The Children of the Sky (Zones of Thought series Book 3) Kindle Edition

The author went off in a totally different direction than expected, resulting in a plodding, choppy bore. Spoilers ahead:If you expected to learn more about the Zones, Powers, the Blight .. or to meet an amazing new alien race (which nevertheless shares enough with humans that we can relate)... or to see how Ravna and the Children or their descendants fought off the Blight fleet in the end... or even new machinations by the remnants of lords Flenser and Steel or some new brilliance by Woodcarver... or indeed anything at all like "Fire" or "Deepness", then forget about it. I plodded through page after page expecting the real story to finally start, but it never did. What a shame, I hoped to learn more about programmer anthropologists, applied theology and so much more on this return to the Zones. SIGH.

Continuing the universe of the brilliant 'A Fire Upon the Deep' and 'A Deepness in the Sky', with their starkly non-human yet deeply developed alien species, 'The Children of the Sky' returns us to the world of the first novel, but introduces very few new developments. It is a disappointing filler volume that might have been better pared down to a couple of excerpts like 'After the Battle on Starship Hill'. We still await a proper conclusion to the series.

Some of the dialogue and characterizations are so amateurish I can't help but feel he got a younger relative to write this. The first two books of the series were big, bold idea-driven science fiction with a disconcerting correlation to our current milieu. I'd love to be proven wrong but this looks like those ideas have run dry with the third installation. Prove me wrong, Vinge!

