Mid-American Aliens

[mtvessel]

Sep 2019
A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge – Gollancz, 2016
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This is a prequel to A Fire upon the Deep and is set in a smaller, more human corner of the universe. I have to say that I liked it a lot better, mainly because the fundamental premise - a first contact with a species living on a planet orbiting a very unusual star - felt much more plausible compared to the situational laws of physics of the zones of thought. Not entirely, mind, but enough that I could suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy the story.

The star is unusual because it has starter problems. It burns for about fifty years and then goes out, plunging the nearby planet Arachna into deep freeze for a couple of centuries before it re-ignites and starts the cycle anew. Despite this unpromising environment, an intelligent species has evolved which can somehow withstand the long dark by going into hibernation in special locations called deepnesses. The aliens, which the humans insist on calling "spiders" even though they are more scorpion-like in shape, have reached an industrial stage where they will soon be developing space flight, and ships from two human cultures race to the system to be there when the spiders next wake up. One group, the Qeng Ho, are galactic traders with Chinese characteristics. The other, the Emergents, are the product of a star system that has clawed its way back up the technological ladder after falling into barbarism. The Qeng Ho want to join the spiders to their trading empire. The purposes of the Emergents are less clear. The two fleets come together over the soon-to-be-defrosted planet and, um, things happen that I don't want to spoil.

There are a number of human and spider viewpoint characters, the main ones being Ezr Vinh and Qiwi Lin Lisolet for the Qeng Ho, Podmaster Thomas Nau for the Emergents, and Sherkaner Underhill and his daughter Viki for the spiders. One other major character is Pham Nuwen, a legendary Qeng Ho leader who is posing as an out-of-touch elder and who is the only connection that I was able to discern with A Fire upon the Deep. All are distinctive and memorable, with Sherkaner being particularly outstanding as a crazed genius spider scientist. This is space opera, so the characters sort rather too neatly into good guys and bad guys, but the baddies are inventive and eminently hissable which means that the reader's attention is easily maintained.

Things I wish were better: Deepnesses are vaguely described - I couldn't figure out how the spiders' hibernation mechanism was supposed to work (are they encased in ice?). The on-off star feels so plausible that I had to look up variable brightness stars to see if something similar has been described. It hasn't, and its description later in the novel as a G-type star more or less rules out the Cepheid variable brightness mechanism, but I could see that with a bit of handwaving, it would be possible to come up with a plausible-sounding process (something like contaminating heavy metals that serve to quench the fusion reactions, then form a layer that compresses the core as the star cools down). It's a pity that Vinge does not give us more of an explanation, particularly as several of the characters are interested in it. I also had problems with the depiction of the spiders, which felt much too lazily human. Apart from the terms "perch" for seat and "lurk" and "counter-lurk" for battle tactics, the society described is essentially early- to mid-twentieth century middle America. Spider family dynamics and personality types map exactly onto human ones, which makes them easy to relate to, but not terribly convincing as aliens. To be fair, there is a sort of explanation given in the text for this, but I didn't buy it. Finally, although there are a number of strong female characters, you can tell that the writer is a man of a certain age because of the tendency to put them on pedestals rather than giving them actual agency. Qiwi is particularly ill-served in this respect.

Still, these are mostly minor caveats. This is an enjoyable tense space opera with things to say about the morality of survival in a hostile universe and the importance of science and open societies. Even if those societies happen to look rather like the twentieth century America in which the author presumably grew up.