Reddit mentions of A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought)

Definitely check out Vernor Vinge's two masterpieces, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.

Let me recommend three things to you.

The Sword - Warp Riders

Thought Chamber - Psykerion - Behind The Eyes Of Ikk

Vernor Vinge - Deepness In The Sky

You'll die for Thought Chamber. The style varies a lot across the entire album, very prog rock on some tunes, very prog metal on others, even jazz instrumental on some. And the story makes me think of the book by Vernor Vinge, which is also worth checking out.

Children of Time and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovksy both have strong sociological themes. If you enjoy these books you might also want to check out Semiosis: A Novel by Susan Burke.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov is about the fall and rise of a galactic empire. It is a bit dated in terms of science fiction but a classic in the genre.

Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang are collections of short stories and some of them contain strong sociological themes around communication and intersubjective understanding.

A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge also have some interesting speculative sociology.

Hominids: Volume One of The Neanderthal Parallax by Robert J. Sawyer also contains interesting speculative anthropology and sociology (but not a very interesting plot IMO) and is also worth a read.

Maybe when the On/Off star turned on and vaporized the volatiles on the diamond asteroids? This is a better cover than the Boris Vallejo cover on my copy

• Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith - very imaginative, sort of across between, say, the humor of Douglas Adams and the down to Earth noir of Raymond Chandler.
  
• Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. Everything SciFi should be.
  
• The Hainish Cycle (or if you're made of money) by Ursula K. Le Guin. Pretty much every single SciFi author you like has read these and been inspired by them, that should tell you a lot, iconic stories and concepts.
  
• Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh. The core novel in the author's Alliance-Union Universe stories. Great ideas, great stories.

A couple books that come to mind that do this are 2312 By Kim Stanley Robinson. And to a lesser degree Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. 2312 is kinda boring since Robinson does world building at the expense of story line and character development ... but it is IMO one of the most robust and coherent pictures of the future I've ever read in SciFi. Vinge's book is more balanced and thus entertaining. Both of them are mostly hard science books, that is they don't break the laws of physics per se. Great reads.

Here's a small list of easily accessible sci-fi that had me hooked to the genre. They are, in my humble opinion, some of the greatest books/authors of the genre.

Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein)

A Deepness in the Sky

Rainbows End (both by Vernor Vinge)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick)

They also all appear to be available for your Kindle.

Some of the coolest science fiction deals with this problem.

Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky had a career called Programmer Archeologist. If you were a galactic trader, and if you reached a planet and their civilization was still around, you'd snatch and grab their entire internet and then spend the time traveling between planets trying to figure out if somebody came up with a solution for something that was more clever than the stuff you were using.

I loved reading "A Deepness In The Sky" and seeing the presence of software archaeologists in humanity's future.

It's so going to happen.

>It just feels like a very "Here's a planet you'll never walk on in your lifetime" thing.

True, given current technology. However, technology changes. Right now the limiting factor constraining colonizing other star systems is the travel time. There are two general ways to address this. One, decrease travel time, two, increase the effective human lifespan.

In my opinion, there's not much to do about the first. The speed of light is the limiting factor, and I pretty strongly expect that wormholes and hyperspace will remain purely SF.

On lifetimes, though, I see great potential in this area, particularly over the next couple centuries. If genuine "suspended animation", cryogenics, whatever you want to call it, or bodily rejuvenation resulting in de facto eternal life (and finding solutions to the associated memory/not getting bored to death aspects), can be perfected, then travel times of thousands of years cease to be an issue.

It's a matter of perspective. Compared to the 24-hour lifespan of a mayfly, the human lifespan is nearly eternal. We can accomplish so much more because we live so incredibly much longer (that, and opposable thumbs).

Imagine that the average person could live for ten million years. At a significant fraction of the speed of light what's a ten thousand year journey between stars? (Relatively to our current lifespans, about a month.)

We aren't going to go racing across the galaxy, but with life ultra-extension, we are quite capable of incrementally colonizing it over hundreds of millenia.

See "A Deepness in the Sky" for a Hugo winning novel set in just such a sub-lightspeed/suspended animation universe.

I had written the reading order exactly the same as you mentioned in the original post although I changed this after _Aardvarks comment to:

> The recommended reading order is to just make sure you read The Children of the Sky after A Fire Upon the Deep. The other book A Deepness in the Sky can be read at any time after 'Fire' (it's also not recommended to read the synopsis of 'Deepness' before reading 'Fire')