Reddit reviews A Fire Upon The Deep (Zones of Thought)
We found 21 Reddit comments about A Fire Upon The Deep (Zones of Thought). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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Thank you everyone who voted. While I was graphing the results, (which you should definitely look at in more detail because there are more than 1 graphs ^), given the crazy number of you who said you love the Culture Series, I was pretty much scrambling to get a hold of it.
All calculations and graphics were made using Excel.
To complete the list, I used this compilation, and suggestions from both r/books and r/scifi.
Most Read: Hitchhiker's Guide, Ender's Game, 1984, Dune, Brave New World, in that order.
Least Read, most loved: Vorkosigan Saga, and A Fire upon the Deep
Highest rated: Hitchhiker's Guide/Culture Series (tie).
I've uploaded the raw data here.
When you do the Racial Sympathy storyline quests for the Skritt, at one point when the lead Skritt enters the hive, the player character and the mentor will comment on how the Skritt suddenly became smarter. That's the cue for the Skritt to explain why.
It's little dialogue and not a click through , which can be missed if one alt-tabs out to wait.
A similar example would be the Tines from Vernor Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep (Zones of Thought) series.
Vernor Vinge. A Fire Upon the Deep redefined high-concept hard SF.
Also, Robert Reed. His "Greatship" collection is like hard SF comfort food.
If you really liked the hard science aspect of Contact, some scifi books I'd recommend are:
Marooned in Realtime - a detective story set 50 million years in the future; the characters are essentially castaways in time since they all happened to miss The Singularity
Fire Upon the Deep - a fantastic sci-fi novel centered on an attempt to prevent an "evil" AI from taking control of the entire Milky Way galaxy
Both books are by Vernor Vinge, a prof at Caltech, and the science is hands-down the best out there. And since Vinge can actually write, the characters and plot are also first-rate.
So, not a movie recommendation, but these books come as close to the experience of Contact, the movie, as anything I've encountered.
Definitely check out Vernor Vinge's two masterpieces, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.
Children of Time and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovksy both have strong sociological themes. If you enjoy these books you might also want to check out Semiosis: A Novel by Susan Burke.
Foundation by Isaac Asimov is about the fall and rise of a galactic empire. It is a bit dated in terms of science fiction but a classic in the genre.
Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang are collections of short stories and some of them contain strong sociological themes around communication and intersubjective understanding.
A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge also have some interesting speculative sociology.
Hominids: Volume One of The Neanderthal Parallax by Robert J. Sawyer also contains interesting speculative anthropology and sociology (but not a very interesting plot IMO) and is also worth a read.
Old Man's War
Fire Upon the Deep
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
> They must almost operate as a single entity...
Been done
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. One of the best SciFi epics I've ever read; good enough that I re-read it every few years. There is also an annotated Kindle version available. Vinge helped popularize the term "singularity" for the time when machines exceed human intelligence; you can read his 1993 speech on the topic here.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge - Absolutely fantastic. Full of well-fleshed-out technology, a great understanding of actual science. Top notch storytelling with a complex setting to back it up. I think Vinge writes some of the most exciting scifi narrative out there.
After you read Hyperion, get Ilium, also by Dan Simmons. Kind of a cool reinterpretation/continuation of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War. Has a cliff-hanger of an ending that picks up again in the sequel Olympos. I didn't like Olympos quite as much, though.
could it be this? http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Upon-Deep-Zones-Thought/dp/0812515285/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453904069&sr=1-1&keywords=fire+upon+the+deep
Sorry for the stupidly long link
The Tine species is borrowed whole from A Fire Upon the Deep. Argent is inspired largely by the packs Peregrine Wrickrackrum and Scriber Jaquramaphan.
Nobody has mentioned Iain M. Banks yet, so how about
The Algebraist
Excession
Against a Dark Background
Another military sci-fi novel with several unique twists would be Vernor Vinge's:
A Fire Upon the Deep
Hard to beat Ender's Game, though. Old Man's War is really good; Armor is good but kinda depressing.
I can think of lots more, reply if you'd like more suggestions :-)
Legacy Inventive new planet and lifeforms.
A Fire Upon the Deep Absolutely epic tale.
Rendezvous with Rama Wonderful story spanning centuries and galaxies.
Rama short film gives an idea of the start of the story.
All of the above are parts of series.
> I agree with your review, too. I've learned an enormous amount by coming across an idea in HP:MOR and putting in the research later on - ideas and concepts posed to me in MOR have resulted in an expansion of my knowlege in at least a half-dozen fields.
I believe that's the point. :-)
Hey, have you read Finale yet? If not, go read Fire upon the Deep and Permutation City first. Mind-bending stuff.
Read, A Fire Upon The Deep. It has two of the most interesting and very different aliens.
The Tines from Verner Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep are incredibly awesome, unique beings. They're doglike creatures who live in packs of collective intelligence that communicates across their composite bodies by soundwaves.
Too few Tines in a group organism, and they don't have enough brain power to think properly. Too many, and they jam up their own soundwave frequencies and can't think properly.
All of the implications of this are thought out very well by Verner Vinge. What happens when members die, when new members are born, what happens when packs get too close to each other, what happens when members of individual packs get too far away from each other for soundwaves to travel effectively and so on. Everything is done on a rock-solid hard science fiction foundation. It's a great book.
Diaspora is a fantastic read (and very relevant). I'm going to throw out A Fire Upon the Deep, as being fairly relevant but mostly just an awesome book.
Fire Upon The Deep.
http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Upon-Deep-Zones-Thought/dp/0812515285
I had written the reading order exactly the same as you mentioned in the original post although I changed this after _Aardvarks comment to:
> The recommended reading order is to just make sure you read The Children of the Sky after A Fire Upon the Deep. The other book A Deepness in the Sky can be read at any time after 'Fire' (it's also not recommended to read the synopsis of 'Deepness' before reading 'Fire')