The first time I read this, the middle of the book tried my patience and I wanted it to just get to the conclusion; I started skimming a bit more until I got to the end.
The second time I read the book, I had planned on just skimming the middle again, but this time without the drive to know the resolution (since I remembered it from last time), I discovered that the middle of the book is really the best part. It's very detailed and well-thought-out, and the second time I didn't even have a problem with the pacing. It's just a very big book, in a good way.
The only other book I know of that I have had this reaction to was the Lord of the Rings series. The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time, but subsequently, the only thing I routinely skip over is the foot chase through Rohan. (Which I remembered as being 50-60 pages long but turns out to actually be only about 12. Still manages to feel 50 pages long to me. YMMV.)
Strongly recommend, and despite being listed as a "prequel" you do not need to have read A Fire Upon the Deep first; only a handful of throwaway details will be mysterious as a result and none of them matter much to you. Vinge does not fall into any of the usual "prequel" issues that for instance the Dune prequels did ("Remember that expansive universe you loved that so carefully managed to feel like just a small part of the totality? No, it was the entire totality and the only people in the universe up to that point were the direct ancestors of the people you loved.") or other things. This is truly a prequel, a story that took place before a later story, and temporal ordering is honored.
It works fine standalone, yes, but if you expect to read both then read them in publication order, because there's a powerful resonance/irony implicit in aDitS with aFutD as background: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2008/07/deepnessreview
As someone whose imagination was shaped in large part by reading Tolkien's vivid descriptions of Middle Earth as a child, I couldn't agree more. You put it beautifully.
The second time I read the book, I had planned on just skimming the middle again, but this time without the drive to know the resolution (since I remembered it from last time), I discovered that the middle of the book is really the best part. It's very detailed and well-thought-out, and the second time I didn't even have a problem with the pacing. It's just a very big book, in a good way.
The only other book I know of that I have had this reaction to was the Lord of the Rings series. The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time, but subsequently, the only thing I routinely skip over is the foot chase through Rohan. (Which I remembered as being 50-60 pages long but turns out to actually be only about 12. Still manages to feel 50 pages long to me. YMMV.)
Strongly recommend, and despite being listed as a "prequel" you do not need to have read A Fire Upon the Deep first; only a handful of throwaway details will be mysterious as a result and none of them matter much to you. Vinge does not fall into any of the usual "prequel" issues that for instance the Dune prequels did ("Remember that expansive universe you loved that so carefully managed to feel like just a small part of the totality? No, it was the entire totality and the only people in the universe up to that point were the direct ancestors of the people you loved.") or other things. This is truly a prequel, a story that took place before a later story, and temporal ordering is honored.