Vernor Vinge's Hugo Award-winning novel — depicting two human factions competing to exploit a pre-industrial alien civilization, with a clandestine slave system maintained by 'focus' (a neurotechnology that maximizes specialists' productivity at the cost of their humanity).
Focus as a metaphor for institutional coercion: 'focus' (a drug/technology that makes specialists obsessively productive at the expense of all other cognition) is the novel's central concept — an extreme version of how institutions extract value from specialists by narrowing their attention to one domain. The Qeng Ho trading civilization (trading across centuries) is the novel's most influential concept for entrepreneurship readers: a mercantile culture that survives by accumulating knowledge and tools over multiple interstellar voyages.
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