A Fire Upon the Deep (Zones of Thought, #1)

by Vernor Vinge

Prying into the aeons-old archive of a dead god is – as the characters in the bravura prologue acknowledge on the first page – an act of almost gothic peril.

when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.

His grin showed he understood just how irritating he was being.

But what do you do when your new creations may be smarter than you are?

She opened her eyes, disoriented and happy. She was lying with her arms wrapped tightly around … a large pillow. Damn. He’d already left.

He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.

Even though she had seen them die, something inside her refused to let them go.

He jammed so much, you nearly died, so much you can’t make sense of it. I’ve read about things like that in Applied Theology—’ as much legend as fact. ‘Godshatter, it’s called.’