A Fire Upon the Deep

21 hrs. 9 min.

Language Russian

Author Vernor Vinge

Narrator Sergey Orobchuk

This book is, in essence, the next stage in the “space opera” genre: a “galactic epic.” Winner of the 1992 Hugo Award. At the center is the Unthinking Depths, and from it, like petals of differently heated zones of flame, extend: the Slow Zone (a place where only sublight speeds and the corresponding technology are possible) and the Beyond (where faster-than-light speed is possible and technologies are based on it). Beyond the Beyond there is something else as well. Civilizations that move past the Beyond become Powers. The mechanism of this transformation is left by Vinge to the readers’ discretion. But we all know how unstable the boundaries of fire are. Roughly the same thing, only much more slowly, happens with the boundaries of the Galaxy’s zones. One day an Archive was found right at the Edge. Whether it surfaced from the side of the Powers, or had drifted there for thousands of years, remaining an inheritance from a dead civilization, is unknown. It could have been anything: evil or good. Those who found it decide to investigate and awaken Something. At first it will be called the Straumli Perversion, then the Blight. Universal Evil, stirred up by the curious, will threaten the existence of all sentient life for millions of light-years around. Only one thing will trouble the Blight. Perhaps on the ship that escaped during the rebirth of the power there was something capable of destroying it. Hope for this will sustain the handful of rescuers trying to save their worlds. This is the main intrigue of the narrative.

1. A Deepness in the Sky (narrated by Vsevolod Kuznetsov) 1. A Fire Upon the Deep (narrated by Vsevolod Kuznetsov) 1. A Fire Upon the Deep 2. A Deepness in the Sky (narrated by Tatyana Nenarokomova) 3.1. A Deepness in the Sky (narrated by Tatyana Nenarokomova)