Tor.com has posted an image of the cover of Vernor Vinge’s forthcoming sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. The cover to The Children of the Sky (due for publication in October) looks great, even if their link to the full-sized version has a typo. They are also giving away 50 copies of the first book in a random drawing among all people who leave comments to the contest post. (There are just over 170 so far, and probably won’t be more than a few hundred all in all, so chances are pretty good.)
A Fire Upon the Deep was the first commercial e-book I ever bought, and I reviewed the annotated e-book edition for Slashdot a few years ago. (I think I probably included a few too many spoilers about the first half or so of the book, and might do it a little differently today, but it’s not bad.) I also touched upon it in my review of another Vinge book, Rainbows End. I’m quite excited that the true sequel I’ve been wanting for over a decade is almost here at last.
Sadly, the e-book of Fire is no longer available from eReader or Fictionwise, where I originally bought it. It can be had from Amazon for $7.99, but not the in annotated version (which I suppose can now be considered lost again). I expect that The Children of the Sky will be available as a Kindle and Nook e-book at the usual agency prices.
Thank you for letting me know about this. As I have mentioned in the past, Rainbows End is probably one of the most relevant novel followers of this site should read. Although I thought A Fire Upon The Deep was merely good, A Deepness In The Sky is fantastic.
I actually didn’t find out he was a professor in computer science until after I had read his novels, but it helps explain how his view of the future is so fundamentally grounded in reality.