The Tatja Grimm's World [Paperback]

Multiple Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge's first full-length novel

As a mud-spattered youngster, Tatja quickly realized she was different from the stone-age primitives with whom she grew up. Her insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge could not be quenched among them; she had to explore and learn more about the strange world she lived on.

She finds the bastion of all culture, arts, entertainment and history for the entire planet, the seven-hundred-year-old science fiction magazineFantasie, which is produced entirely aboard a gargantuan floating vessel the size of a small city. But despite the printing presses, sail-powered vessels, and mind-expanding technology, Tatja is still dissatisfied. Rising through the ranks, she finds that the people on the enormous barge are just as unintelligent as the primitives she grew up with. But others have come to the planet who not only challenge her intelligence, but offer her a tantalizing opportunity to uncover answers to mysteries that have long plagued her.

But with opportunity comes risk. And if she acts unwisely, she could bring doom to the only world she knows.

An excellent and intricate story that provides further evidence that Vinge has become one of the major voices in modern SF. Science Fiction Chronicle on A Deepness in the Sky

This is top-drawer hard SF--fast-paced, packed with action, intellectually challenging and, above all, capable of invoking SF's grail: a genuine sense of wonder. Publishers Weekly Top 10 of 1999 on A Deepness in the Sky

This new epic shares the breadth of imagination and vivid storytelling which made the earlier book so justly popular. The Denver Post on A Deepness in the Sky

Sporting enough action for a dozenStar Warssequels,A Deepness in the Skyis filled with unsettling images of mind control and slavery. The Dallas Morning News

An ingenious and engaging tale of epic proportilC0