> I just finished reading this book. It was pretty good, except that I keep
getting flashes that Vinge, through Nuwen kinda agrees with the hyperevil
Tomas Nau on a lot of things. Also, as in _A Fire Upon the Deep_, Vinge's
characterizations of aliens seemed much too anthropomorphic for my tastes.
Perhaps that was intended, given the Focused translations. But it seems to
me that, human in the Olag Stapledon tradition though they may be, aliens
should still be aliens and be inscrutable to some degree.
Hmmm.... I thought that the point of Deepness was to make the aliens seem
human and the humans seem alien. :o)
FutD was different, the aliens really were different, but Vinge does assume
that similar things motivate almost all sentients.
> Another thing -- does Vinge have a fixation on Pham Nuwen, the "hero to
match and best all heroes"? I get uneasy when, like Frank Herbert does in
Dune, an author cultivates his antagonists to be supermen due to a rough
childhood. It is a trope that I find to be manifestly untrue -- people
succeed mostly due to hard work and perserverance, timeliness and fortunate
circumstances and not through the principle "if it doesn't kill you it will
make you stronger".
If he turns up in Vinge's next book, you're right. :o)
Charlie
