A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge

I read this book a while back and decided to pick it up again to fill in some gaps (both in my memory and in between reading other stuff).

I had forgotten about some of the things I disliked about the book. Which is a good thing, I believe. The thought of having "zones of thought" in which "normal" laws of nature no longer adhere is very interesting. However, why zones of thought? Strange. But anyway, Vinge fills his galaxy with fascinating aliens (usually aliens are better when they are not very humanoid; how big is the universe anyway?) and appropriately scaled levels of technology. I was fascinated by the "Beyond" and Transcended "Powers". While it is never made clear how this happens or why, there is enough of a mystery to create a kind of allure with these godlike beings. Even his little world that is stuck in the slow region of space he has crafty little sentient beings that work with a hive mind. Vinge pulls it off quite well.

I did not like the 'Net that much. It smacks of the world wide web (itself smacking of old usenets) too much, and puts way too much of a human face on the galactic civilizations. I give credit to Vinge for contemplating something like the 'Net back in the early 90's; for that, I am in awe of his imagination. But it just seems a little dated now. I guess that happens. =)

I did enjoy how the plot grew and the the little twists kept me coming back until I hit the climax of the story. Some of the progression of the old backwater aliens was too much like our Feudal era, but I guess that helps readers to get pulled into the story a little. It was interesting to watch how "high technology" was adapted to work in "slower" zones, to the point that the characters are discussing how best to jumpstart a civilization's tech tree as if there are dusty white papers on the topic floating around. And I do very much enjoy the glimpses of "high technology" that Vinge allows us to see. While I want more, I do appreciate that he had the good sense to enshroud it in enigma so as to allow the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps. Too often I find that the author goes overboard in detail and his imagination limits the story.

The Changeling Plague, by Syne Mitchell

This book has a very interesting premise and plot; in some sense, it is right up the sci-fi alley. My beef is two-fold:
- has a really slow start
- the ending is just weird

It is almost like the story twists in a exponential way. I did like the concept of systematically mapping and categorizing the building blocks of our DNA, and the possibility of "reprogramming"; just the thought of that is pretty amazing. But I did not really like how the author used a computer hacker to become the genetic engineering guru just by reading a few books. Sure, there are some similarities between the complex systems of a program and the biological instructions stored in protein pairs, but to think that you can simply tweak DNA willy-nilly is quite naive. The author lightly touches on the negative side-affects, but in my mind, it was a gross over-simplification.

As ever, my "litmus test" is that the book did not draw me at all. There was nobody to connect too. There is a hacker who turns his girlfriend into his late sister, the misplaced billionaire who is hated but charitable, and a CDC genetic specialist who is at the forefront of genetic engineering but seems to do nothing productive with it.