天空的孩子 (2011)

《天空的孩子》（英文名：The children of the sky）是由美国作家弗诺·文奇所著、于2011年出版的长篇科幻小说，属于太空歌剧类型，为深渊三部曲的最后一部。

《天空的孩子》的简体中文版于2013年10月由四川科学技术出版社出版，译者为朱佳文。

The Children of the Sky is a science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge. It is a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep and shares the Zones of Thought universe with the prequel A Deepness in the Sky. It was published 20 years after the first novel but is set 10 years after its events.

Unlike A Fire Upon the Deep, the novel is set completely on the world of the Tines – pack animals which form collective intelligences. The protagonists include human characters from the first novel and their political struggles over the development of their new society and the threat from the remnants of the Blight.

It was nominated for the 2012 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the Prometheus Award.

Plot

Two years pass after the Battle on Starship Hill on Tines World. The exiled Tine pack Vendacious travels to the city of East Home, seeking to ally with Tycoon, the world's richest businessman. Over the next year, Vendacious helps Tycoon expand his enterprise (using a stolen human dataset) and undertake an expedition to the Tropical Choir, a legendary mob of over one hundred million Tines living in the world's equatorial region. Meanwhile, Ravna Bergsndot has slowly begun reviving the human Children who have been kept in cold sleep pods since their flight from High Lab and the Blight at the galaxy's edge. Although the Blight was effectively destroyed by Countermeasure, its fleet survives stranded 30 light-years away from Tines World, presumably developing ramscoop technology to resume its journey. Ravna hopes to use the technical archives on the crippled Out of Band II (Oobii) to elevate Woodcarver's Domain and Tines World to a level of technology advanced enough to combat the Blight's remnant. The Blight may yet take decades or even centuries to arrive, but when the Zone boundaries briefly shift, those estimates become questionable.

Ten years after the Battle on Starship Hill, Ravna's plans begin to crumble. She learns of a faction of Children calling themselves the Disaster Study Group who believe that the Blight's fleet is a rescue party sent for them, and that Countermeasure, having destroyed countless civilizations by moving the Slow Zone to quell the Blight, is the true evil. When Ravna tries to explain to an assembly of Children the importance of adhering to her schedule for advancing Tines World, she is upstaged and betrayed by Nevil Storherte, who convinces most of the Children that Ravna is obsessed and misguided, and that he should be the one to lead them. Nevil then forces Ravna to turn over sysadmin authority of Oobii to him, granting him access to its archives, systems, and weapons; however, Ravna secretly retains Command Privilege over the starship, a status that supersedes sysadmin.