What if Mars really had canals and Martians?

Science fiction | Old Mars | Edited by George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois

As George RR Martin says in the introduction, this is the 'old' Mars, the one in the imaginations of Percival Lowell, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. The Mars with ancient canals so wide they are visible from Earth. Not the real Mars of barren lands and atmospheres thinner than ghosts. Short stories to evoke that utterly fictional Mars.

Let me go story by story. But to start with, I was greatly disappointed. The first stories are very much close to the tenor of earlier stories: all-male. As the book proceeded, though, I revised my early impressions. Which is good for you. I think.

Martian Blood by Allen M Steele is about an Earth researcher going into the tourist-ridden cities on Mars, looking for some Martian blood to prove or disprove his hypothesis that Martians and Earthers are ultimately descended from the same genetic pool. The Martian natives (no other word quite fits, sorry) are reclusive and hostile, likely to be violent. The researcher's hired guide is left to make world-changing decisions. Is it deliberate that the Martian aborigines' word for themselves is shatan?

The Ugly Duckling by Matthew Hughes could have been written by Bradbury. Fred Mather, an archaeologist, smuggles himself to Mars, marsquerading (I can't help myself) as a miner. Miners on Mars have quotas to fill. Martian cities are made of bone, and pulverising them and shipping them is hugely profitable. Nobody to record the cities, or the Martian culture. Fred offers to scout and lay the laser finders for the big machines. This way, he gets to see the city before it is demolished. He finds an amphitheatre, and the Martian script suddenly and telepathically makes sense to him, as he finds himself immersed in a Martian entertainment/history. The boss miner finds him lost to the Martian madness, in which he thinks himself a Martian, and has to save himself from Fred's attack. For some reason, ancient Martian 'masks' have value. Go figure.

In The Wreck of The Mars Adventure, Captain Kidd is rescued by the King of England days before he is due to be hanged, under condition that he leads an expedition to Mars. On a sailing ship equipped with hot air balloons. And accompanied by the eccentric scientist who has designed the equipment. Off they sail, through doldrums and storms between the planets. (Yeah, exactly!). Finally, they crashland on Mars, where their trade goods help them for a short while, to trade with suspicious Martian princes. The scene in which the Martians solemnly eat a Bible and the horror of the scientist at this blasphemy was quite funny! David D Levine certainly gets a good flavour of 100-year-old science fiction, Victorian without being steampunk, and utterly unscientific.

The Swords of Zar-tu-kan feature the first woman in the book, and high time. SM Stirling has populated both Venus and Mars with aliens, and this story is placed in that world. A biologist arrives on Mars, and is taken under the wing of a resident Terranan. Unfortunately, he is promptly kidnapped. Like many a Larry Niven character, the Martians have great respect for contracts. Also for debts. Sally Yamashita ropes in an old comrade, the Professional Practitioner of Coercive Violence, Teyudza-Zhalt. The duo find the missing biologist—but of course—with very satisfactory shenanigans on the way. A nice mix of Japanese culture and Mister Spock's alien logic, not to mention a talking 'optimal canid' named Satemcan. There is also a very good reason for the kidnapping. This story is one of my favourites in this book.

So I continued reading the book.

Shoals by Mary Rosenblum also explores the miners vs. dreamers trope. Maartin's mother was killed in a blow-out of a dome when miners after shoals of Martian 'pearls' undercut it. The miners are greedy for the vast riches that attend the finding of a shoal. People see wonderful visions with these 'pearls'. Except, Maartin sees them all the time, direct access to ancient Martians stored virtually. The virtual Martians still have a few tricks up their dusty sleeves, though, to save themselves and the farming city that Maartin's family is a part of.

