fire upon the deep, A - By Vernor Vinge Page 0,2

cases these can be distinguished by the added tags (DONE, SOL, …). In other cases, you can see a dialog between myself and my consultants. At least once, I rearranged the chapters. (So the chapter references — for example, “c08” — are not reliable. I believe this is especially the case for the references to later chapters.)

At one point (Christmas Break 1990?), I had numerous pending issues in my “^” comments. I swept through them, inserting “!!” as I revised. Thus the stuff after “!!” was normally the old comment together with whatever action I took. Most comments are of the “!!” type, and have no special mark associated with them in this 2002 edition. (Most of the other comments represent issues that were not resolved by the “!!” sweep of the text. In this edition they are marked, for example with the code [ur].)

Some of the notes have dates attached to them. These dates are accurate for some part of the note they appear in. Unfortunately, they don’t reflect everything about the note — and many comments have no date attached to them. (There is another style of date you will notice in some places, dates like 5 June 15989! This was my crude way of keeping track of the story chronology. Since Tines’ World days are about the same length as Earth’s, it was possible for me to use the calendar tools in Lotus Agenda(tm) to manage the chronology of the story. I more or less arbitrarily set the beginning of the story (the birth of the Straumli Blight) at 00:00:00 23 June 15988. Note that this assumption never leaks out of the annotations; it was just an artifice to make it easier for me to track the relative position of events occurring within the story. (In fact, it’s not certain just how far in the future this story happens; fourteen thousand years after 1988 seems to be about the minimum.)

I used a few unusual characters in the manuscript (mainly restricted to the annotations — I took pity on myself and the copyeditors). These characters are listed in the following table. Hopefully, this table will be helpful if your display device is not mapping these 8-bit patterns to the characters I intended!

(“ISO” is short for ISOLatin1Encoding as it appears on p596-599 of Postscript(r) Language Reference Manual, Second Edition, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1990 [the Adobe “Red Book”].)

bit

pattern

ISOISOactually

octalnamedisplayed

306AEÆ

330OslashØ

340agraveà

345aringå

346aeæ

347ccedillaç

351eacuteé

352ecircumflexê

357iumlï

366oumlsö

370oslashø

A Little History

Some of the comments may be more intelligible if I say a little about the history of the writing of A Fire Upon the Deep.

During Christmas Break 1987/88, I wrote a novella, “The Blabber” (first published by Baen Books, 1988; now available in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, from Tor Books). In fact, this story was a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. The novella was written after most of the background universe of the Zones and the Tines had been worked out, but before I knew the details of the novel. It might seem that the existence of such a story would make the planning of the novel more difficult. To some extent this was true, but more often “The Blabber” provided boundary conditions and inspiration for the novel. And the apparently unresolved inconsistencies between the novella and the novel may provide fuel for later revelations. Some of the notes in the novel reference “The Blabber” and these consistency issues.

I was on leave from SDSU during the 1988-1989 academic year. During the summer of 1988 I attended the distributed systems course at the University of Tromsø, and I visited Oslo. I saw much that affected the story (and I met many wonderful people — see the book’s acknowledgments). During the following twelve months I completed an initial draft of most of the story. In programming there is a saying that “First you write the program; then you do it again, and this time you do it right.” My experience was not quite this discouraging. The Tines’ World plot line went smoothly right from the start, but the Ravna plot line was enormously difficult. In the earliest draft, Ravna was a secret agent opposed to the Straumli Realm, an empire that had unleashed the Blight in a desperate effort to avoid losing a war. In the wake of this catastrophe, she escapes to Relay where she engages a Vrinimi humanoid, Yrdnalf Scrubscooey, to help her find the refugees from the High Lab. I pursued this version through the Fall of Relay before I realized that it