Morality Pet: There were hints in A Fire Upon the Deep that Flenser-Tyrathect develops parental feelings towards Amdiranifani by the end, the sequel confirms it.

Ritser Brughel's final fate in A Deepness in the Sky. At the end he's the only human at the disposal of the Spiders, so they're going to keep him alive as long as possible to run tests on him. And he's arachnophobic. Whatevermancy: It's not used for prophecy, but in A Deepness in the Sky, the early attempts of the Spiders at electronics displays can only produce a limited range of colors. Many Spiders assume that a display capable of reproducing their entire visible spectrum would be impossible to construct, and derisively call the idea "videomancy". Of course, they later develop displays capable of producing their entire visible spectrum, including infrared and ultraviolet "colors". Macross Missile Massacre: Seems to be the favorite form of combat in Beyond, from handguns that fire seemingly endless amounts of guided missiles, to swarms of jump-capable smart missiles in starship battles. Walton, Jo (June 11, 2009). "The Net of a Million Lies: Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep". Tor.com.Nuke 'em: How the mad governance of Tarelsk tries to deal with Qeng Ho fleet. It fails, but kills billions in the process. Vinge’s readers in 1992 would almost certainly recognize his accomplishment, for he managed to model a galaxy free of the real-science constraints ordaining, for instance, that faster-than-light travel was nonsense, and that, as the Drake Equation argued, other intelligent life in the galaxy was astronomically unlikely. He was not alone. Writers like Iain M. Banks and Greg Bear and C. J. Cherryh and Dan Simmons and Gene Wolfe (a bit earlier) had also been revamping and supercharging the old space opera form, complexifying the old Heroes with a Thousand Faces into more problematic beings (compare Vinge’s multiply discombobulated Pham Nuwen with Larry Niven’s Ringworld predecessor Louis Wu from 1970), rebuilding the old tinkertoy galaxies into labyrinths that seemed turtles all the way down: compare Vinge’s galaxy (see below) with E. E. Smith’s pre–World War Two Lensmen world. As befits writers in the Silver Age of a form, Vinge and his peers were, in other words, deeply playful and dead serious, as were some of those who began to publish a few years later, like Stephen Baxter, or Linda Nagata, or Alastair Reynolds, or Charles Stross. Each of them excelled in one way or another (Banks’s post-scarcity universe retains all its initial transgressiveness), but of them all only Vinge, I think, gave us a galactic architecture truly fit for stories to be told within. An expedition from Straumli Realm, an ambitious young human civilization in the high Beyond, investigates a five-billion-year-old data archive in the low Transcend that offers the possibility of unimaginable riches. The expedition's facility, High Lab, is gradually compromised by a dormant superintelligence within the archive later known as the Blight. However, shortly before the Blight's final "flowering", two self-aware entities created similarly to the Blight plot to aid the humans before the Blight can escape. Vinge first used the concepts of "Zones of Thought" in a 1988 novella The Blabber, which occurs after Fire. Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky (1999) is a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep set 20,000 years earlier and featuring Pham Nuwen. Vinge's The Children of the Sky, "a near-term sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep ", set ten years later, was released in October 2011. [9]

Gut Punch: The series as a whole is too dark and violent to get much darker, but taking The Children of the Sky as a single work, most of the "evil" going on is either safely offscreen or nonviolent. Nevil Storherte, the most prominent of the Big Bad trio, spends most of the story coming across as a seditious and weaselly but charismatic manipulator. He never quite seems like the type to condone violence except in necessary situations, and since he's the Big Bad, it seems likely that the story's conflict will remain mostly political... until, near the end of the book, he fires an explosive Wave-Motion Gun into a crowd of civilians in an attempt to kill a target who might be there. Shortly thereafter, he privately laments the deaths... and blames them on his intended target for maybe being there. Space Nomads: In A Deepness in the Sky, the Qeng Ho traders are a loose collective of interstellar traders that travel via slower-than-light ramscoop-powered sleeper starships. The Qeng Ho hold that if they start to use the local time system (days/months/years) instead of their UNIX-time based system (seconds, kiloseconds megaseconds, etc), they've been in the system for too long.That naturally pales before Beyonder surveillance methods, revealed in The Chidren of the Sky— swarms of nanocameras, that infuse the target's bloodstream, can be transferred by a casual touch, and relay everything their host hears and sees. Of course, such technology swiftly decays in the Slow Zone. Last-Minute Hookup: A Deepness in the Sky has two mild examples. There is some foreshadowing of the relationships involved, but it's still pretty sudden. A Fire Upon the Deep was a favorite of mine after I first read it years ago, and it still holds up pretty well after a second visit, this time in audio. Vinge is a former computer science professor turned writer, and the guy responsible for popularizing the concept of a technological singularity. In the galaxy he imagines here, such singularities have been occurring for eons, technological races or their constructs transcending into godlike artificial minds. However, in this universe, there's a catch: faster-than-light travel and communication only work beyond a certain distance from the galactic core. Thus, the outer darkness is home to unimaginably advanced beings, while the inner "slow zone" protects newly-started civilizations from interference from above. In the jostling middle known as "The Beyond" lives everyone else, including humans, connected by a vast and ancient galactic internet (as envisioned from 1992, when it was still the age of newsgroups and slow image uploads).

Faux Affably Evil: Master villains can be distinguished by ability to be charming and polite up to the moment the Cold-Blooded Torture starts, and maybe even after, while inferior underlings and pretenders have trouble hiding their true nature.Sealed Evil in a Can: In A Fire Upon the Deep, the Blight/Straumli Perversion is a program inside a multi-billion year old archive, let loose by unwitting archaeologists. Gambit Pileup: In A Deepness in the Sky, Sherkaner Underhill and Pham Nuwen accidentally steamroll each other with their simultaneous Batman Gambits, giving Nau an opening to execute his own plan and nearly kill them all. He fails, but at the possible cost of Sherkaner and his wife's life, as well as many of his friends and staffers.