fire upon the deep, A - By Vernor Vinge Page 0,3

was unacceptably weak. It was time for me to retreat, salvage what I could, and plan a different approach: Having Ravna be an employee of Vrinimi made the background much easier to present. Having Pham be … what he is … gave me a direct witness on the Slow Zone and the Depths and the nature of the Powers. (And of course, it provided a romance that was within my ability to describe.) Of course it also meant that I had to completely rewrite the Relay scenes. In the comments, you will find only fleeting references to poor Yrdnalf Scrubscooey and Straum the warlike realm; now they are less than fiction.

The only other major change was small by comparison, but it also illustrates my problem with the Ravna plotline. It became clear that the flight of the Out of Band II must take many months, yet I had only a few scenes aboard the ship. I had not properly mastered “summing up”. I call these gaps “Lost Times” in the notes. Filling them in with retrospective summaries turned out to be easy as well as necessary — and gave me an opportunity to improve the characters and the credibility of the plot. Some of this strategy is discussed in commentary tagged to “Lost Time”.

Finally, when Brad Templeton suggested (April 1993) that I make the annotations available for the Clarinet edition, I looked at the notes and marveled at how cryptic and contradictory they were. I went over them and tried to make them more intelligible. In places, I added some background about terminology (see “evocation” and “virtual partition”). I also added my thoughts about a few things that readers had commented on.

The Future of Annotations

You’ve probably noticed from the discussion above that my word-processing automation is very primitive. I like the fact that written fiction is built on words and sentences and paragraphs. Plain prose is still the best technology for turning the user’s own mind into a display device! There may be times when fonts and page layout are important to the story being told, but they are rarely at the heart of the prose art form.

Software for managing story development is a different matter: My embedded comment convention served me well during the 1980s. Early in the decade, disk capacities were so small that the comments served mainly for important reminders. By the end of the decade, I could keep an entire novel in a single file (if I wished), and I could keep much of the support documentation in-line with the text. Fortunately, processing power had also improved, and by using grep I could hop around the manuscript, guided by whatever tags were useful at the moment.

For a story the size of A Fire Upon the Deep, this was not enough. I needed more than the ability to find tags and instances; I needed to generate summaries of background information and story text, keyed on the parameters of the moment. Late in the project, I began to use Lotus Agenda(tm). (Stan Schmidt describes a similar experience with Hypercard(tm) in “Hypertext as a Writing Tool”, SFFWA Bulletin, Summer 1992, p6-10.) Agenda was very helpful, especially in tying a consistent timeline to the story events. Unfortunately, home computers in 1990 were too small to support everything I needed. I needed a system capable of supporting all the story notes and the story text in one multilinked structure.

There are two other features that would have been useful — though both are such an infringement on privacy and ego that I find them a bit scarey:

Whenever I wanted my consultants to look at the manuscript, I had to print up a hardcopy and ship it to those consultants. Even if I had sent the files over the phone, the operation would still have been tedious. Much nicer (and now possible with the Internet) would be software that makes a project visible (to the extent that the author desires) to others and allows them to enter comment nodes and pointers. You see a small amount of such dialog in A Fire Upon the Deep but that is the result of much manual labor on my part.

In 1992(?), Barry R. Levin had an article in Publishers Weekly, “Manuscript Collection — An Endangered Species”. (I have not had a chance to read his article myself. What I say about it is based on Stan Schmidt’s description in “The Manuscript that Never Was” (editorial), Analog, February 1993, p4-12.) Barry Levin notes that because of word