This novel is a sequel to Vinge's Hugo Award Winning 1993 novel: "A Fire Upon the Deep" and you can't even really understand the "Children of the Sky" unless you've read that previous book. There's not even a summary and the action picks up pretty much where the old book left off 20 years ago, with the human survivors marooned on the "Tines World" -- inhabited by a race of intelligent dog-like creatures with group minds.It's not terrible. Somewhat interesting in it's own right, but to understand how completely disappointing this novel is, you have to understand how ground breaking "A Fire Upon the Deep" was. All of science from Carl Sagan to modern science fiction that posits a galaxy containing thousands or millions of intelligent races must answer the question: "then given the billions of years in which intelligent races could have evolved in the galaxy, why aren't they here? Why is there no evidence of intelligent aliens ever visiting earth?" The answers to these questions underlie much of the current scientific search for extra-terrestrial life and most modern science fiction.Vinge's unique idea is that the galaxy is divided into "zones of thought" from the slow-zone where earth is and super-human machine intelligence and faster than light travel are impossible, to the "Transcend" where civilized races evolve godlike intelligence and powers.The question in "Fire Upon the Deep" is "what happens when one godlike intelligence decides to take over the entire galaxy?" Humans browsing in a lost library archive in the Transcend accidentally re-awaken an ancient evil super-intelligence that ruled the galaxy billions or years before and which then proceeds to start to take over once again.The other half of the story is a rather interesting but trivial story of primitive but intelligent "good-doggie" versus "bad-doggie" aliens who befriend or menace the human survivors who have crash landed on their world.After 20 years one might have thought that Vinge would have something interesting to say about his grand themes of galactic conflict and the question "can human level intelligence or independence survive in a galaxy with godlike races?"But, he's apparently only interested in the struggles between certain idiot spoiled survivor children and the Tines.His main character from Fire Upon the Deep, Ravna seems to have had a lobotomy and spends 1/2 the book making one incomprehensibly stupid decision after another. The only interesting additional characters are the Tines "Tycoon" who is founding an industrial empire. Sadly we don't spend that much time with him.We learn NOTHING whatever about the fate of the galaxy after the end of the last novel. Is the Blight (the super-intelligent evil power) really dead? What happens to the blight fleet? If the counter-measure enemy of the blight really dead or only dormant? What's going to happen?I expected that at least we'd get to see the Tines enact some form of space-faring civilization, but the novel mostly deals with the "Perils of Ravna" who is kidnapped and menaced by evil and spends much of the book attempting to fight her way back to civilization. What? She didn't think to carry a hand-gun when facing danger? She controls the ship computer but never thinks to use her power to block ship's access to the evil children for about 400 pages?If Vinge wanted to write an interesting novel about Tines World, he could at least have had them develop space travel. It would have been fun to see the Tines making their way in the galaxy and interacting with the "slow-zone" aliens there as in Vinge's other previous novel "A Deepness In The Sky". But, no. . . .Unless Vinge decides to write a concluding novel to this saga the story will forever be wrapped in enigma, ending not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Two of the best science fiction books of the last few decades were written by Vernor Vinge. These are the classic titles A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky (see MadProfessah reviews by clicking on the links.) These books were published in 1992 and 2000, respectively and are now generally described as being part of the Zones of Thought series. They both won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in the year of their release. Now, nearly 20 years after the first book in the series, Vinge has published a sequel called The Children of the Sky set in the exact same setting as A Fire Upon The Deep, with several of the characters from the earlier books returning, albeit in a time which is 10 years past the events in the first book.Most fans are usually disappointed when a long-awaited sequel to a beloved book is finally produced. The reasons for this are unsurprising; in the intervening years both the audience and the author have both aged and changed and thus it is very difficult to recapture that spark which inflamed readers the first time. Happily, in the case of The Children of the Sky, Vinge is able to seemlessly drop us right back into the world he created with A Fire Upon the Deep decades before as if only a few moments had passed by.The basics of the story are that a horrible disaster has befallen civilization. In Vinge's Universe there are Zones of space in which different levels of technology are possible. There is the Slow Zone, where faster-than-light speed is not possible due to the limitations on computational complexity and speeds, the Beyond in which FTL travel and communication is possible and the Transcend where the beings are so advanced they are for all intents and purposes Gods. These Zones of Thought are not sharp delineations and there is some variation even among the Zones. For example it's possible (and devastating) for planets to slip from one zone to the other, causing functional technological levels to vary by thousands of years of development in just a few seconds. In A Fire Upon The Deep a long-dormant evil intelligence (known as The Blight) is awakened in the Beyond and begins to cause unimaginable havoc to the civilized species who inhabit the Zone, resulting in the deaths of billions. A space ship carrying a few hundred children in "sleepboxes" (suspended animation) crashes on a planet and that story revolved around how the brother and sister Jefri and Johanna Olsndot survive their first contact with the intelligent species which inhabit the planet, called Tines World. The Olsndot siblings' parents were part of the scientific team that discovered and accidentally released The Blight into the Beyond. The Tines are 4-legged furry animals resembling dogs who communicate telepathically and through subsonic signals and when spatially close in groups of four or more form a group intelligence equivalent to humans. The Tines have a basic medieval form of society when suddenly they are exposed to the existence of modern technology from The Beyond. Additionally, a space ship (called Out of Band) from the Beyond lands on Tines World in order to rescue the children and get information on where the Blight came from in order to protect and save the rest of civilization from its devastating effects.In The Children of the Sky, Tines World is now firmly in the Slow Zone and ten years have passed since the events of the A Fire Upon The Deep and most of the children who were in coldsleep have been awakened and are starting to form a society with the realization they may never get back to The Beyond and ever experience those familiar technologies again. One of the fascinating aspects of A Fire Upon The Deep (and A Deepness in the Sky) is the incredibly detailed and complex society that Vinge is able to produce, in a completely alien context. Here we have humans interacting with dog-like hive minds and the characters are drawn with such fully realized motivations and emotions that you are forced to empathise with them. Another feature of Vinge's writing is the ambiguity of his characters, especially his villains. In A Fire Upon The Deep it is not very easy to distinguish who the "good guys" are from the "bad guys" and it is a central tension of the book, which returns in the sequel Children of the Sky that just because we are getting a first-person perspective on events from a particular character does not necessarily mean that that character is a force for "good." In fact, central to Children of the Sky is who gets to decide what is "good" or the best course of action for a group of people? How are those decisions made? There are (at least) two main factions and they both feel they are doing the correct thing for the Children and Tines World as a whole. Eventually it becomes clear that one faction is willing to commit horrific crimes (of violence, kidnapping and murder) to achieve its ends and so the reader (or at least This Reader) made a choice as to which faction to support. Then the tension is will the good guys win or will the bad guys win? This is quite a suspenseful question which basically kept me up reading until 5am to finish the book, and by the end several questions (but notably not all of them) are answered, which leads most observers and reviewers to think that there will probably be a sequel (or sequels) forthcoming.Hopefully, it won't take another 20 years for Vernor Vinge to write it!Title: The Children of the Sky.Author: Vernor Vinge.Length: 448 pages.Publisher: TOR Books.Published: October 11, 2011.OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).PLOT: A.IMAGERY: A-.IMPACT: A-.WRITING: A.