In the Tombs of the Martian Kings by Mike Resnick features an Earthman named The Scorpion, who has a lion-sized Venusian 'dog' as a companion. Two pages in, we find the Venusian is telepathic. A Martian hires them to help him find the mythical lost Tombs of the really really ancient Martian Kings, who may well have been superpowered aliens (aliens to Mars, that is), worshipped as gods by primitive Martians. Our gun for hire helps the Martian, named Quedipai and called Cutiepie. Very Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lots of fancy traps and monsters to protect the Kings. A book with an invocation to awaken the last King... ok, you can guess how it goes.

Out of Scarlight by Liz Williams could well be placed on Earth in any fantasy world. Zuneida Peace pretends to be a man named Thane. She saves the adventurer Nightwall Dair from a sorcerer on her way to the Tribes, to get clues on finding a Martian slave girl stolen by a sorcerer from a lord of Cadrada, and whom he wants back. Scarlight is the name of the last town before the Cold Deserts. Zuneida/Thane finds the priestess, gets the clues, evades the attentions of Dair, gets caught by the sorcerer, rescued, and does some rescuing. All very confusing. Who is after what. But tied up neatly in a bow at the end.

Howard Waldrop has a 'modern' Earthman follow the old trek of an ancient Martian, writing a diary detailing the old diary. A short and whimsical story, The Dead Sea-Bottom Scrolls.

James SA Corey describes another story based on sea pirates. In A Man Without Honor, we have an American-spelling story about a subject of the King of England, explaining the circumstances under which he killed the King's Governor. The pirates attempt to loot a derelict, find it still under attack, and rescue the damsel with the treasure. But she's a Captain herself, of a spacecraft. She's getting some chemicals from Earth to help her Martian race (very human-like) to save themselves from tentacled Martian tyrants of another species. Bravely, the pirates and the heroic humanoid Martians ally, as do the greedy Governor and the Martian monsters. Will the good guys of Mars be saved?

Written in Dust by Melinda M Snodgrass, too, has the ancient Martians accessible through stored memories, and under risk of demolished cities. In this one, a teenager reaching college age on Mars finds her two fathers' marriage being torn apart by her control-freak Martian grandfather (all humans here). There is family adventure. And of course the access to Martian dead—perhaps human dead, too?

Michael Moorcock, you either love or hate, and I tend to sit on the latter side, but this was a cool story. The Lost Canal has future humans on Mars being contacted by close-to-today humans via a time machine. 'Your mission, should you choose to accept it' offered to the fugitive Mac Stone is nothing less than to save the planet. Mac has been making money and the rich people don't like it. There are killer robots, ancient bombs, a lost canal with a tremendous waterfall (that possibly goes to the centre of the planet), and only seven hours to save the world. The time machine gives him useful information and gadgets for super strength and anti-gravity. On the other hand, apart from killer robots, he's being hunted by a top assassin as well.

Phyllis Eisenstein's The Sunstone is set in the heroic savage mould. David Miller returns to Mars after being educated on Earth, to find his archaeologist father missing. He has gone to find one more wonderful city, to make tourist money off. David teams up with his father's Martian friend Rekari to go find the body. Rekari tells him his father was adopted by the last of a dying tribe, so that their memories could live on, and gives him a traditional sunstone to wear. The traditional Martians don't like that. Is David a true Martian or will he be unable to enter—or exit—the Martian repository of tradition they find beneath his father's body?

(These are all rhetorical questions, okay, you're supposed to guess the right and obvious answer.)

Joe R Lansdale's King of the Cheap Romance is possibly my favourite in this book. It has spacecraft (ok, aircraft, but Martian air is too thin to live in), a young protagonist left to find a way to save herself and the next city all alone. Angela King's Dad is killed in a crash while they are carrying vaccine to the local town. The 'cheap romance' is what her father calls adventure stories. She loads up everything including the body, onto a solar sled with limited battery power. She is chased by a persistent and deadly Martian ice shark. Then a climbing berg climbs out of the ice. These are rises of solid ice coming up from old old Mars. Full of living organisms that need air once in a while. This one has an ancient Martian ship embedded in it. Angela evades the ice shark and goes inside the berg, where she sees ancient Martian wonders. With the last of her consciousness, she does reach the city. With or without the vaccine? With or without the fever herself?

