A Deepness In the Sky by Vernor Vinge

I had previously read Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" (which somehow relates to "A Deepness in the Sky") and find it quite charming and entertaining, though riddled with flaws, so naturally I was quite into reading "A Deepness in the Sky".
There are really not many good things to be said about "A Deepness in the Sky".
There is no plot, no really good one that is. I kept reading in the illusive hope that somehow things will unfold. Well, they didn't. The story line is long and fairly dull, taking quite a few turns, though not the ones you would have expected or liked. There is plenty of detail, yet not quite polished.
There are no powerful, fascinating characters. There are nonetheless many of them. None of them receives a fine makeup, though.
Some of the parties involved in the book are quite schematic. The Emergents (the bad guys) are plain unconvincing, their motivation and nature obscure.
The worlds featured by the book are bluntly dull. For this once, Vinge turned unimaginative. The aliens are more human than the human: they have cars and trains, school teachers and army ranks (sergeants and colonels), monarchies and air strips, everything humans do and just about nothing humans don't. Even alien sex is impossible to tell apart: there are two sexes and the females have all the characteristics of women and the males all of men. The alien dialogs are bluntly human.
Not all is that dull and unimaginative: the Qeng Ho trading guild (the good guys) is still some feature. Yet, there are serious flaws in its construction (one would have expected such a successful and long standing organization better prepared in dealing with unfriendly parties).
Vinge is not a great story teller, also. Not that he does a lousy job here, but his style will not redeem the lack of just about anything.
All in all, it is a Vinge classic: an intricate plot and a fragile story line, many parties, many characters, many details, many flaws, a lot of "alien" stuff trapped in all too human clichés. Sadly, this one is a lesser Vinge work, and it is missing the charm and briskness of some of his other novels.

***** SPOILER ALERT *****

How do you make the perfect slave? A slave who loves to serve you? But more than that, who is like Rainman, an autistic savant, totally focused on some problem you give them, to the point of forgetting to dress themselves, eat, drink, or any other necessary bodily functions while doing things with their minds that shouldn't be possible? They not only work but think themselves to death for you. Meet Focus, the genetic technology developed by the Emergents to make themselves the ultimate slavemasters. Shades of House Harkonnen to the nth power. This is the main feature of the fine novel by Vernor Vinge. But there is more. Imagine a sun that goes on every so many years, then goes off for far longer: an OnOff star. What kind of life would evolve on one of its planets? Vinge answers this: a race of sapient knee-high spiders, every bit as sapient as humans. They spend the cold years in deepnesses, but one prophet sees a future in space, hence the title. Add these elements to the story line in Vinge's earlier work A Fire Upon the Deep, and you get the epic prince warlord hero Pham Nuwen into the bargain. Pham, betrayed by his own, lives incognito while plotting and planning a comeback. Meanwhile, he's found himself on a Qen Ho expedition to the OnOff Star, where they meet an expedition of Emergents (human like themselves), whereupon the sparks fly as they vie for the up-and-coming spider world's resources in quite different ways. A tad long, and with an ending that many will consider as deus ex machina, it satisfies the need for readable, capable hard science fiction, and is another brick in a grand space opera series no doubt. 4 out of 5 stars.