As I said myself in a talk given around that time in Chicago: “The breast is shut.”īut we still inhabited a living drama back then, even if the curtain seemed to be dropping. So it was easy to think that American SF had run its course that the future would no longer give us suck that the ever-moving frontier of old had become increasingly toll-gated, though none of us probably dreamt that thirty years later it would become a wall. No longer a frontier threshold in the mind’s eye, a “grammar” of story fundamental to the megatext, near-future space was becoming a day-job extension of history as we lived it, a confirmation of the nightmare we had hoped to escape: the sense of wonder reduced to mission statements. In 1990, though the information revolution may have hardly begun, Sputnik and its breed had already brought space down to earth. The SF story itself-what we were beginning to think of as the SF megatext-was increasingly uncomfortable with history some readers were already becoming nostalgic for what were becoming popularly known as yesterday’s tomorrows: futures from the Golden Age. I was certainly one of those in 1990 who claimed to detect-not entirely without reasons-signs of heat death in the genre. Of course SF has always been in a state of crisis, always dying, never dead, reborn like the phoenix. But A Fire upon the Deep, which is SF all the way through, remains fit for purpose here in 2020. SF itself has changed over these three decades, from the Indian Summer of its early 1990s pomp, when an SF story could still be trusted to stay SF all the way through, until now, three decades onwards, we find ourselves encountering sadder, maybe wiser, assemblages of story that contain SF, but more fantastical and at the same time world-sensitive than before: AWD vehicles designed to cope with the badlands of the world we seem to have entered. No reader is the same after thirty years, of course those of us old enough to have forgotten most of what we learned have still learned much. I think A Fire upon the Deep may be better today than it ever was.

The kaleidoscope has been shaken, and something like a clean, pure, laser-bright blast from the past has just transfigured my summer. The first edition of Vernor Vinge’s great long-limbed space opera, A Fire upon the Deep, which I and others reviewed excitedly in early 1992, may have been reprinted without a change ever since-the edition you are holding now may have been reset but is the same text-but right now, in July 2019, I have just read, or reread, something that feels hugely different to the mind’s eye.

A fire upon the deep