Mariner has an Earthman stranded on Mars. He gets there while attempting to sail around the Earth. A type of Martian captures him, and fortunately he is able to convince them he is air-breathing. Other Martian species all war with each other. The only commonality is that they all need respirators in air (to keep their gills moist). Jason becomes a pirate, then a pirate captain. What happens when he rescues a ship full of to-be-slaves, when he is already below quota on plunder? Chris Robertson writes a straightforward tale.

Ian McDonald doesn't. The Queen of the Night's Aria is the closest to a horror story in this book. Maestro Jack Fitzgerald, the famous singer from Earth, is on a downward economic spiral and refuses to accept it. He and his sidekick are reduced to singing for the Earth troops on the frontline in Mars. Mars had attacked, Earth had counterattacked. Earth has now occupied most of Mars. There are all kinds of exotic aliens and alien cities. During his performance at the Front, the Martians counter-attack. The Queen of the Martians is a fan of the Count. Things go downhill from there. It's more poignant than horrific, come to that. I mean, we're not actually suffering reverses on Mars, are we?

TL;DR? A good read for sci fi fans.

When you want to die, either laughing or in terror

Humour/Thriller, Horror | Anthony Horowitz | Three of Diamonds, Horowitz Horror 1

Anthony Horowitz writes funny thrillers, thrilling funny books and horror stories with equal facility. He does this for teens. For adults, he writes for TV. Personally, I think he enjoys the books for teens more. Or maybe I'm just projecting my own sentiments on the writing, since, to the best of my knowledge, I've never seen any of the TV series he writes for.

To start with, Three of Diamonds. This brings together three of the Diamond Brothers Defective (sic) Agency stories. Nick Diamond, a teen boy, has the most stupid elder brother ever. Tim Diamond fancies himself a detective, with groan-worthily hilarious results. The whole thing from one end to the other is a gag-fest, with a veneer of detectiving as well. It's beautifully done, so that you have a mystery, a logical progress to the solution, and the most insane dialogues and action sequences to take you from one end to the other.

Tim phones up the expiry date on a yoghurt carton. He wants to take pictures of fish in the Chunnel. Escaping from villains, they reach a bridge:

“The river!” I said.

Tim reached into his pocket and took out his camera.

“No!” I yelled. “I don't want you to photograph it! I want us to cross it!”

You have to tell Tim, preferably in short, simple words.

The French Confection  has the Diamond bros win a trip to Paris. Tim's boasting on the train brings a desperate man to them, asking for help. He's murdered. The villains want to know what he told them, and mayhem proceeds from there, via the bridge on the river, a boat on the river, prison, a hotel, kidnapping:

“You have put us to a great deal of trouble,” he went on. “We've searched you and this morning we searched your room. Are you going to tell us where it is?”

“It's on the top floor of the hotel!” Tim exclaimed.

“Not the room!” Bastille swore and choked on his cigarette.

Sorry, I keep laughing over the paragraphs, wherever the book opens. Anyhow, Nick manages to solve the mystery, and Tim remains convinced he (Tim) is the greatest of detectives.

The Blurred Man (yes, Horowitz loves his puns, even though most of the kids who read his books will never have read the originals of the punny titles) has an American who hires the Diamonds to find out what happened to his good friend Lenny Smile, who runs a charity called Dream Time, to which the American novelist has given two million dollars in donations. Just before he was to have met Smile and found out what wonderful work the charity has done, Smile is run over by a roadroller. Why? (Ahem).

I am not going to give you a sample of how Tim interrogates the roadroller driver. I don't like to mistype so many words because I'm laughing too hard.

