14 ms·

The Hypertext annotated version of “A Fire Upon the Deep” (1993)

99 points by handol 6y ago

handol 6y ago
The CD-ROM is available in two libraries https://www.worldcat.org/title/hugo-and-nebula-anthology-1993/oclc/36742304 https://www.worldcat.org/title/hugo-and-nebula-anthology-199... but cannot be checked out.
- unixhero 6y ago
  How about archive.org? This belongs there.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    But a really big archive won't be usable unless it is in the Transcend and who knows what it might do then?
    - pavel_lishin 6y ago
      You can get a lot done if you have a competent programmer-archaeologist on board.
      - arethuza 6y ago
        Definitely required for a mature programming environment.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    Here you go: https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993 https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  Oof, Texas A&M and Northern Colorado. That's a bit too far for a quick jaunt.
handol 6y ago
The other post Brad made that day he references: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.sf.written/c/pbuT5Xty9QY/m/5AzkJGGfmcgJ https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.sf.written/c/pbuT5Xty9Q...
- Sharlin 6y ago
  Wow, hadn't realized that A Fire Upon the Deep, Red Mars, Snow Crash, and Doomsday Book were all published in 1992. Awesome year for SF.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Yeah - we got a load of DEC Alpha machines in the lab I worked in around then. Which were promptly named Ares, Tharsis, Elysium... etc.
andyjohnson0 6y ago
Brad has a page about his SF publishing on his personal site [1]. He says that it is still possible to get the CD-format anthology that includes the hypertext version of A Fire Upon the Deep by joining the EFF. More details on the page. [1] https://www.netfunny.com/hugo.html#get https://www.netfunny.com/hugo.html#get
- handol 6y ago
  Interesting, though it appears EFF no longer has a comments field on their donation form.
ansible 6y ago
I had bought the hardcover when it first came out, but always wanted the CDROM version when I had heard of it. It is a shame it hasn't made it online somewhere convenient. I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today. At the time of publishing, Vinge was one of the very few people who had a good grasp of the limits of computation and molecular nanotechnology were. Up until that point in mainstream SF writing, highly advanced technology was more akin to magic, even in "hard" SF. Aside from FTL tech (necessary for a novel with galactic scope), and the Zones of Thought (an artifice to help tell stories centering on people), Vinge sticks close to what is physically possible. The prologue alone is packed with realistic details that was exceptional for its time.
- rsync 6y ago
  "I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today." I enjoyed tremendously _A Deepness in the Sky_ and continue to find the ideas interesting and thought-provoking - especially the localizer networks, etc. Based on that I read _Fire Upon the Deep_ and found it very enjoyable and interesting throughout, but then deeply disappointing at the end. I was expecting explanations and resolutions of the deep background events and actors that were shaping the story and none were given.
  - jerf 6y ago
    "then deeply disappointing at the end. I was expecting explanations and resolutions of the deep background events and actors that were shaping the story and none were given." If you read carefully, and make a couple of reasonable deductions, I think you can come to mostly satisfactory conclusions. There's room for a couple of different interpretations of what's in the center of the galaxy, but not all that many, really.
    - vintagedave 6y ago
      Could you explain your own deductions, please? What are the possible interpretations? I have read both novels, but on that reading do not feel I could be sure of understanding what's at the galactic center at all. In fact, I recall feeling puzzled and wishing it was explained, much like the parent poster. I'd love to hear some deductions and to find out what hints in the book I missed. Edit: I see you also wrote this comment - very informative, thanks! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24869467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24869467
austincheney 6y ago
I never truly enjoyed that book, but Vinge’s A Deepness In The Sky is the most beloved sci-fi book for both me and the wife.
- alexgmcm 6y ago
  I've read A Deepness In The Sky and enjoyed it, I was wondering whether it A Fire Upon The Deep is similar? Also, it was lucky I had A Deepness In The Sky on my e-reader as I had no idea how long it was and it would have been far more intimidating in its physical form!
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Both are glorious books - I didn't like The Children of the Sky though.
    - hyperpallium2 6y ago
      Larry Niven, a similar kind of a scifi writer, said that when a writer is so successful they quit their day job, they lose that source of inspiration. Vinge retired from lecturing compsci in 2000. Deepness was 1999. Children was 2011, was competent, but lacked almost all the clever insights of the previous novels. I wish he'd go back. Oh well, he gave us several very good novels and 2 great ones. He deserves a break!
      - arethuza 6y ago
        Not very difficult to think of counterexamples to that rule: Iain Banks, Neal Stephenson, Charlie Stross...
