A Fire Upon the Deep: 1 (Zones of Thought)

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Sudden Name Change: A strange one considering the meticulousness of the author, but the "wolves" of A Fire Upon the Deep are suddenly and inexplicably "weasels" by the time The Children of the Sky rolls around. Doubly strange, as "wolves" was a Justified use of Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit" that no longer makes sense with "weasels".

That naturally pales before Beyonder surveillance methods, revealed in The Chidren of the Sky— swarms of nanocameras, that infuse the target's bloodstream, can be transferred by a casual touch, and relay everything their host hears and sees. Of course, such technology swiftly decays in the Slow Zone. Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Averted with distance, and the aversion is one of the biggest reasons why civilizations in the Beyond avoid going anywhere near the Slow Zone. In Children of the Sky, "They're Rider larvae, Jef," revealing Tycoon's "cuttlefish" as Skroderider larvae. Very shortly thereafter, she realizes that Greenstalk is among the adult Skroderiders in the colony, making it a double Wham Line. Oddly, this changes the plot not at all, save for one key thing: keeping Ravna and Jef out of Vendacious' claws.

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Capital Letters Are Magic: Plenty of examples note The Tines, the Powers, the Emergents and the Emergency, the Spiders, Focus and the Focused, the Children, the Choir, and of course the Zones themselves, the Slow Zone, the Beyond, and the Transcend, but one of the strongest examples in the trilogy occurs when Beyonders trapped in the Slow Zone start referring to it sullenly as "Down Here". Now with a new introduction for the Tor Essentials line, A Fire Upon the Deep is sure to bring a new generation of SF fans to Vinge's award-winning works.

Vinge, Vernor (1992). A Fire Upon the Deep (1st mass marketed.). New York: Tom Doherty Associates. p. 62. ISBN 0812515285. LCCN 91-39020.

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Intro-Only Point of View: The prologue of A Fire Upon the Deep is mostly told from the viewpoint of the nascent Straumli Perversion as it rapidly gains sentience, though a small portion of it is also told from the viewpoint of several other nascent AIs in the same network. Deceptive Disciple: Flenser was Woodcarver's offspring/creation and most brilliant disciple, until the nature of his experiments was revealed. Some characters including Flenser!Tyrathect even call out Woodcarver for creating such a monster and then just letting him go. A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. The Spiders in A Deepness in the Sky have a larger visible spectrum of light than humans, referring to infrared frequencies as "far-red" and ultraviolet as "far-blue". Human display technologies, designed only to display what we can see, look like simple and underdeveloped technology to them, despite our otherwise advanced capabilities. Some Spider dwellings also appear dark to us, due to being lit with light outside our visible spectrum. On one occasion, Spiders are also shown to be able to "hear" vibrations in the ground through their feet.