This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.
There's an interview with Vinge from 2009 [0] which contains a screenshot [1] of him using Emacs with his home-brewed proto-Org-mode annotation system (which appears in parent's link).
Based on what I read in the annotations mentioned above, I didn't see any implication of software support for his special markup beyond using search etc basic text editing features.
Personally I found the chapters about the spiders absurdly boring. They're just big sentient spiders; nothing novel like a group mind. Fortunately the other half of the Deepness plot more than made up for it though.
I quit that book at the dogs. I understand that it's a great book and I ought to pick it up again, but goddamn those chapters were bad. And to be honest, the glaring similarity between early internet and nntp and Vinge's far future networking was distracting. Perhaps I'm misremembering that part...
It's always a little sad when you can tell the things the author finds the most interesting about their fiction aren't the same things you find the most interesting. I wanted a lot more of the blight and the powers and the zones and a lot less dogs talking to children.
He's intentionally trying to make the superintelligences stay superintelligent by not describing them. I think it's pretty effective. He did the same thing in Across Realtime.
His first book Tatja Grimm's World was also about superintelligent people (or the whole rest of the planet except them was sub-intelligent, or something… it's not clear). That one is, hmm, not nearly as good as his later ones. So I think it's just as well he didn't try.
The third book -- while not nearly as good as either Fire Upon The Deep or Deepness in the Sky -- had even more fascinating insights into the practical mechanics of a group mind with physical bodies. Like the fact that romance happens on two separate levels!
Thanks for mirroring this! This was only published on an old CD for the '93 Hugo winners, and I had a devil of a time trying to find a copy (inter-library-loan, etc) before realizing someone had archived it on archive.org. It is indeed well worth the time spent if you're a fan of Fire.
The annotations are there in the RTF files, but there is something quirky about the format of those RTF files - perhaps they predate standardization or something. If you open one of the RTFs in a straight text editor like emacs or vi, you'll see them. There was a bit of discussion around this here, a few years ago, when this version was re-released [1]
IIRC from the annotations (it's been a while), Vinge did not intend that Twirlip was right about everything; Twirlip was merely meant to a representation of the weird things you used to get on Usenet. But it worked out fairly well. (On the one hand, this might technically be a spoiler, but on the other, I think in practice even knowing this tidbit won't actually give anything away.)
(I'm glad someone linked to this. I actually bought the annotated edition a while back and was reading it back in the Palm Pilot era, I think, but I've lost it and never quite finished it. So I'm happy to see it and have no qualms for myself about grabbing it.)
I'd be pretty comfortable advocating for (metaphorical) Death of the Author on this one if this weren't, you know, a thread about the literal death of the author.
There are cliff-hanger endings, or clearly unfinished works, but I don't mind a bit of uncertainty at the edge of the story.
Compare The Wheel of Time to The Lord of the Rings.
At the end of LotR, it is over. Not only is the Dark Lord defeated forever, the elves, the wizards, all magic, and our two protagonists leave the world for the Undying Lands. We're told of the lives and deaths of all the other main characters. The world is finished. There are no stories left to tell.
At the end of WoT, it's just an ending. We're told of a great cycle to the universe, but half of it remains a mystery. Our protagonists are barely into their twenties, and the world has just been turned upside down. What will happen next? Anything, everything.
I don't mind the Zones of Thought universe being left open-ended, even if I would have preferred a little more. It's the sort of universe that shouldn't be wrapped up completely.
> In this form, it is possible to read the story without being bothered by the comments -- yet be able to see the comments on demand. (Because of production deadlines I have not seen the exact user interface for the Clarinet edition, and so some of this discussion may be slightly inconsistent with details of the final product.)
Did the final product not hold up, or is the page not presenting it right?
The page is not presenting right, I think. This HN comment from a few years ago [1] points to a script that purports to munge the files into modern HTML, but I have not tried it myself.
That's interesting but I found it it incredibly difficult to read/parse through. I've read A Fire Upon the Deep many times (the whole trilogy) but the comment syntax is not easy for me to follow at all. There are snippets that make a little sense but I don't think I could read this as-is.
Yes, the Hugo-Nebula 1993 CD-ROM. That included some of the earliest (some say the earliest) examples of ebooks based on current fiction (rather than on out-of-copyright classic books). I have it myself still somewhere.
This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.