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Dec 06, 2011

Mike rated it:

First off, I was a huge fan of Vinge's other books, Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. They were awesome examples of hard sci-fi and rife with interesting and innovative ideas and characters. Sadly Children of the Sky does not come close to its predessesors.

To me it felt like the story suffered from Secondbookitis. It seems pretty clear that there is going to be a sequel, but this book just didn't know what to do in the interim. It was pretty neat to see how the humans More...

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Feb 06, 2012

D.L. rated it:

I first heard of Vernor Vinge when I saw him at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Orlando in 2011. This is the second of his books I’ve found at the library and read. The first was Rainbow’s End.
The Children of the Sky is the third book in his ‘Zones of Thought Series.’ As I did not (yet) read the first two, this was my first exposure to this world. Fortunately, enough backstory is provided to develop the characters and explain how humans arrived on this planet.
What I liked most:
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Feb 05, 2012

Edward rated it:

Not that it matters to you, but I don't read nearly as much science fiction as I used to. Science fiction is, to generalize, a popular form of literature, and it's much easier to put up with the varying quality and styles if you're consuming boxes and full shelves of the books. You don't like something? Well, now you know. And you move on.

These days I hardly ever buy hardcovers, and only read them if my local library has a copy. I was pretty excited when I saw this sequel to FIRE UPON More...

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Jan 15, 2012

Denny rated it:

When you're following up one of the best science fiction books of the late 20th Century (A Fire Upon the Deep), expectations will be high. And unfortunately, they're dashed here. There are parts of this book that are fantastic, but there are a few sections that are glacially paced. A bigger problem is the characters: One of the heroic leads from the first book comes across as a myopic idiot at times in this one, and having just re-read AFUTD prior to starting this, that was hard to swallow.
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Nov 22, 2011

Mike rated it:

There's a scene in A Beautiful Mind where Nash is visited by a friend and former colleague after coming home from the mental hospital. Nash shows his friend his latest work, which is just childish scribbling, from a man who had previously done work worthy of a Nobel Prize. The friend gives him patronizing encouragement but it's clear that he's horrified at what has happened.

That's how I felt upon getting into The Children of the Sky. Vinge has produced two of the best books I've ever h More...

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Jan 07, 2012

Ken rated it:

I was one of the numerous people who was looking forward to this book yet like so many others I found that, while it's enjoyable, it falls far short of the mark of its predecessors. A sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, it's far more thematically similar to A Deepness in the Sky.

There are two big drawbacks to this book. One is the glacial pace (I easily skimmed at least a hundred pages in the middle of the novel with no loss). Antagonists who are so obviously evil that they should've be More...

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Nov 01, 2011

Sandi rated it:

Two credits. I had been anxiously awaiting the release of The Children of the Sky and totally planned on getting the audiobook because the ebook was too expensive. Then, it turned out that the audiobook was two credits on Audible. I hesitated for about one day. Then, I saw that it was narrated by my favorite narrator, Oliver Wyman and I caved. Wyman is absolutely wonderful and giving each character a unique voice and I have yet to hear a male narrator who does a better job at voicing women More...

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Oct 17, 2011

Brenda rated it:

If your favorite part of Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning "A Fire Upon the Deep" was the relations between two human children and the dog-like hive minds called Tines on the medieval planet on which they became stranded, then you will love "The Children of the Sky".

If you liked AFUtD for the peeks into the connected, multi-civilization melange of super tech species and near godlike transcended Powers, and the desperate flight of the rescue ship "Out of Band II" More...

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Oct 23, 2011

Angie rated it:

ALMOST a 5.
I have seen some fairly critical reviews of The Children of the Sky, but it seems that in general they do not criticize the book for what it is but rather because it is not what they wanted it to be. Vinge fans have been waiting for this book eagerly, because the other two books in the series were so good.
My impression, though, is that there seem to be (at least) 3 kinds of readers involved, and we were anticipating 3 different books. First, there are the people inter More...

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Nov 20, 2011

Matt rated it:

I had the great luck to have read "A Fire Upon the Deep" just a couple years ago, and so didn't have to wait quite as long as some graybeards that were onto this from the very beginning. "A Fire Upon the Deep" was a VERY engaging book from me, and one of the very few that was really a constant, read for hours, page turner. One of the clear differences between AFUtD and it's sequel, "The Children of the Sky" is that the sequel doesn't have the galactic wide "zon More...

