Vernor Vinge

A Fire Upon the Deepis the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function. Nobody knows what strange...

"Ten years have passed on Tines World, where Ravna Bergnsdot and a number of human children ended up after a disaster that nearly obliterated humankind throughout the galaxy. Ravna and the pack animals for which the planet is named have survived a war, and Ravna has saved more than one hundred children who were in cold-sleep aboard the vessel that brought them. While there is peace among the Tines, there are those among them--and among the humans--who...

On a distant future Earth where the human race has inexplicably dwindled to some three hundred members, a secretive person harbors a deadly secret that he or she is willing to kill in order to protect.

Fifty years before, the "Peace Authority" took control of goverments worldwide with a radically different weapon, the "bobbler, ' which encased its targets within an impenetrable force field, rendering resistance useless. after the takeover come the plagues; civilization fell into a semifeudal state, and all high technology was banned. But Paul Naismith, inventer of the bobbler, has never given up hope. After having hidden from the usurping Peace...