Anyway, they solve that one, too. Finally, there is I Know What you did Last Wednesday, in which Tim is invited by his millionaire classmate to visit him on an island, along with a bunch of other classmates. Except that they all start getting murdered one by one. You've seen this in a movie, right? And read the Agatha Christie book of the same premise, right? But you cannot beat Tim Diamond at it. Fortunately, Nick insists on going with him, and Tim comes out alive in the end. Not before you find he topped his school in embroidery. Yes, amazing that Tim could actually do something well, isn't it?

Okay, and then I picked up Horowitz Horror 1, which is not funny in the slightest. I checked. A bit of gallows humour once in a while. This is the guy who created an explosive bubble-gum for Alex Rider called Bubble-o seven? Yup. Horowitz writes terrific horror. Just in case you think horror for younger readers is less horrifying than that for adults, well, it's not. It's just as horrifying, if not more, considering that many of the protagonists are kids.

There's Bath Night, a story of a haunted bathtub. Killer Camera kills everything it's used to take a picture of. You don't want to know what the last picture in the story was of. Light Moves is about a kid who gets a haunted computer which can predict horse races, and the consequences of greed. The Night Bus is closer to the conventional kids' horror story, but creepy in its own way. Harriet's Horrible Dream is worthy of George RR Martin or Orson Scott Card, and so horrible I'm skipping onwards. Scared is about the city-kid bully in the country, and reminds me, strangely enough, of Ray Bradbury stories. In A Career in Computer Games, Horowitz tries to make the protagonist as unsympathetic as possible so that we don't mind what happens. Yet, in the end, I felt sorry for the wretch, for whom, let me say, I had no plans to have any sympathy whatsoever. The Man with the Yellow Face has supernatural horror in it, rather Victorian in ambience. The Monkey's Ear is the only story in which Horowitz's inner punster leaks out a bit, and it's a fair tribute to that original of horror stories, The Monkey's Paw.

TL;DR – read Horowitz's books, and don't worry about your chronological age. Horowitz is that worthy YA writer: he never condescends to his reader, and that's what makes his stories so enthralling.

A rich vein of tropes

Science fiction | Greig Beck | Beneath the Dark Ice

I knew when I picked it up that it would probably be lightweight SF. You've seen this trope many times before. If you've seen Aliens vs. Predator, a terrible movie, you've seen the 'hideous creatures under the ice' trope. And perhaps this suffers from comparison with the last book I read with the trope, Gridlinked (see earlier posts), which, too, had a hideous murderous thing under the ice. But it's not steampunk, alien-punk or far future folderol. This is near future stuff.

But this book has another trope, too, and I wanted to see how the two meshed. The hero, Capt Alex Hunter, has become a superman. Nope, no radioactive spiders, just a bullet into a part of the brain which gets superactivated in his case. He can run faster, see further, in the dark, hear better, be stronger, cleverer, you name it. Err, you saw this in the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough. Except that Hunter is not immune to pain.

There is also Dr Aimee Weir, a petrobiologist, who spends the first few chapters slowly falling in love and sharing gazes across the room. For some reason, she can also do instant dissections and tell you all about the Creature under the scalpel.

There is the creepy Dr Silex of the lax ethical codes and roving hands.

Assorted hardcore military types.

And the monster under the ice. OK, I'm not giving away any spoilers about how this monster, a prototype kraken, differs from other trope-y monsters. It's different. Trust me. Whatever is not a trope will not suffer spoilers. OK, hint, Arthur C Clarke did something similar, but not similar enough to make it a trope.

Of course, there are ancient pre-Mayan Altanteans, nonono, they are Aztlans, using granite from Aswan to build a huge city in the Antarctic (facepalm). Except that they built it about 10000 years ago when Antarctica was warm and green. Let me put in the comma: 10,000 years ago. And then it sank under the ice.

Anyhow, with the help of the hotshot climber Monica Jennings and the smitten-by-Monica Dr Matt Kerns, the archaeologist, the whole lot goes down into the ominous cave, in the wake of the previous expedition, of which they have a few bits and pieces left, which in turn was off to rescue a billionaire's planeload of hangers-on, of which pieces, ditto.