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Jan 11, 2012

Lucas rated it:

A space opera that is extremely light on the space.

I found the interleaved convergent story thread structure of the original A Fire Upon The Deep frustrating because I was far less interested in primitive alien hive dogs than galactic culture and space battles. Many other books suffer the same problem, and I think the plot-twist/cliffhanger-then-cut-to something unrelated is overused by less skilled writers.

But because Children doesn't have any space travel the dedicated More...

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Nov 02, 2011

Joey rated it:

Nowhere near the fun of A Fire Upon the Deep or subtlety of A Deepness in the Sky. Took the least interesting part of AFUtD, the part that drags for me most when I read it, and expanded it to a whole book. Also added lots of airships, presumably because steampunk sells these days.

Disappointing, but I do hope the obvious sequel is written.

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Dec 18, 2011

Rusty rated it:

Well, it's the sequel I've been waiting for - for almost 20 years. TWENTY-YEARS! Why, oh why, would a man who takes 20 years to write a sequel, clearly write something that does not wrap up the story? Yep, this is a trilogy, at the very least, and he puts these things out so slow, he's all but blackmailing the world to come up with some life extension technique that will allow him to continue writing for many more decades. Either that or we never find out how it ends.

That's why I'm More...

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Nov 12, 2011

Brian rated it:

This is more 'set in the universe of A Fire Upon the Deep' than 'sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep', in that the high-tech far-future post-singularity aspects are almost entirely absent. I shared the disappointment of the characters who also missed that aspect of their lives.

With expectations properly calibrated, I thought it was a good book, albeit feeling more like the first book of a trilogy than a fully-realized book of its own. The fact that it ends with plot threads clearly dangli More...

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Oct 20, 2011

Dan rated it:

This book was more kin to A Deepness In The Sky than to A Fire Upon The Deep.

That is, the book took place in a universe where Singularity-level AI was possible, but it was mostly a very non-Singularity story about humans (and aliens) backstabbing each other. The central tension was about trust: there are some people you really should know better than to trust, and if you trust them anyway they will backstab you so hard, but you can't just kill them because that would be evil, so what More...

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Jan 03, 2012

Julie rated it:

When did Vernor Vinge start writing YA fiction?? That was my main thought as I slogged my way through this thoroughly disappointing follow-up to the brilliant and mind-bending A Fire Upon the Deep. If you are a fan of that classic book, do yourself a favor and go re-read it rather than waste your time on Children of the Sky. If you have not yet read A Fire Upon the Deep, do so immediately. If you have picked up Children of the Sky and begun to read it, let me assure you it does not get better More...

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Dec 08, 2011

Bruce rated it:

Ten years after the Battle on Starship Hill Co-Queen of the Northern Domain Ravna Bergsndot discovers that her plan to protect the humans—she still thinks of them as the Children even though most are now young adults and some of them parents themselves—has neglected a serious problem. While she has been concentrating on science and technology to prepare for the arrival of the Blight, a malevolent superhuman consciousness bent on the destruction of humanity, political forces have been working aga More...

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Dec 23, 2011

Raja rated it:

After the long wait, I was disappointed. I'm not as interested in the low-tech stuff going on on Tines' World as I am in the outer reaches of the Zones of Thought, but I knew when I bought this book that it was focused on Tines' World politics. So in that respect, I wasn't disappointed; I got what I expected, but not what I wanted.

No, I was disappointed for other reasons. The glacial plotting. The fact that for a book mostly about political machinations, the plot was fairly pedestrian More...

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Dec 28, 2011

William rated it:

The third “Zones of Thought” novel would have had a hard time living up to its two predecessors since they are two of the classics of modern Science Fiction, and it didn’t even try to match them, abandoning A Fire Upon The Deep’s galaxy-spanning plot for a book entirely set on a single alien world. The Tines continue to be one of the most intriguing alien races in SF and the book does do some interesting further exploration of the implications of their group mind consciousness. The plot was slow More...

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Nov 26, 2011

Milele rated it:

I really liked this sequel, following Johanna and Ravna in their life on the Tines' world.

I remember the idea of a race like the Tines blew my mind when I read Vinge's first story about that world. This book seems less wildly inventive than Vinge usually is, because the setting itself has no major completely new races, technologies or other sci-fi bells and whistles. The setting limits the bells and whistles because the book set on a world where the main species is technologically More...

