A Fire Upon the Deep juggles dozens of characters and plotlines without ever becoming confusing. Science fiction author Abby Goldsmith appreciated the book’s carefully crafted story. “Just plotwise it’s stunning, as well as creatively,” she says. “The work shows. The amount of time and effort he put into thinking it through, I really admire that.”

The novel imagines a galaxy in which thousands of alien races are able to communicate with each other via short paragraphs of text. Science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell notes that the novel deftly captures the various ways in which such a system might be abused. “I read all these cyberpunk books that I thought were preparing me for the internet, but it turns out that the book that most prepared me for the internet as it stands today was A Fire Upon the Deep and its ‘net of a million lies,’ and its whole ‘groups of people trying to commit genocide because of something they read on the net of a million lies,'” he says. “I’m just like, ‘Oh my god, this book really, really, really prepared me for all this.'”