I’ve got really behind in my plan to blog all the books I read this year. If I get a chance I’ll try to catch up.

In preparation for reading the new Vernor Vinge, Children of the Sky, I re-read A Fire Upon the Deep. This won (jointly in a tie) the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and was a worthy recipient. That was 20 years ago, now, though, so how well has this tale weathered the passage of time? It’s clearly a novel of its time. It’s effectively about the Internet as it was in 1990 when the Web was just a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes and the big new place to be online was usenet. The thing that makes this useful for a novel is the pure text basis of usenet. That all seems a little dated now in the world of smart phones, Facebook, Twitter et al. Still, as a work of science fiction based on complexity theory, it does well. The action parts of the book stand up well to the test of time and it’s still a good read, though to a new audence who didn’t read/post to usenet in its heyday I’m not sure it will be so accessible.