And presently they are attacked both by Russians and the creature.

The Russians have been sent by their Energy Minister, who is terrified of the ex-KGB President, and sends in their elite killer unit just in case the liquid under the cave is petroleum, which mother Russian will naturally keep to herself, but the gracious Americans by contrast will either keep safe for the future or share generously. Right. This minister later on turns out to like teen prostitutes and gets assassinated. What's with this penchant of Americans to demonise Russian villains, anyway? I asked this before, and I ask it again. Russia is a democracy and has checks and balances. OK, OK, I'm grateful the Americans don't demonise Indian villains. I'd stop reading their fiction, most likely.

The underground thingy turns out to be a lake with beaches populated by enough new forms of vicious life to give Pellucidar a hat-tip.

As with any Creature movie, the cast gets killed off one by one, leaving very few to be rescued at the end, and as a going-away prize, knocks off a few of the rescuers as well. I'll leave you to guess who gets killed. Is Greig Beck the new George RR Martin (everyone dies!) or more in the Hollywood tradition?

This book will come to you as a Hollywood movie, I predict to you, all dialogue retained intact. [Nooooo, I did not mean to give you a hint.]

Read it on a tired Sunday when you really have no energy for more than some light, fluffy entertainment, and the TV or DVD player are on the blink. It will not make you strain your brain, hough you will learn how blue ice differs from other ice, and what a halocline is. It's what we in India call 'a time-pass'.

But I picked it over serious literature. Therefore you safely conclude my last Sunday was not particularly energetic.

First world problems of the future

Science Fiction | Vernor Vinge | Children of the Sky

So I finally finished Children of the Sky. Indeed, once I started on it again, it was unputdownable.

This is the follow up story to A Fire on the Deep, which is a sequel itself to A Deepness in the Sky. The last two books in the series could well have been published as one book, since the events follow so closely and the characters are shared between the books (except the ones that got killed in Fire, but Vinge is no George RR Martin, thank goodness, and is thrifty with the deaths). One major difference between these two is that the villains this time include humans as well (oh! the horror!).

Ravna revives the surviving children from the cold sleep boxes, and they all grow up into young adults, with no real adult supervision along the way, given how much time Ravna spends on frantically preparing to confront the Blight. And if you've read Lord of the Flies, you know what's going to happen then. Well, not really, the Tines do a good job of adult supervision, for what it's worth.

In the meantime, one of the old villains steals a dataset and ties up with a Tine in another country, a brilliant inventor, if somewhat erratic. This villain continues with worse villainy in this episode.

Ravna faces slow technology, slow progress, fast talking villains, perfidy and kidnapping. On the plus side are her loyal friends (though one is getting paranoid) and, well, loyal frenemies. Good guys turn out to be bad guys and vice versa.

The children are led astray by smooth villains who object to the available technology not being used for things they were used to in the high-tech Beyond. Complete First World Problems complaints! You want to shake sense into them. But are they wrong in their worries?

Good eventually triumphs, as in all Vinge's books, but, as usual, only squeaking through in the very last hour. (Hmph, in Deepness, they did their squeaking through in the last few pages-- we were down to single digit numbers of pages by the time the villains were vanquished-- so either Vinge is getting slow in his older age, or this story is not supposed to be as tense a read).

I dunno, you may cavil, but I liked Deepness best and I still wonder what Sherkaner Underhill got up to. There is, however, a possibility that there will be another sequel coming up. Ravna has yet to take on the Blight. On the other hand, even a major talent like Vinge may quail at taking on that encounter. He needs to exercise, eat protein-rich diets, fish oil, yoga and things before sitting down and cracking his knuckles for that one. The Blight is a Metavillain.

Next up, I will be covering my re-read of Terry Pratchett's Jingo.

