What a simply marvelous book. For plot, for imagination, for character and dreaming, few could do better than Vinge. Here's a story, the first I've read by him, about the Singularity, about light-speed travel, about an amazing universe far ahead of us, filled with reflections, ever cloudy, of the present day.

Assuredly no grammatical wizard, Vinge nevertheless writes in top-notch style, his sentences neither shining nor worth complaining about, and more than made up for by the wonderful tale he weaves using them. His characters are rich, interesting, flawed and lovable. The alien races are some of the most creative ever produced--strangely human and nevertheless, quite strange. The plot slides like a thunderbolt, gets your heart going with an accelerating pounding.

My reading choices in sci-fi have typically been X-files related. I've read William Gibson's Virtual Light and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, but beyond that? I really don't know that I've read others. This is why I believe it took me so long to read Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. I'd read a little, then put it down. A few weeks later, I'd pick it up and read a little more. However, I plowed through the last 200 pages or so.

This is a very complex story, full of captivating characters in richly detailed lands. Jefri and Johanna Olsndot are children stranded on a medieval planet, where the inhabitants are canine creatures that exist in pack forms. The crew (Ravna, Pham, Blueshell, Greenstalk) of a ship named the OOB, races to save them and to retrieve an artifact that just may save the world.

I'll admit, this book is a slow read initially. The first third of it tripped me up with all the high tech space speak. Plus, the author includes many Internet style messages that are pretty much reading email across the universe. These messages are technical soup. Toward the end I found myself just skipping over them.

Once I got past that initial space speak section and into the medieval world (and read far enough to actually understand that the inhabitants were pack creatures) I found myself entranced by this world. I loved seeing the children interact with these creatures. The author did an excellent job with creating a wide variety of personalities, yet blending them all nicely into the story.

Any time the story flipped back to space I found it lagging. Mostly because all the geek speak was over my head. I followed some of it with a struggle between great Powers. And I liked Blueshell and Greenstalk, who are basically plants on wheels and have limited short term memory. That made for some amusing scenes. But overall, the scenes that happened in the skies, weren't as interesting to me as what was going on down below.

Yet, even with that, I loved this story. I can easily see myself skimming through it just to read about this canine pack world again. The culture is that fascinating. Packs of dog like beings who live in a medieval society. They use their mouths to grasp tools just as they do their paws. And they can't get too close to each other or the mind noise that radiates from each pack entity will confuse them. Plus there are two sides at war, so the story is ripe with spies and the race for technological advances to defeat the enemy. All in all, very cool! I'll just skip over all the space talk. :P

I'm sure many won't like my review, but I just don't get the point of this book. I'm around page 70 (as another reviewer was) and I'm desperate to move on to another book. The writing is inconsistent in voice, the author fails to ground the reader in the book's world. For example, it takes the author forever and a day to make it clear that the dog-like creatures travel in packs and that they think as a unit, even then I have questions, for example, do any of the members have independent thought, what is their history, etc. Granted the author can't give up all information up front, but at least make us like the characters. None of the characters are sympathetic...if any of them died, I wouldn't care. And frankly, I wish I'd understood better that the main storyline centered around telepathy and thoughts - I don't find that subject matter believable. I bought this book because it was rated highly on Amazon's science fiction book list. Next time I'll do better research.