem. Pretty much by definition, the action must span star systems or even galaxies, but if human-level plotting is to be possible, the timescale must be kept to within a human lifetime. This means that every writer of space opera has to consider how to address the faster-than-light elephant in the room. Most simply ignore it, postulating ansibles, warp drives or wormhole generators that effectively mean that their stories take place in an alternate universe where, presumably, there is an aether or other privileged coordinate system to avoid the necessity of a cosmic speed limit to preserve causality. Vernor Vinge, to his credit, has avoided this cop-out and come up with an original background in which he has embedded a conspiracy thriller of a godlike Power seeking to enslave galactic civilisation, and a much smaller scale young-people-in-peril story set on a single low-tech planet. The density of original ideas is hugely impressive, so it's a shame that the background is, in my view, flawed.
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