Some of Vinge, Brin and Reynolds' best works are confined to remarkably low tech or fairly confined, non-cosmic locales.

I think there are some other answers that still need exploring. Of course they're lobbing around gods there's no place else to go in that direction and none of them have really seen a fresh way to tackle it yet. The impulse is to continue pushing the slider further and further into the extreme to define new territory and they rarely seem to ask whether there isn't an intriguing new way of looking at it which doesn't require pushing the utter furthest extent in order to out-do the previous effort. Many of these people suffer from the Dragon Ball Z problem of continuous one-upsmanship. SF nowadays reveals an extensive problem in the genre and the people defining the genre. Sanos was only one of the brilliantly created evil character types in Talon, and it made it to both novels which was unfortunate. What bothered me the most is that the evil character, Tomas Nau, looks a lot like Lord Steel from “A Fire Upon The Deep”. It would be worth reading “A Deepness in the Sky” if you insert at least one other book between the two novels, then perhaps the repetition is not so boring. “A Fire Upon The Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” are very similar: a beautiful comparative analysis study could be written about them. In a “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge

“So high, so low, so many things to know.”

A deepness in the sky by vernor vinge