        p_l 6y ago
        Charlie Stross arguably lives in a country led by New Management, so for inspiration he only needs to launch BBC these days...
hyperpallium2 6y ago
NB: not actually The Hypertext annotated version of “A Fire Upon the Deep”
russnewcomer 6y ago
Whine here - this version used to be available on Kindle - I know, because I purchased it. However, it is no longer available and my copy got ‘updated’ to just the regular text, sometime between my original purchase in 08 and ~2015. I now no longer solely purchase Kindle versions of books that have some characteristic I value, and I think Vinge would solidly approve of that stance. Not sure about the reaction of the Blight, though.
- arethuza 6y ago
  At least they didn't delete your copy of 1984! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-kindle-1984 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-ki...
- Hitton 6y ago
  Another possibility is not to keep the books just in the Kindle/Kindle app and to regularly download them to your computer and back them up. The DRM can be stripped too.
- EdwardCoffin 6y ago
  In the pre-Kindle days, Amazon sold it as an Adobe DRMed PDF, which is how I bought it in 2006. When they introduced the Kindle they retired the Adobe DRM servers, and since they did not alert me as to this happening (despite the ebook being registered to an email address), my copy turned into a pumpkin. It took me a few back-and-forths with Amazon's customer support to get them to even acknowledge that this had happened. Most of the reps I communicated with weren't even aware that Amazon had sold ebooks before the Kindle. They wanted to just give me the Kindle version of the regular eBook, but grudgingly gave me a refund instead, because I insisted on either the full annotated version in any form or a refund (I already own two copies of the regular book in paper form).
EdwardCoffin 6y ago
My interest in reading this was to see how he went about writing. I did read some of it (I 'owned' it in Adobe PDF form) before getting sidetracked, then my copy turned into a pumpkin when Amazon retired the Adobe DRM servers shortly after they introduced the Kindle. Anyone interested in Vinge's annotation scheme can get a sense of it from this interview with Norwescon [1], which includes a screenshot of his working draft for The Children of the Sky. Short answer: he writes in Emacs, and uses a convention to incorporate reviewer comments, annotations, and his own tags intermingled with the actual text, and has a set of text processing tools for navigating it. Edit: I just remembered a bit of trivia some readers might find interesting: there was a whole minor character he cut fairly late in writing, who survives in fragments 'commented out' in the annotated version. I think it might have been one of Ravna's fellow librarians at Relay, and he cut the character to streamline the storytelling. I think there might have been notes from his early readers supporting the decision too. [1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview.htm http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  > my copy turned into a pumpkin when Amazon retired the Adobe DRM servers I have never read such an apt analogy for the what remains of "purchased" content after the DRM servers go away.
  - EdwardCoffin 6y ago
    I find this tweet the most representative [1]: "Reminded that the Microsoft ebook store closes next week. The DRM'd books will stop working. I cannot believe that sentence. "The books will stop working." I keep saying it and it sounds worse each time." - Rob Donoghue [1] https://twitter.com/rdonoghue/status/1144011630197522432?s=20 https://twitter.com/rdonoghue/status/1144011630197522432?s=2...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thudson 6y ago
The CD-ROM is now on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993 https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993 Brad Templeton wrote about it: "I believe this CD is now a piece of history, as the world's first major eBook project using current fiction. At the time it was the largest anthology of current fiction ever published in one volume, and it may retain that title even today. Prior ventures were small or featured either unpublished writers or public domain works. This anthology featured novels that in most cases had not yet come out in paperback."
- AlbertoGP 6y ago
  WOW!!! “These directories contain the "raw" form of the anthology, which is to say RTF, GIF and JPEG files, along with a few ASCII files. They are found in the online version, and in a special directory on the CD for people without MS-Windows or a Macintosh.” [read.me] The format description for the .txt annotations is at: "hugo-nebula anthology 1993/hugo/novel/vinge/exnotes.txt" To take a first quick look at the notes: unzip hugo.zip cd 'hugo-nebula anthology 1993/hugo/novel/vinge/' rg '^\^ ' # or grep -rn '^\^ ' .
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    The footnotes appear to be missing from the text files, but are present in the RTFs.
    - EdwardCoffin 6y ago
      FYI for Mac users: I can see footnotes when I look at the raw source for the RTFs, but on macOS Catalina neither TextEdit nor Pages show them.
      - duskwuff 6y ago
        Hmm. Perhaps someone needs to transform those RTFs to HTML, with appropriate management for the footnotes. Then we can finally have the HTML version of the annotated novel that was promised 27 years ago. :)

