![]() Of course SF has always been in a state of crisis, always dying, never dead, reborn like the phoenix. But A Fire upon the Deep, which is SF all the way through, remains fit for purpose here in 2020. SF itself has changed over these three decades, from the Indian Summer of its early 1990s pomp, when an SF story could still be trusted to stay SF all the way through, until now, three decades onwards, we find ourselves encountering sadder, maybe wiser, assemblages of story that contain SF, but more fantastical and at the same time world-sensitive than before: AWD vehicles designed to cope with the badlands of the world we seem to have entered. No reader is the same after thirty years, of course those of us old enough to have forgotten most of what we learned have still learned much. I think A Fire upon the Deep may be better today than it ever was. The kaleidoscope has been shaken, and something like a clean, pure, laser-bright blast from the past has just transfigured my summer. The first edition of Vernor Vinge’s great long-limbed space opera, A Fire upon the Deep, which I and others reviewed excitedly in early 1992, may have been reprinted without a change ever since-the edition you are holding now may have been reset but is the same text-but right now, in July 2019, I have just read, or reread, something that feels hugely different to the mind’s eye. ![]()
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