From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu Dec 05 2002 - 13:56:27 MST
Vernor Vinge's Hugo-award winning novel A Deepness in the Sky has been
discussed here a few times. I will assume that by now it has been read
by most people who are interested, so I will ask some questions about
the ending which I held off on before so as not to reveal spoilers.
A lot of stuff happens at the end very quickly. Pham Nuwen is trying
to use his localizer network to stop the Emergents' plans. They have a
ship over the Spider planet and are going to intervene in the incipient
nuclear war going on there to help the bad guys. But Pham discovers that
somehow the genius Spider, Sherkaner Underhill, has taken control of
the Focused humans who are handling communication. He and the Spiders
have to quickly learn to trust each other in order to stop the Emergents.
The point which is never explained in the book is how exactly Sherkaner
and the Spiders acquired this degree of control over the Focused.
The humans had perhaps tipped their hand earlier when they intervened to
break a code when Sherkaner's children were kidnapped. I could see that
Sherkaner would be suspicious about the supposedly chance-in-a-million
good luck that led to the code breaking. Then later we see him
fooling around with "videomancy", a disreputable video technology
(apparently the compound Spider eyes don't lend themselves to video)
which has connotations of fortune telling. There are hints that this
is involved somehow in establishing communication between the Spiders
and the Focussed humans.
Can anyone present a plausible story about what happened here? How did
Sherky confirm a possible theory about the existence of humans? How could
he have started communicating with the Focussed - was there a two way
link set up? The Focussed knew what he was doing, but how did he know
what they were doing? And why was he able to not only communicate
with them, but in effect take over control of them? And how was this
done without any hint to the Emergent overseers who were running the
Focussed communications people? The Focussed don't seem to have the
mental scope to keep secrets and engage in conspiracies.
It made for a great surprise ending, but I was disappointed that Vinge
didn't go back and explain what had happened. Or if he did, I missed it.
Maybe I'm just being a stickler for detail but it's hard for me to enjoy
a surprise ending when this many holes are left unexplained.
Hal
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