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.

I actually read a Fire Upon The Deep over Christmas, and then went on with the rest. The entire trilogy is pretty amazing.

I really wish he had wrapped everything up.

Yes, I've been hoping for this; one amongst many reasons to be sad that Vinge didn't live longer.

Was he in the process of wrapping everything up?

Eh, I have mixed feelings on that.

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.

Tolkien did start writing a sequel to LOTR set a generation or two later, but he abandoned it because it was coming out too grimdark for him.

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.

Is this annotated version on the archive.org CD? I couldn't find it in https://archive.org/download/hugo_nebula_1993

you have to open hugo.zip, or click on the view contents link beside it

Yes, I did that. I see in there the vinge novel but NOT the version with annotations.

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]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876236

Oh wow thanks!

The key insight always was hexapodia.

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.

I got this on CD-ROM back in the 90's. It was really fun looking through stuff.

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.

Yes, that was it! I haven't seen mine for a couple of decades. Too aggressive purging of stuff, so I think I won't see it ever again.

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).

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170215121054/http://www.norwes...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170104130412/http://www.norwes...

Thank you - I love HN for things like this! A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite books/series. RIP

Except for the weird dogs. "A deepness in the sky" is the epitome for me.

I couldn't buy the audio relaying wolf packs either, but enjoyed the other aspects of his fiction.

What?! Blasphemy! A computer nerd created a fictional distributed intelligence, and you were not entertained?

Best aliens ever.

Yeah seriously.

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!

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.

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.

> Personally I found the chapters about the spiders absurdly boring.

They're giant sentient spiders living in a 50's sitcom. What's not to like?

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...

True Names was pretty great.

Based on the modeline, it's just text-mode using RCS as version control. It must be a minor mode that he wrote.

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.

Wow! This is the internet find of the week for me. How long until this appears as its own post on the HN front page? Thanks for mirroring.

The read-first file says

> 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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876236

This seems to do the trick:

    wget -mkx -e robots=off https://3e.org/vvannot/

thanks for sharing.. https://valerocreditcard.fun/

thanks for sharing... https://liteblue.cloud

A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the all-time great science fiction novels.