Masterworks Spotlight: A Deepness in the Sky

Back in January, we opened 2016 by welcoming Vernor Vinge‘s Hugo Award-winning space opera epic A Fire Upon the Deep to the SF Masterworks list.

Now, we’re delighted to add Vinge’s prequel, set thirty millennia earlier, A Deepness in the Sky, which went its predecessor one better, winning the Hugo Award for best novel and adding the John W. Campbell Memorial Award!

The Hugo and John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winning prequel to the magnificent A Fire Upon the Deep.

A Deepness In the Sky is the story of Pham Nuwen, a small cog in the interstellar trading fleet of the Queng Ho. Both they and the Emergents are orbiting Arachna, a dormant planet which will shortly wake up when its On/Off star relights after decades of darkness. Both groups hope to exploit the coming age of technology and commerce on Arachna. But while the Queng Ho seek only to trade aggressively, the Emergents plans are far more sinister, amounting to little short of genocide . . .

This is science fiction on the grandest of scales – a cast of thousands set across hundreds of years and in the farthest reaches of Human Space. 

A Deepness In the Sky is available as an SF Masterworks paperback and a Gateway eBook (which will be updated very soon with the Masterworks cover and Graham Sleight’s excellent new introduction).

You can read more about Vernor Vinge in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.