Ian and the Dragon

Science Fiction | Neal Asher | Gridlinked

Like I mentioned in the last post, this book had me helplessly glued to it, and this is when it was a re-read, and also I'd had no intentions of re-reading the whole thing when I innocently picked it off the shelf to read a few pages. And this is Neal Asher's first novel. Whuff.

Gridlinked is the story of the fabulous Ian Cormac, described at one point in the book as 'the invention of fabulists', an agent for Earth Security in a universe where people travel from planet to planet via runcibles (Asher's name for the instant-elsewhere device variously called a gate, portal, etc in other fiction of the ilk). People live lives of luxury, mostly, and the tech is way up in the realms of magic. The only thing you cannot carry through a runcible is a proscribed weapon. And yet, there are those who want to leave the Polity, and drag their planet away from it. Separatists, particularly nasty multiple murderers get Cormac's goat, and he's awfully good at getting them to justice.

Early in the story, Cormac blows his cover by being too cyborg-like as a result of 30 years of being fully gridlinked with the AIs that run the cities, the runcibles, and Earth Security. Horace Blegg, the near-mythical head of ES, a 400 year old survivor of Hiroshima, suggests that he should get off the grid and take on a new assignment, to find out what caused one of the runcibles to fail, converting an incoming human into a 30 megaton bomb.

In this book, you meet the villainous separatist, Arian Pelter, who is as vicious a psychopath as you will ever meet in fiction; his sidekick, John Stanton, a boosted mercenary who prides himself on leaving separatist cells before they go fully bad, and misses the signs this time; Mr Crane, the broken Golem run by Pelter, and other assorted human villains. You also meet the dracomen, who may be alive, or not, probably created by Dragon, a series of four kilometer-diameter spheres with a touchy personality and an inexhaustible supply of lies and indirection. On Cormac's side, there are a team of four Sparkind, two of which are Golems, another Golem, a runcible expert, and assorted AIs and soldiers. Not to forget, the not-paranoid-enough smuggler captain, catadapt women and ophiadapt men. The augmentations that people do are satisfyingly futuristic, the different planets reminiscent of science fiction book covers down the ages. The spacecraft are marvels, the cars fly on anti-gravity, weird killer bugs and robotic spiders populate the shade under strange trees, and the weaponry is enough to start a movie series in itself.

All this and evocative writing too. Neal Asher actually makes you like the James Bond-ish Ian Cormac, and some of the lines are real gems. Sample:

He stretched himself out and was wondering if he would get any sleep, when sleep crept up and got him instead.

A whodunit with plenty of twists and turns, and a surprise ending.

And now, I wonder if a writer has to be ruthless with the characters, not just in setting up challenges for them, but even unto knocking them off when least expected, to get that extra 'grittiness' into fiction. You cannot be empathetic with your characters and create dyed-in-the-wool villains unless you are either psychopathic or have a ruthless grip on your imagination. At one extreme is I-will-gross-you-out-if-I-can't-horrify-you Stephen King and George RR Martin, who is inventively torturous with his characters. Certainly, these writers understand their characters, but they don't care for them, or they would not kill them so gruesomely. The taste has bitter notes all along, and sometimes strongly in the aftertaste, too. Even the chocolate in these is bitter choc. On the other end, you have Anne McCaffery, Catrina Taylor and Gord McLeod, who care deeply for their characters, and shy away from the real gore. There are tragedies and triumphs, but the overall taste is sweet. The villains are misguided and can be brought around, the aliens are understandable, and all problems can be solved if we all pull together. I know which world I'd prefer to live in, all right! And who doesn't like cake?

Yet, once in a while, your reading will go for the stronger and less expected tastes. Gridlinked is salty, pungent, with a hint of sour and an early overlay of bitter. More like eating a large burger with chilli than a bowl of chips. Satisfying.

OK, now I need to get back to Children of the Sky. Only, I'm taking a short story diversion through Aberrations, edited by Jeremy Shipp. I'm three short stories in already, which is blazing fast for a book I only downloaded today. (Oh, did I mention it's free on Amazon today?) Read it yourself, so that you can take issue with me in a few days when I comment on it. Please. :)

Whatever happened to Sherkaner Underhill?

