After Vernor Vinge died I resolved to read A Fire Upon the Deep to Boen as his next bedtime book. During the bike tour this summer I made him read 20 minutes a day in the morning, and to my surprise he finished the last one third of the book by himself because he enjoyed it so much.
The book's great. It's got humans in a cosmopolitan galaxy-spanning internet-type civilization. It's even got the same snarky trolls you find on the internet. It's got an alien pack-mind race that's unique and different. It's got transcendental intelligences and hostile AIs, and it's even got FTL existing in a universe where some parts of the galaxy have to follow relativistic laws.
What's fun is that the book's got great characters who develop and change, which rarely happens in science fiction. There's good reason that the book won its Hugo and Nebula awards, and still remains a classic 33years later.
Recommended.
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