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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,19,17,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-books","category-sf","category-books-sf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":430,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}