Pham Nuwen is a legendary trader, space navigator and politician, is very good at Slow Zone-level programming, and is as badass as they come, particularly when not undermined by advanced age. An ancient, malevolent super-intelligent entity which strives to constantly expand and can easily manipulate electronics and even organic beings. Playing with Syringes: A Deepness in the Sky gleefully teeters on the fence between invoking this and playing it straight. In the Dénouement, while negotiating over what to do with the human POWs, the Spiders insist on keeping Ritser Brughel, unarguably the worst of the surviving war criminals, to themselves. When the humans concede that it would be fair to give him to the Spiders to be punished, the Spiders' response is something along the lines of, "Punish him? Oh, no. We just need a live experimental subject to help our studies of human physiology. Any 'punishment' would be strictly incidental."

The plot of the novel describes the ambitious activities of Straumli Realm, a human civilization that lives in the highest part of the Beyond Zone, near the Transcend Zone. They are taking part in an expedition to investigate a data archive but become compromised by the release of an ancient superintelligent power known as the Blight. The Blight begins to take over the High Lab where the Straumli Realm is doing their research. The humans attempt to escape in two ships, one for adults and one for children. The one for adults ends up being destroyed by the Blight but the children survive. Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. Dug Too Deep: In A Fire Upon the Deep, data-archaeologists dig too deeply into an ancient digital archive and unleash the Blight, a sort of godlike computer virus that eats minds.The outermost layer, containing the galactic halo, is the Transcend, within which incomprehensible, superintelligent beings dwell. When a "Beyonder" civilization reaches the point of technological singularity, it is said to "Transcend", becoming a "Power". Such Powers always seem to relocate to the Transcend, seemingly necessarily, where they become engaged in affairs which remain entirely mysterious to those that remain in the Beyond. Flenser: You don't believe me? That's funny. Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths. But now, when only the truth will work, I can't convince you.

Fantastic Racism: Both of the main villains in The Children of the Sky are racist towards each other's respective races. This, curiously, does not stop them from cooperating. The novel is set in various locations in the Milky Way. The galaxy is divided into four concentric volumes called the "Zones of Thought"; it is not clear to the novel's characters whether this is a natural phenomenon or an artificially produced one, but it seems to roughly correspond with galactic-scale stellar density and a Beyond region is mentioned in the Sculptor Galaxy as well. [4] The Zones reflect fundamental differences in basic physical laws, and one of the main consequences is their effect on intelligence, both biological and artificial. Artificial intelligence and automation is most directly affected, in that advanced hardware and software from the Beyond or the Transcend will work less and less well as a ship "descends" towards the Unthinking Depths. But even biological intelligence is affected to a lesser degree. The four zones are spoken of in terms of "low" to "high" as follows: Alternate Number System: The Tines have two different number systems: one where they count "by legs" (in base 4) and one where they count "by fore-claws" (in base 10). Confusion between these two systems leads to the accidental meeting of two of the major characters in A Fire Upon the Deep. Amdiranifani is housed in room 33, Jefri is supposed to be imprisoned in room 15 (33 in base 4), and the guard who's taking him there uses the wrong numbering system.I mean sure, the zones of consciousness and shared consciousness ideas are fun, and must have been very unique when the book came out. But why is it still getting recommended? There has got be something a little more updated that isn't so cloyingly "novel". I want to like where it's going but not only do I dislike all the characters and their ridiculous sex lives, I can't even get invested in my dislike for them. Sudden Name Change: A strange one considering the meticulousness of the author, but the "wolves" of A Fire Upon the Deep are suddenly and inexplicably "weasels" by the time The Children of the Sky rolls around. Doubly strange, as "wolves" was a Justified use of Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit" that no longer makes sense with "weasels". Space Opera seems to be like Soap Opera, watch on Monday and Friday, skip through the week cause nothing new is going to happen. There are too many good books out there for me to beating myself in the head waiting on something to happen that I care about. Occasionally the [human characters] say things that reveal what their societies are like. … The example I really wanted to mention of that is when they’re at this place called Harmonious Repose, and they’re negotiating with aliens to fix their ship, and the Skroderiders are haggling with the aliens, and Ravna has never seen haggling before because she’s only ever been in societies where everyone always has perfect information about what everything is worth, and so there’s never any negotiating. “We both know this is worth this, and so this is what the price is going to be.” And I thought that was a really interesting idea.