"A Fire Upon the Deep"

[fiefoe]

Amazon comments like 'His science fiction is as hard as diamond' sound quite off-putting, but Vernor Vinge turned out to be a refreshing gush of ideas. I won't soon forget the delight when it burst upon me that Peregrine is a pack creature.  Plot-wise, I heartily approve the practise of always leaving the protagonists hanging on a rope, and then proceeding to cut the rope, though the ending was a bit of a let-down.

• Peregrine had served on lines before; it was a strung-out existence, but not nearly as dull as ordinary sentry duty. It's hard to be bored when you're as stupid as a line.
• In the centuries before him, there had been only a few effective postures: the instinctive heads together, the ring sentry, various work postures.
• "I'm sorry." He paused, going into the stillness of complete concentration. "I've committed the memory." Sometimes the habit was cute, and sometimes just irritating. {Cuteoverload: a plant riding on a cart that serves as its short-term memory.}
• In Ravna's opinion, sex in zero-gee was not the experience some people bragged it up to be; but really sleeping with someone... that was much nicer in free fall. An embrace could be light and enduring and effortless.
• Cricketsong has been on the Net for more than ten thousand years. Apparently it is a fanatical studier of paths to Transcendence. For eight thousand years it has been the heaviest poster on "Where are they now" and related groups.
• Something so big it swallowed the races that might have recorded it. Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all-no one's around to write horror stories.
• The Zones themselves may be an artifact, perhaps created by something beyond Transcendence for the protection of lesser forms or [hypothetical] sentient gas clouds in galactic cores.
• Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience. {Again, the perspective tilt.}