"A Fire Upon The Deep" by Verno Vinge (1992) is slightly incoherent and jumps around a lot, as opposed to say a Jim Butcher series that mostly sticks to the protagonist. The threads mostly do eventually come together. The incoherence is in part the jumpy storyline, and also various inclusions of what look use USENET, only "in space" as said in one of those deep drawn out booming voices. Some things are not really explained. Kurzweilian Transcendence and faster than light travel are taken as givens, which is perhaps typical for the genre and maybe for the epoch.

There is some interesting alien design, though if you peek under the hood it looks a lot like Protestant work ethic™ that just so happens to be set in some cold remote area of the planet (Northwestern Europe, much?) and there is a perhaps inevitable line about decadent southrons

> "The crowds there were mobs, vast group minds as stupid as they were ecstatic. If the stores were true, some of the southern cities were nonstop …" (p.165)

though some historians don't let facts get in the way of a good story. Herodotus comes to mind.

tags #scifi