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Feb 01, 2012

Eoghann rated it:

As the much anticipated sequel to the exceptional A Fire Upon the Deep, there are ridiculous levels of expectation about this book.

Not surprisingly it doesn't meet them.

It's actually a rather good story. But while it does take place shortly after the events of A Fire Upon The Deep and it does deal with some of the same covers, it's not really a sequel in the normal sense because it is not only stylistically and thematically different, but it doesn't continue the same stor More...

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Oct 19, 2011

Emily rated it:

This is the sequel to "A Fire Upon the Deep" and should definitely be read in that order. It continues the story of the Tines world as the stranded human children grow up over the next 20 years or so. There's less high tech coolness (since they're still stranded in the slow zone after all) but still plenty of interesting characters, political scheming, and of course the Tines pack minds are as fascinating and well described as ever.

I found the book a little slow to get into, More...

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Jan 02, 2012

Zare rated it:

I was quite excited when The Children of the Sky was released, as I enjoyed all of the original Zones of Thought books and was interested to see how Vinge would revisit that universe. Unfortunately I found Children of the Sky to be a slog and struggled to finish it. Tines World with its native pack intelligences remains a well-developed setting, but the book starts off slowly and never achieves a compelling momentum. Principal characters were one-dimensional and story's focus on political machin More...

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Dec 12, 2011

Patrick rated it:

On the plus side: it was interesting to see what happens when a High Beyond / near-Transcendent civilization wakes up to find itself embedded in the Slow Zone. It was good to see what had become of Ravna Bergsndot, Johanna, Jefri, Amdiranifani, and all the Tines, not to mention all the now-thawed children.

On the minus side: Quite plainly this was a setup for another sequel. By its very nature, this novel was missing the intrigue of the Beyond, which was what I really loved about i More...

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Dec 08, 2011

Steve rated it:

I'll start by saying that Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" is one of my top-10 favorite sci-fi novels. And I've read and enjoyed most everything else Vinge has written. So to give "The Children of the Sky" only three stars is about as low as any Vinge book could get from me. And it's not that this is a mediocre book; it's written in the same voice as "Fire" and tells a story of what happens to the characters after the events of that novel. It's entertaining, an More...

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Feb 19, 2012

Aaron rated it:

Mediocre book. Not nearly as good as the other two in this series. Kind of hard to write a sequel to a galactic wide armageddon involving a dark super-human god that isn't going to be a huge let-down.

This was indeed that let-down. If he was going to write a sequel, I really wish he'd have written a sequel to Deepness in the Sky, not A Fire Upon The Deep. He could have written about the fleet of ships that was going to go take on the Emergents. Ah well.

I guess the only go More...

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Jul 21, 2011

Ed rated it:

The first half was weaker than I expected. Set in the years after Fire upon the Deep, the book deals with humans on Tines' World and their efforts to grapple with their new existence in the Slow Zone, recreating high technology from scratch.

Unfortunately, the book was far less compelling than its forbear. The politics and betrayals and long fought-for coups that marked Fire upon the Deep and Deepness in the Sky seem almost... transparent here. There were times when I put the book asid More...

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Jan 17, 2012

Dev rated it:

(3.3) Vernor Vinge is the visionary of the Singularity and the writer of some great short fiction and space operas. Children is not the book I hoped to read. The novel's interesting and involving, but there's no grand sweeping ideas that travel across arms of galaxies nor are they any revelatory new ideas that Vinge has packed into his other novels. Children is just the continuation of where he left off on the Tines planet: packs of dogs that share evolving intelligence and a desperate cast of More...

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Oct 29, 2011

John rated it:

Vinge's particular SF genius is his ability imagine an write about non-humanoid intelligences. (This probably stems from his CompSci/AI background.) This time we are returned to the land of the Tines, a race of pack animals (a lot like dogs) that implement collective intelligence using high-frequency sounds.

It's fun to read how the human characters interact with their Tinish friends. The story unfolds slowly, but there's action, intrigue, and good character development. If you've More...

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Jan 08, 2012

Cam rated it:

A nice return to the world of "A Fire Upon the Deep," one of the classic sci-fi books. Stirred up fond memories of the original, which I had re-read to enjoy the sequel better. Characters develop, the aliens become more complex and realistic, and the humans, well, the humans keep being human. Seems like a trilogy in the making, too, because the underlying threat from the nemesis of the first novel is still lurking in the depths of slow-moving space. A fun read for Vinge fans and a More...

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