A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge

This was a fun space-opera. The beginning was a bit unsettling and hard to read for me. The author leaves plenty of room for the reader to figure things out instead of explaining everything. As a consequence, you go through many,many pages not quite understanding things, but in the end the prize for your persistence and effort is worth it. There are some really great ideas such as the galaxy being divided into "zones of thought" each one with different laws of physics. The "lupine" race of aliens mentioned in the back cover of the paperback edition is brilliant. The ideas on the evolution of sentient species is also very interesting. I nearly put this down after about 30 pages or so, but as I went on reading, more and more of Vinge's universe made sense and I could appreciate it better. In scope, this is comparable to the great works of science fiction, even though it doesn't even qualify as soft sci-fi.