99 points by handol 6y ago

The CD-ROM is available in two libraries https://www.worldcat.org/title/hugo-and-nebula-anthology-1993/oclc/36742304 https://www.worldcat.org/title/hugo-and-nebula-anthology-199... but cannot be checked out.

unixhero 6y ago
How about archive.org? This belongs there.
- arethuza 6y ago
  But a really big archive won't be usable unless it is in the Transcend and who knows what it might do then?
  - pavel_lishin 6y ago
    You can get a lot done if you have a competent programmer-archaeologist on board.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      Definitely required for a mature programming environment.
- webmaven 6y ago
  Here you go: https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993 https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993
pavel_lishin 6y ago
Oof, Texas A&M and Northern Colorado. That's a bit too far for a quick jaunt.

handol 6y ago

The other post Brad made that day he references: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.sf.written/c/pbuT5Xty9QY/m/5AzkJGGfmcgJ https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.sf.written/c/pbuT5Xty9Q...

Sharlin 6y ago
Wow, hadn't realized that A Fire Upon the Deep, Red Mars, Snow Crash, and Doomsday Book were all published in 1992. Awesome year for SF.
- arethuza 6y ago
  Yeah - we got a load of DEC Alpha machines in the lab I worked in around then. Which were promptly named Ares, Tharsis, Elysium... etc.

andyjohnson0 6y ago

Brad has a page about his SF publishing on his personal site [1]. He says that it is still possible to get the CD-format anthology that includes the hypertext version of A Fire Upon the Deep by joining the EFF. More details on the page. [1] https://www.netfunny.com/hugo.html#get https://www.netfunny.com/hugo.html#get

handol 6y ago
Interesting, though it appears EFF no longer has a comments field on their donation form.

ansible 6y ago

I had bought the hardcover when it first came out, but always wanted the CDROM version when I had heard of it. It is a shame it hasn't made it online somewhere convenient. I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today. At the time of publishing, Vinge was one of the very few people who had a good grasp of the limits of computation and molecular nanotechnology were. Up until that point in mainstream SF writing, highly advanced technology was more akin to magic, even in "hard" SF. Aside from FTL tech (necessary for a novel with galactic scope), and the Zones of Thought (an artifice to help tell stories centering on people), Vinge sticks close to what is physically possible. The prologue alone is packed with realistic details that was exceptional for its time.

rsync 6y ago
"I believe it remains one of the seminal works in SF, and holds up pretty well today." I enjoyed tremendously _A Deepness in the Sky_ and continue to find the ideas interesting and thought-provoking - especially the localizer networks, etc. Based on that I read _Fire Upon the Deep_ and found it very enjoyable and interesting throughout, but then deeply disappointing at the end. I was expecting explanations and resolutions of the deep background events and actors that were shaping the story and none were given.
- jerf 6y ago
  "then deeply disappointing at the end. I was expecting explanations and resolutions of the deep background events and actors that were shaping the story and none were given." If you read carefully, and make a couple of reasonable deductions, I think you can come to mostly satisfactory conclusions. There's room for a couple of different interpretations of what's in the center of the galaxy, but not all that many, really.
  - vintagedave 6y ago
    Could you explain your own deductions, please? What are the possible interpretations? I have read both novels, but on that reading do not feel I could be sure of understanding what's at the galactic center at all. In fact, I recall feeling puzzled and wishing it was explained, much like the parent poster. I'd love to hear some deductions and to find out what hints in the book I missed. Edit: I see you also wrote this comment - very informative, thanks! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24869467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24869467

austincheney 6y ago

I never truly enjoyed that book, but Vinge’s A Deepness In The Sky is the most beloved sci-fi book for both me and the wife.

alexgmcm 6y ago
I've read A Deepness In The Sky and enjoyed it, I was wondering whether it A Fire Upon The Deep is similar? Also, it was lucky I had A Deepness In The Sky on my e-reader as I had no idea how long it was and it would have been far more intimidating in its physical form!
- arethuza 6y ago
  Both are glorious books - I didn't like The Children of the Sky though.
  - hyperpallium2 6y ago
    Larry Niven, a similar kind of a scifi writer, said that when a writer is so successful they quit their day job, they lose that source of inspiration. Vinge retired from lecturing compsci in 2000. Deepness was 1999. Children was 2011, was competent, but lacked almost all the clever insights of the previous novels. I wish he'd go back. Oh well, he gave us several very good novels and 2 great ones. He deserves a break!
    - arethuza 6y ago
      Not very difficult to think of counterexamples to that rule: Iain Banks, Neal Stephenson, Charlie Stross...
      - p_l 6y ago
        Charlie Stross arguably lives in a country led by New Management, so for inspiration he only needs to launch BBC these days...

