Book Review: A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

I haven't reviewed a book in awhile, but I just finished an interesting one, and thought I'd update you all. In case you're unfamiliar with my rating scale, here it is: http://leftsideofnowhere.blogspot.com/2010/11/is-there-scale-for-that.html

There were many things that I liked about the book. First, it was well written. The prose didn't feel labored, nor did he bore me with lots of speculative science. I liked the POV of the spiders, that was interesting. I also enjoyed some of the concepts of space-fairing cultures that he explores. His idea that all human planetary cultures eventually fail and are reduced to a middle-ages state of technology is a little unbelievable, but reasonably acceptable for the sake of the story. "Focus" was a very interesting form of slavery.

There were some technical aspects of the book that I felt showed some flaws. First, I thought the book was far too long. The beginning and ending were snappy, but there was a long trek through the middle that I almost didn't make it through. His action sequences were very non-visual. He didn't successfully lay out the action. I had a difficult time figuring out what was happening, and had to reread sections. Action scenes are not my strong suit either. I had to really work hard to bring my action scenes up to par in the 7th revision of my book, so Vinge's short suit in that area was really obvious to me. The big surprise at the end came off flat in my opinion because he went too far in disguising it. I felt like he was purposefully misleading, and as a result I figured out the big reveal . I didn't think the surprise was good enough to warrant the story being told from secondary sources. I would have rather had some direct insight from more main characters near the end of the book.

There weren't too many things I just flat out didn't like. The biggest thing was Vinge's penchant to repeat himself. He gives the same personal insight from the characters several times, and I felt like there were a lot of wasted words as a result.  

All in all, it  was a good read when it wasn't a slog. The characters were vibrant, even if the villains were a bit too perfect. Brughel in particular is a psychopath and would have demonstrated further shortcomings I feel, but he wasn't on screen  as much and he did have Nau holding him back. Nau was delightfully evil, all the way to the end.

I would have liked to learn more about the on-off star and why it was an on-off. I would have liked to see the humans try to uncover the truth about Arachna's past. I think there were some archaeological things that the humans would have been quick to start uncovering. They are hinted at twice, and there's an untapped goldmine there. Probably enough for me to want to read a sequel!

Bottom Line: Readability - 5, Quality - 6