Tine Team

[mtvessel]

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.

Vinge's concept, put briefly, is that the laws of physics are not absolute but depend on the local mass density. This means that space in and around the Milky Way (and, presumably, any other galaxy) can be divided into concentric zones where different things are possible. Old Earth is in the Slow Zone where nothing can travel faster than the speed of light and intelligence is consequently limited. Further out is the Beyond, where advanced galactic civilisation is possible, and beyond that is the Transcend, where only Powers (superintelligent beings) can live. Humans are junior members of the Beyond, having discovered it by accident, and naturally it is human curiosity that precipitates the plot.

An expedition investigating an archive of data in the Lower Transcend inadvertently wakes a Power called the Blight which starts to take over the expedition members. Recognising the danger, the remaining humans escape in two ships, one of which is destroyed. The other crashes on a planet close to the border with the Slow Zone, where a race of intelligent canids called tines has evolved to a roughly medieval tech level. One group of tines, the Flenserists, attacks the ship and kills all the survivors except for two children called Jefri and Johanna, who end up on opposite sides of a civil war. Meanwhile, a distress signal sent by the ship has reached further up into the Beyond where it is heard by a benevolent Power called the Old One and by Ravna Bergsndot, the only human employee at Relay, a galactic communications hub. Ravna persuades her employers to organise a rescue expedition - for the Blight is starting to colonise the Upper Beyond, and the crashed ship might just hold a way of defeating it.

My big problem with this book was that I couldn’t get over the basic premise. The idea that the laws of physics vary with average density is a clever way of having your faster-than-light cake and eating it, but it is inconceivable that recognisable human culture could have emerged in such a universe. For a start, modern science could never have developed when one of its axioms - the idea that a single set of laws applies to the entire universe - can be shown to be wrong by simply pointing a telescope at a particular bit of the sky. The galactic civilisation is an attractive place but rather more Gernsbachian than plausible. The messaging system called the Net is particularly hilarious with its horribly dated usenet-style news groups and message headers. The Blight is an acceptable Sauron-substitute but made for a rather characterless antagonist. It was difficult to invest in the conflict when the rules governing its behaviour are inherently unknowable by mere humans.

The low-tech world of the tines fares rather better, albeit in a simplified young-adult way. The tines have a form of telepathy mediated by ultrasonic waves that causes them to organise into packs of four or more individuals who effectively share a group mind. The psychology and physics of this is nicely done and the consequences for the plot make sense. Some human-specific terms such as "pilgrim" are used that don't seem to sit quite right, but for the most part the tines are a pretty much perfect SF alien, different enough to allow for an interesting examination of the tension between individuality and social togetherness that lies at the heart of human personality, and similar enough that we can understand and become emotionally invested in their struggles. I could have quite happily read a book set entirely on the tines' world without any of the more transcendent stuff. Which is a bit of a problem for the novel as a whole, despite its plethora of good ideas.