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.