Deepness in the Sky may be the most extended example of dramatic irony ever published; it is certainly one of the oddest, because the irony does not end. It is a jaw which does not open to let in the light. At no point in this extremely long space opera--which is set in the same universe as, and features at least one of the same characters from, Vernor Vinge's 1992 novel A Fire Upon the Deep--is there a hint of release.
But it's odder than that. It is not just the characters in the tale itself who live and die in the darkness of a profound withholding. It's the reader as well: nowhere in the text is that governing irony, an irony that coordinates every word and shadows every speculation uttered over 600 large pages, made any more explicit to the reader than it is to the victims inside. The true shape of A Deepness in the Sky cannot therefore be understood by reading the book itself.
Only one character in Deepness--a madcap arachnoid genius named Sherkaner Underhill, inventor, culture hero of the Spider race that inhabits Arachna, a spider-guy who combines in his person the best attributes of Daedalus, Moses, Newton, Einstein, Cavour, Rolls, Edison, Royce, Gates (Bill), Hari (Mata), Jemima (Aunt) and Throat (Deep)--has the slightest clue as to the nature of the universe in which everything takes place.
But no reader who does not know A Fire Upon the Deep will understand what Sherkaner seems vaguely almost to have understood, sort of. (His seeming death, near the end of the tale, will not, however, fool any reader: not only does his surname broadly hint that one should add to the list of heroes he resembles the name of King Arthur; but his body is never found, which in any work of popular literature of the last 100 years means sequel. So even the reader ignorant of the cruel jaws of Vinge's withheld release from darkness will know that there has to be more to come.)
But let's make clear we're all thinking about the same thing.
The sense of wonder
In normal critical discourse, "dramatic irony" occurs when the reader or viewer of a work knows something that is withheld from a character who appears in that work. In SF, there is a second use of the term, at least according to this reviewer, who has argued the case elsewhere: in SF, the sense of wonder is an affect of dramatic irony. It is what happens when the jaws of irony open. It is the feeling we have when the hero of a tale learns something we already know, especially something that reveals to him that universe is much larger than he could have guessed.
The sense of wonder, thus defined, may seem marginally less profound than what we feel when Oedipus discovers the truth about himself, but it is in terms of grammar the very same thing.
Dramatic irony is a verb-like device: it is a device which longs to open.
To allow us to share with the cast the wonder of the light.
Nothing of that happens in A Deepness in the Sky.
The novel takes place about 30/35,000 years before A Fire Upon the Deep. Though the term is never used, it is set entirely in what Vinge in Fire calls the Slow Zone. In Vinge's cosmology--which is the finest playground for space opera ever constructed--every galaxy in the universe has the same structure: at the galaxy's core lie the Unthinking Depths, where all electromagnetic actions are profoundly hampered and nothing normally can escape; circumambiating the Depths is the Slow Zone, where the speed of light is an absolute barrier, and electromagnetic actions are too limited for AIs to exist; around the Slow Zone is the Beyond (just a few light years upwards, I suspect, from Arachna, the planet where most of Deepness is set), where the speed of light is no barrier, AIs exist, and millions upon millions of true civilizations dance the dance, too; and beyond the Beyond is the Transcend, haunted by godlike creatures, with all the terror that implies.
Anguishes of the spirit
Readers of Fire know, therefore, what readers of Deepness alone do not: that the anguish of longing to understand the nature of the universe that ravages Underhill, and the longing--to establish an interstellar polity capable of sustaining civilizations through their inevitable times of trouble--that anguishes Pham Nuwen, are both anguishes of the spirit unanswerable within the Slow Zone.
Only when they reach the Beyond will the characters of this novel begin to stretch into their dreams. My guess is that Sherkaner will get there in the next volume--he is too smart to plunge into the heart of the galaxy. Pham Nuwen, we already know from reading Fire, does make the plunge into the Profound Depths that he is planning on as this volume closes (though without hinting at his terrible fate); and will only surface again, transfigured and plenipotentiary and full of story, 30,000 years on.
There is a story, which has been ignored so far. A few words then. Pham Nuwen is the slightly Van Vogtish secret master and progenitor (rather like Hedrock in the Weapon Maker series) of the interstellar trading association/family known as the Qeng Ho; long before Deepness begins, his efforts to make the Qeng Ho into protectors of interstellar civilizations has been betrayed, and he's gone to ground.
He is found again in time to participate incognito in a great Qeng Ho expedition to OnOff, a variable star (hundreds of years dark, 35 or so bright) orbited by a single planet on which, against terrible odds, a civilization is growing. Unfortunately, the Qeng Ho are almost beaten to the draw by another human civilization, the Emergents, whose fleet arrives in the OnOff system at the same time.
Near Destruction
The plot is heavy and long, and mostly intriguing, except for the odd dozen-page segments given over to hard-SF geekishness about orbits and computers and stuff. The Emergents sneak-attack the Qeng Ho, and both fleets are almost destroyed in battle. An enforced cohabitation of both cultures, under the manipulative control of the Emergents (who are astonishingly unlikable, but astonishingly plausible villains), leads through plot and counterplot, overt and covert, to the near destruction of the Spider culture on Arachna, and the near triumph of the Emergents.
But Pham Nuwen saves the day.
It is a lot of fun. Underhill and his family, though all too nuclear for a multi-limbed lot of bounding exoskeletons, are superbly likable. We all breathe a sigh of relief when they survive.
But we are breathing in the dark.
A Deepness in the Sky is an anecdote of the Slow Zone. It is terribly cruel. The story has hardly begun. It is time for the jaws to open, for Underhill to leap into the light. Beyond is the day.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list.
