The plot of A Fire Upon the Deep is set in motion through the actions of beings from the Beyond. Between the Depths and the Beyond lies the Slow Zone, where only simple creatures and technologies can function. The center of the Milky Way, known as the Unthinking Depths, harbors the least potential for intelligence. When doing so with malign intent, they have the potential to do untold damage and are called Perversions. Occasionally, however, these god-like beings, called Powers, turn their attention back to the rest of the galaxy. When entities reach this locale, they have achieved a god-like state of being, and their concerns become mostly incomprehensible to lesser minds. Myriads of sentient species have moved physically and intellectually, over an evolutionary time scale measured in billions of years, toward this region on the galactic rim known as the Beyond and the Transcendence.

The greatest potential for intelligence lies at the edges of the galaxy, where computer-like superminds, with intellects far beyond the mental capacity of any biological brain, dwell. In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge creates a genuinely new and unique concept of the nature of the galaxy in which the laws of physics vary with location. That a work of SF and its sequel should both earn such recognition is unusual and attests to the author's skill and intelligence as a writer of richly complex hard SF 'sense-of-wonder' yarns in the grandest style. Now that veteran SF writer Vernor Vinge's most recent book, A Deepness in the Sky has won the Hugo Award for best SF novel of the year, this seems to be a good time to re-assess it and the novel that inspired it, A Fire Upon the Deep, which won the Hugo in 1993.

A fire upon the deep review