hyperpallium2 6y ago

NB: not actually The Hypertext annotated version of “A Fire Upon the Deep”

russnewcomer 6y ago

Whine here - this version used to be available on Kindle - I know, because I purchased it. However, it is no longer available and my copy got ‘updated’ to just the regular text, sometime between my original purchase in 08 and ~2015. I now no longer solely purchase Kindle versions of books that have some characteristic I value, and I think Vinge would solidly approve of that stance. Not sure about the reaction of the Blight, though.

arethuza 6y ago
At least they didn't delete your copy of 1984! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-kindle-1984 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-ki...
Hitton 6y ago
Another possibility is not to keep the books just in the Kindle/Kindle app and to regularly download them to your computer and back them up. The DRM can be stripped too.
EdwardCoffin 6y ago
In the pre-Kindle days, Amazon sold it as an Adobe DRMed PDF, which is how I bought it in 2006. When they introduced the Kindle they retired the Adobe DRM servers, and since they did not alert me as to this happening (despite the ebook being registered to an email address), my copy turned into a pumpkin. It took me a few back-and-forths with Amazon's customer support to get them to even acknowledge that this had happened. Most of the reps I communicated with weren't even aware that Amazon had sold ebooks before the Kindle. They wanted to just give me the Kindle version of the regular eBook, but grudgingly gave me a refund instead, because I insisted on either the full annotated version in any form or a refund (I already own two copies of the regular book in paper form).

EdwardCoffin 6y ago

My interest in reading this was to see how he went about writing. I did read some of it (I 'owned' it in Adobe PDF form) before getting sidetracked, then my copy turned into a pumpkin when Amazon retired the Adobe DRM servers shortly after they introduced the Kindle. Anyone interested in Vinge's annotation scheme can get a sense of it from this interview with Norwescon [1], which includes a screenshot of his working draft for The Children of the Sky. Short answer: he writes in Emacs, and uses a convention to incorporate reviewer comments, annotations, and his own tags intermingled with the actual text, and has a set of text processing tools for navigating it. Edit: I just remembered a bit of trivia some readers might find interesting: there was a whole minor character he cut fairly late in writing, who survives in fragments 'commented out' in the annotated version. I think it might have been one of Ravna's fellow librarians at Relay, and he cut the character to streamline the storytelling. I think there might have been notes from his early readers supporting the decision too. [1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview.htm http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...

selfhoster11 6y ago
> my copy turned into a pumpkin when Amazon retired the Adobe DRM servers I have never read such an apt analogy for the what remains of "purchased" content after the DRM servers go away.
- EdwardCoffin 6y ago
  I find this tweet the most representative [1]: "Reminded that the Microsoft ebook store closes next week. The DRM'd books will stop working. I cannot believe that sentence. "The books will stop working." I keep saying it and it sounds worse each time." - Rob Donoghue [1] https://twitter.com/rdonoghue/status/1144011630197522432?s=20 https://twitter.com/rdonoghue/status/1144011630197522432?s=2...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thudson 6y ago

The CD-ROM is now on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993 https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993 Brad Templeton wrote about it: "I believe this CD is now a piece of history, as the world's first major eBook project using current fiction. At the time it was the largest anthology of current fiction ever published in one volume, and it may retain that title even today. Prior ventures were small or featured either unpublished writers or public domain works. This anthology featured novels that in most cases had not yet come out in paperback."

AlbertoGP 6y ago
WOW!!! “These directories contain the "raw" form of the anthology, which is to say RTF, GIF and JPEG files, along with a few ASCII files. They are found in the online version, and in a special directory on the CD for people without MS-Windows or a Macintosh.” [read.me] The format description for the .txt annotations is at: "hugo-nebula anthology 1993/hugo/novel/vinge/exnotes.txt" To take a first quick look at the notes: unzip hugo.zip cd 'hugo-nebula anthology 1993/hugo/novel/vinge/' rg '^\^ ' # or grep -rn '^\^ ' .
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- duskwuff 6y ago
  The footnotes appear to be missing from the text files, but are present in the RTFs.
  - EdwardCoffin 6y ago
    FYI for Mac users: I can see footnotes when I look at the raw source for the RTFs, but on macOS Catalina neither TextEdit nor Pages show them.
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      Hmm. Perhaps someone needs to transform those RTFs to HTML, with appropriate management for the footnotes. Then we can finally have the HTML version of the annotated novel that was promised 27 years ago. :)