This book blends the best parts of The Dark Forest Forest and The Expanse. It's got the time dilation with ramifications of technological development, it's got evil goop, it's got multidimensional existential threats, and it's got solid characters.

In a description of the amalgamation of dog like creatures on XXX planet, Vinge describes one of the Cronenbergian bastards of creation (Woodcarver) as "something you might see in the last generation of incest," which is fire.

I liked the show-don't-tell anthropology qua alien races, and how proper it is that young Jefri is able to quickly adapt given his youth. Very early on getting stranded near the bottom of the Slowness, Jefri starts to refer to the doglike Tine hive-mind creatures via singular verbs instead of plural. The way the puppy Tines describe themselves as getting recycled and as a collective amalgamation that retains a singular sense of self is a great way to observe how the two species would interact.

There are a couple places throughout the book where I would hold Vinge responsible for being more accurate about the techno stuff he talks about, even with the book being written in the 90s. Moore's law existed in '92, and everyone has FTL travel, why are they still measuring data capacity in Kbps, even at the lower end of the Transcend strata. This becomes a plot point later on. There's no explanation for the technological degradation whereas a series like Dune supplies an answer, this book maintains that computers probably didn't get more advanced over the millennia – to the point that Pham Nuwen, a dude reconstituted by The Old One to commune with the Straumlians and defeat the Blight (all the characters we follow are but pawns of the higher dimensional feud: "The Beyond and below are like a deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We're so far down that the beings on the surface --superior though they are --can't effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper levels with poisons we don't even understand. But the abyss remains a relatively safe place.") And he's all like "yeah I can figure out this ship in no time, computers can't have progressed that much," whilst continuing to measure data in terms of bits.

I appreciate the inclusion and legitimate use of a crypto OTP as a plot device surrounding in order to communicate between ships at the deep, however, again it kind of demonstrates a lack of intuition of the scale of the units of information. They use 1/3 of a one time pad, which admittedly is of unspecified length, but if they were previously quibbling about the transmission rate of individual bits. Why would you use a one time pad to encrypt a video message? It would make more sense to use text if you have a finite amount of it. The length of the one time pad is kind of incidental, but then why mention that you only have 1/3 of it remaining?

Maybe it's actually me who is out of whack, but then he mentions the specific number of 4000 bits per second while describing video relay. What kind of fuckin video is that? 1 frame of 720p is 9,216,000 bits or a little over a kilobyte. Mf communicating via slideshow – point being it irked me that he delved far enough into the specifics to be more or less wrong. Low FPS transmission for 360p black and white sure sure sure, but you're also transmitting across 70 light years or something insane like that.

Overall, I really enjoyed the story lol

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