A Deepness in the Sky

I finished Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. It's nominally set in the same Zones of Thought universe as A Fire Upon The Deep, but you wouldn't know it except for the name of one character. Deepness takes place at the first contact with a non-human race; Fire is set much later, when the galaxy--and that does mean "galaxy", not "a few hundred stars"--has been explored. In Deepness, two nations of non-humans face each other in a Cold War, while in orbit above them, two human factions engage in a more subtle and treacherous contest against each other. The non-humans were more sympathetic than the humans, which I suspect was intentional; however, given that a lot of the book was about the maneuvering between human factions, not having a really sympathetic hero made the book less enjoyable than Fire. Of course Fire won a Hugo, so that's a high standard to meet.
The two main ideas of the book that make it science fiction are the setting and one human ability. The story takes place in a solar system where the sun burns for a few years, then goes out; the planet is habitable for about 25 years, then cools to the point where the air freezes; the the sun reignites and things come out of hibernation. The human ability is an induced mental condition, sort of an obsessive autistic mindset which makes some people into geniuses, and leads to interesting ramifications.