Andrej Karpathy's Review of A Fire Upon The Deep

“I finished Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep". Reviewed on Goodreads

“A Fire Upon The Deep is a Hugo-award-winning scifi by a Mathematician, Vernor Vinge. It is a mixed bag of awesome ideas alongside high-school grade ideas about a universe full of alien races that ultimately falls flat of the promise it sets up in the first few chapters. I have a tendency to prefer books written by scientists turned authors because I find the presented ideas to be always more interesting, plausible, consistent and generally less magic-like. Combined with the fact that the book came warmly recommended by my friends, I had no hesitations in plunging right into it. The first few chapters of the book hooked me right away: a stunning narrative from the point of view of a god-like, ancient super-intelligence, a compelling and fantastic sketch of a life-filled universe, intriguing concepts of zones, an entire hierarchy of computational supremacy among living things from Slowness to the Transcend (and even hints of beyond), and a pack-mind Tine race who communicate among member

“Incredible first chapter, bit downhill from there. Disliked everything about the Tine race of sentient ... dogs?