I know I should be working now....

But I'm too busy racing through Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. I've never read his stuff before. It reminds me a lot of Brin's Uplift trilogies in scale - there are a dizzying number of races and expanses of time in this universe.

02/15

page 32

5.0%

Whoa. Just figured out how the aliens work, and I'm hooked. They are mind-blowingly cool: lupine creatures with a gestalt organization to their telepathic packs. One individual, many creatures. If that makes no sense to you, fine. (But it would if you read the book, and that is why this is great science fiction.)

02/15

page 88

14.0%

Get back to the wolves! The "zones of thought" are only slightly less cool than the gestalt packs: basically in our part of space physics works slowly. Brains are dumber, light speed travel is impossible. But the further out you go from the central "Unthinking Depths" (where everything, including intelligence, stops working), the faster and smarter things get - including AI. There are many traps for the unwary there, including malevolent computer intelligences that trick you into writing them...