First off this is not a bad book. it's not a great book, but it is an enjoyable romp with some familiar characters. The massive grumping by some that it is a poor sequel to A Fire Upon The Deep is justified only in as much as we all expect the next book to be more epic than the last, Vinge has taken it down several notches on the space opera scale and made a very different and more human novel, and yet the existential threat is still there. I look forward to see if Mr Vinge is taking us somewhere with this, I hope so. We shall see.

Arrived promptly from the USA, in absolutely immaculate condition.

No dust cover but book is perfect

I feel that "A Fire Upon The Deep" is the best SF story I have ever read, so it was always going to be a hard act to follow, as the cliché has it. Vernor Vinge's first step in that direction was "A Deepness In The Sky", a "prequel", which I also have. That isn't quite so superlative, but judged by ordinary standards it is another excellent book. Both are full of ideas, with a gripping plot and interesting characters. "Children of the Sky" is, by comparison, feeble. In "A Fire Upon The Deep" the antagonist is a transcendental being which threatens to reduce all intelligent creatures for a thousand light years every way to mindless slaves; in "A Deepness In The Sky" the humans must fight a dictatorship which can take control of their individual minds, while on the planet below an alien race is rushing through twentieth-century technology and on the verge of a nuclear war. In "Children of the Sky" the antagonists are a bunch of silly conspiracy theorists. Unlike "Deepness", the sections of the book that deal with human-human interactions are almost entirely tiresome: only when we are learning more about the Tines and their world does it become interesting and fun. The end of the story doesn't even resolve much: it looks as if Vinge has left himself hooks on which to hang another sequel. My own opinion is that, if he has another chunk of story in mind, he would have been much better putting it into this book and cutting out a lot of the material that just holds up the plot. I also felt that the "crusherbushes" were a bit of a deus ex machina, an implausible cheat to get the characters out of a sticky situation. Usually Vinge is much more rigorous than that.

I won't give away any details of the story at all. I WILL say this though... the first time I read this book I thought 'Oh no! What's V.V. done??'The story didn't go at all in any direction that I could have anticipated, and I was so busy waiting for what I thought SHOULD happen that I almost completely missed what DOES happen.There were a couple of sections which caught my attention however, and I immediately went back and re-read the book.It's great! Once you realise that the entire tale will be set on Tines world, and that 10 years have passed and the Children are not all kids anymore, the story moves along at a fair clip, and the characters and situations are fabulous.Read it at least twice. I guarantee, your eyes will be opened :)10/10, Mr. Vinge!EDIT: I'm now in the process of listening to the audiobook edition. I've never listened to an audiobook before, but I'm finding this story even more enjoyable through this medium. Amazed!2nd EDIT: I can't stop listening to this audiobook. Some really important plot points are created simply by specific Tines characters using specific voices at specific times... something that might be slightly lost in translation when reading the written dialogue as opposed to its importance being highlighted when listening to the narrator's interpretation. I'm amazed to say that the audiobook presentation is far superior to the written version. The narrator (Oliver Wyman) does a wonderful job with a great-fun story.***** 5 STARS ALL ROUND! I want MORE!:)