The Children of the Sky

Vernor Vinge

2011

This is the sequel to Vinge's 1992 novel 'A Fire Upon the Deep'. Unlike the near twenty year gap between the novels. this story is set a mere decade after the conclusion of the events in the earlier book. In that book, Ravna Bergsndot, along with a revenant Pham and a couple of the children evacuated from the Near Transend had stopped the Blight in an extrusion of the Slow Zone but with lifetimes measurable in the centuries that was only a temporary measure...

In this book, most of the remaining Children have been woken from the cold sleep they had been stouck in but all they could remember was the high tech Magics of the Transcend and the High Beyond so this cold world in the Slow Zone was shear torture and they found Ravna and Johanna's tales of the Blight hard to credit - it would have been their parents being silly enough to have activated it when all said and done - and then there were the Tines to get used to - packs of dog-like beings who made up a thinking being but this went surprisingly well. However, there were those Children who did not believe Ravna's tales of on-comimg doom and wanted her to concentrate resources on making their lives easier. And then there were the Tines, most accepting of the humans, some really keen to learn what these strangers from the sky could do, and some wanting to see them dead.

I was worried at first as Vinge has written this with a rather everyday tone but in fact this works surprisingly well as the Children and Ravna adapt to their new lives as the children grow up and become adults in their own right. There is still a sense of suspense in the action and even more than in in the earlier book I felt the Tines were individuals and the fact that the fact that the individual Tines were made up of separate creatures is used in a number of plot points throughout the book. All over, a great sequel, though it does open up the possibility of a further sequel - though I hope it doesn't take quite so long to be published...

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