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Perplexed comments on Specific Fiction Discusion (April 2011) - Less Wrong
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Comments (158)
I just started Fire Upon the Deep yesterday. It's confusing, and I don't know why so many people seem to like it. I'm not really having fun because I don't know what's going on and I can't keep anything or anyone straight. The plot threads have no obvious connection to each other and the author seems to be having way too much fun tantalizing me with incomplete worldbuilding details. I'm up to page 109: someone tell me what makes the other 500 pages worth reading, please.
Go ahead and put it down. It is a 'high concept' novel. The characters are absurd and unsympathetic, the plot is even more absurd and is resolved by a Deus ex galactica. As the Penguin recommends, read A Deepness in the Sky for a richer plot, better characters, and some really remarkable world-building. But then don't bother to come back to Fire. Unless you are a Doc Savage fan. IMHO.
I have the exact opposite view. I liked A Fire Upon the Deep and felt that Deepness had a woefully anthropomorphic and unimaginative alien world, cartoonish cast and a plot that drags on.
Aside from these two I've read Marooned in Realtime and True Names, and both were quite good. Overall I'd label Vinge a decent, albeit clearly second rate writer.
I suppose you are right that the alien world is unrealistically human-like - at least psychologically. The world-building that I particularly admired was the variety of human cultures that were briefly presented - the extra verisimilitude arising from the level of extraneous detail offered. (Did I just hear someone whisper: "Conjunction Fallacy"?)
One of the points in Deepness is that we almost exclusively experience the aliens as translated by the human "translators": due to their extreme skills, they are able to make the non-human easy for the humans to relate to.
In a brief glimpse near the end of the story, Vinge gives us a hint that perhaps the aliens aren't as human-like as the "translators" has made them seem.