Science fiction | Vernor Vinge | A Fire Upon the Deep


I must confess, I was greatly excited to find that Vinge had written not one, but two, sequels to A Deepness in the Sky. I really wanted to know what happened to Sherkaner Underhill and the rest of the supersmart aliens who found humans cute.


Well, I never did. The sequel, A Fire Upon the Deep, takes on the iconic Pham Nuwen part 2. You know, I know, everyone who read the first book knows, that Pham Nuwen was a legend. A solver of impossible problems (not really, but it will be a spoiler for Deepness if I tell you more). He's back, after several thousand years of being left for dead.

But let's back up a bit. Fire begins with humans well settled in the outer reaches of the galaxy. For unspecified reasons, Vinge decided that going to the centre of the galaxy to find higher technical civilisations wouldn't work. As you get deeper in the gravity well, therefore, tech slows down, sapients become stupider, things go bad. As you move out, though, things speed up, magic becomes possible: antigravity, FTL travel, transcendent intelligences, the works. Every species' goal, then, is to investigate every possibility of becoming transcendent itself. With help and shortcuts from older transcendent Powers, if possible.

However, they know from the gww (galaxy wide web, ha ha, not that Vinge calls it anything but the Net of a Million Lies), that the process of waking up old archives is fraught with danger, and carefully locate High Lab far away from civilisation. Except they make the mistake of bringing their kids along.

Anyhow, low bandwidth communication between species (I suppose in the early days of the Net, a speed of several kbps was considered to be really cutting edge futuristic) tracks the progress of the new transcendent, which turns out to be an ancient evil that ensnares all the humans on High Lab, except the kids, which the Countermeasure helps two adults to save in coldsleep boxes, and transport at great risk to a world in the Slow Zone, where they hope to set up a signal and call for help.

But there are native intelligences on the planet, some things which are a bit like large, dog-sized long-necked ratlike creatures, which, we slowly realise, are made up of packs. Individuals have no intelligence; only a pack of several individuals is intelligent, but too many together, and the 'mind-noise' destroys intelligence again. Vinge is good at inventing aliens.

These critters are at a medieval history level, and some of them attack the ship, kill the adults and several children. 8 year old Jefri and his 13 year old sister Johanna, who dubs them Tines, become the surviving pawns in the low-level power play.

In the meantime, in the high-level power play, Ravna Bergnsdot, the lone human in the internet hub called Relay, is approached for help in understanding a human found in a really ancient dead ship, who is found to be revivable after all, and like no modern human. Pham Nuwen is back. Or is he? You know, I know, that Pham is real. But does Ravna, and more to the point, does Pham?

How the super evil, the Blight, then attacks, and how Pham and Ravna race to save the children as well as the galaxy, is the rest of the book. There are a few more aliens to meet on the way, don't worry.

Vinge specialises in the known evil plot and the unknown villain. You see this first in Grimm's World, the first part of which I read way back soon after it was first published (Eeee, I just dated myself!) and then again in Deepness, which was one suspenseful book, and you see it again in the maneouvering of the tines.

Now, I shall proceed with the third book in the series, which, as you already know, I made the mistake of reading 11 chapters of, before realising I was building up spoilers and reading out of sequence. Sigh.

No, actually, I will finish rereading Neal Asher's Gridlinked, which I stretched out a hand and picked up to read a couple of pages of, in a free moment, and which I then compulsively started from the beginning and am reading through to the end in a helpless fashion. Then I will get back to The Children of the Deep, which I left at another unexpected-villains-start-winning point, always a depressing stage in any book, and particularly with a master like Vinge. When I review Gridlinked, I will muse about ruthlessness in writers, and whether it is a good thing or not, with side comments on George RR Martin.

On the minus side, I never did get to know what happened to the inimitable Sherkaner Underhill and his lovely family. Wail.