Zones of Thought/YMMV

• Author Tract: A Deepness in the Sky often veers in this direction, particularly whenever there are comparisons between the Emergent civilization and Qeng Ho.
• Complete Monster
  • Tomas Nau from A Deepness in the Sky and, apparently, the entire ruling class of Emergents. It seems like Thomas Nau in particular is trying to collect atrocities the way normal people collect stamps. Rape, genocide, and slavery are his favorites, and the he has all sorts of futuristic tools to help him with all three.
  • Flenser and Steel from A Fire Upon the Deep, although this only applies to the past Flenser -- by the time Flenser appears in the story, he's partly a different person, due to the Tines being small-scale hive minds. It's complicated.
  • Vendacious hits this stage in Children of the Sky. Not that he wasn't a sadistic and selfish asshole who betrayed his country and parent apparently for the hell of it in the first book, but in the sequel he gets alot more screentime to establish the true scope of his evilness.
• Downer Ending: If you read both A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, you realize that at the end of A Deepness in the Sky, Pham Nuwen points his fleet towards the unthinking depths of the galaxy, where (most likely) everyone dies in a futile attempt to learn the wonders of the galaxy -- which happen to lie in the opposite direction. Pham Nuwen gets reassembled thirty thousand years later.
• Humans Are Special: Averted. Humans are not special at all. Well, except Pham Nuwen, who is so awesome that a Physical God who was as above normal sapients, as they are above fish, admitted to not being able to invent a personality like his.
  • it wasn't that Old One couldn't have invented Pham, Old One had to tone him down in order to use him.
• Memetic Mutation: Hexapodia is the key insight!
• Moral Event Horizon: Tomas Nau: when we meet him he's already over the horizon by several million klicks -- but it takes time for the truth to come out. If he hadn't already passed it before, we see several MEHs for him in text, but the biggest one is probably that he keeps Qiwi as a lover while still keeping around video footage of the time he raped and murdered her mother; then repeatedly allows her to find out about this and then wipes her memory of the event.