I Liked It So Much I Never Want To See It Again

Please be good, please.

Woo boy. Last week, the sequel to what is probably one of my favorite books of all time was released. And I’ve not read it yet. It hurts, and I’m scared. I’m scared I won’t like it.

Best. Book. Ever.

The book? Oh yeah, it’s Children of the Sky, by Vernor Vinge. The sequel to the book that I fell in love with, oh so many years ago, A Fire Upon the Deep. And it was one of a trinity of books that made me fall head over heels in love with Science Fiction.

Now, I’ve often recommended some of my seminal books to others and have been met with blank stares, or outright confusion after folks have tried to read them. I have had to do some deep soul searching before I can tell you why I love those books so.

Here’s my best guess. From the earliest times of my life as a rational being, like, 4, maybe 5, I dreamed of being a scientist. To be specific, an Astronomer. Well, I did have a brief foray where I investigated becoming the incredible Hulk, but found the science was… a little untenable. Anyway, the minutia of actual scientific work was a bit too dry to keep my interest. It required a lot of math, which I was pretty good at, but it required that I really put forth effort to do it well. Being lazy won out and I decided I would pursue one of the other great passions of my life.

The arts.

Sigh.  As I got older, I still loved the sciences, and read as much pop-science type of stuff I could - books about physics, cosmology (about the cosmos, not hair), paleontology, whatever it was, I ate it up. I might not ever contribute to any of those fields, but I could at least enjoy the work that others had done.

It wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s, after quitting college and finding that I had tons of time on my hands that I started to read books again. You see, that was a time of my life where I was spending as much of my free time as I had attempting to play music. I’ve told the story of how much I loved Star Trek before, and won’t rehash it again here, but I would watch TV, or movies, and be playing my guitar quietly the whole time. If I was on the phone, I was playing. If I had some free time, I was playing.

It was really hard to read and play guitar. I did have the good fortune to work the nightshift at a gas station then, and I probably could have brought my guitar in to play, but it was in a pretty rough neighborhood, and I wasn’t about to put my guitar in harm’s way. So, I brought something to read with me.

Like I said, I read a lot of pop-science books anyway, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t read anything before, and during my late middle school/early high school years I read several genre books, I enjoyed them, but none of them were life changing.

It wasn’t until I was sitting in that gas station at 2 o’clock in the morning, bored out of my mind, that I thought I could pass the time reading. Of course, my much admitted adoration of Star Trek meant I read Star Trek novels. There were already a lot of them then (yes, even way back then), but I did have some taste, and I passed on a few I thought would be stinkers.

I found I could read a lot of books that way, I worked 10 hour shifts, and generally, I had about 4 or 5 hours of every night where I did absolutely nothing but sit and read.   After a few months I had no more Star Trek.

By that time, I had gotten into a habit of running by the bookstore on my way to work, browsing the isles and looking for the most Star Trek like book I could find, which meant I was looking for a cover with a spaceship on it.

Not Just Epic. Super Epic!

I've talked about Stephen Baxter’s Ring before. It was epic in a way few books ever written were epic. I mean, what happens when you get a window into the future where every single star in the observable universe has been snuffed out? What do you do then? How do you fix that? Epic.

That was my very first non Star Trek book and it was so much bigger, better and more powerful than anything I’d ever experienced in fiction before. It was so full of… ideas.

Oh, idea based fiction. Now that’s awesome. So, as it were, I fell in love with not just science fiction, but a sub-genre labeled as hard science fiction. There are tons of definitions readily available, but the one that best fits for me is this: The emphasis is on the science. Characters and plotting are of lesser import than the science, or the scientific speculation that takes place in the story.

It makes sense that I would be drawn to that. I was, after all, a frustrated adult, already wishing I had at least made an effort to follow my childhood dreams of becoming a scientist one day. I would lay in bed and think about what I read in that book. It got in me like a drug, I was hooked.

That was also getting pretty close to the time that I chucked any thought I had of being a musician. I was no longer reading when I was just at work. At the time I had a schedule that meant I worked 8 days on, 6 days off. That was a long time between books. I was reading a minimum of 3 books a week when I was at work, and none when I was not. I was finding that I couldn’t wait all the way until my next work week before I started reading again. All that time I formerly spent playing guitar was now taken up with reading.

It’s okay though, I think grunge was still the popular rock music at the time and I didn’t begin to appreciate it until a good 10 years later, after it had long since gone out of style.

Well, I think the book I picked up not too long after Ring, was A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. This one, it might have had too many ideas, because I had to read it twice. Literally, I read it. Freaked out, waited a day or so, and read it again. In a lot of ways, it was superior to Baxter’s novel, actually, in almost every way. He introduced me to the Tines, the zones of thought, to the technological singularity*, to a great story. This one had it all.

What made me love Stephen Baxter is that he kept putting out books, Vernor Vinge though, he had a lot of other interests, writing novels was just something he did on the side. Now, almost 20 years after he published A Fire Upon the Deep, he’s writing the sequel. Set 10 years after the events of the first book and involving most of the characters.

And again, I still haven’t read it.

I read Rainbow’s End just after it was released, again, Vernor’s book, and I found it to be a big whomping clusterf**k of crap. I can’t think of much I found that disappointing. I hated, hated, hated it. The guy who produced the greatest work of genius of my generation also produced the biggest turd.

So I'm scared. I purchased it from Amazon and it's being delivered later in the week, and I will read. I’m just stalling. I’m going back to my birth as a heavy reader of science fiction, and also, the birth of my dream to become a writer. It’s holy ground. It’s a place to tread carefully. Wish me luck.

* The Zones of Thought have absolutely no scientific rationale at all. This book isn't really hard science fiction. But it is a work of pure genius.