A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge
A loan from .
This was a really good read for sci-fi fans. There’s lots of fun ideas,
and it’s pretty well written.
Some concepts:
-Lupine creatures that are an entity made up of 4-8 wolf-like things.
Independantly, they’re scarce smarter than a standard wolf, but when close
enough, their minds work together (communicating through high-frequency
sound) to form a single personality.
-The Zones of Thought. The milky way is divided into several zones, from
the Unthinking Depths up to the Transcend. The closer to the galactic
core you get, the poorer technology works. So, faster than light travel
is possible at the level called the Beyond, but not in the Slowness (where
Earth is supposed to be). In the High Beyond and above that (the
Transcend) races can “evolve” into Powers… god-like things, but the
god-like things can’t exist in slower zones.
All good fun.
What I came to realize halfway through was that I had read a couple Vernor
Vinge novels back in high school: Across Realtime and Marooned
in Realtime. Both of which I had loved, and recently had tried to
locate again (I couldn’t remember the title or author). But seeing the
titles in the Other Books By page brought it all back.
The Realtime novels play with a concept called “Bobbles”, which are
basically frozen-time spheres. You can create a Bobble around yourself,
and basically time stops for you until the Bobble dissolves. To people
outside the Bobble, it just looks like an impenetrable, indestructable
mirrored sphere.
So, if you want to travel through time (forwards, at least), you Bobble
yourself for however many years, and whammo, you’re in the Future.
Also good fun.