One of the books that I’ve managed to find for my Kindle is “Fire Upon the Deep” by Vernor Vinge. The Kindle version of the novel adds a new and unexpected dimension to reading.

“Fire Upon the Deep” is the story of people in the far future who confront an ancient malignant Artificial Intelligence that is accidentally released from a data archive.

Vinge creates a world where computers can evolve into gods, and computation can perform miracles. He populates this world with fascinating characters, and creates an epic plot that pits the forces of the universe against each other. It is one of my favorite books.

Vinge is, of course, a computer scientist and his stories have every often been about themes near and dear to my heart. Many of the stories in my book, Error Message Eyes, have been influenced by “True Names”, “Fire Upon the Deep” or one of Vinge’s other stories.

He wrote the book using classic Unix tools like EMACS, GREP, and TeX. He wrote the novel and the notes in the same files and used special characters to indicate notes so he could filter out the notes when he formatted it for publication. The Kindle version has all of Vinge’s notes as well as the notes of people who helped him edit the book. Almost every page has a link to the notes about the text at that point.

You can read the novel straight and ignore the notes, or you can stop and see what Vinge was thinking about when he wrote a section. Most of the notes are short and some are not very revealing. I am fascinated that Vinge stops and does the math along the way. When the ship is landing on a planet, he does the calculation in his notes that gives him the speed, force, and landing time.

This could not really be done in a regular novel. I guess you could have footnotes, but it is very nice to click on a link, read the note, and then press back to get on with the book.

I have read “Fire Upon the Deep” four times, at least, before. I have listened it to on tape twice. This time, as I read the book, I am taking my time. I don’t read all the notes, but when the action is particularly interesting, or there is something that I am not sure of, I read the notes on the page, and many times I’ll get my questions answered.

It is likely that in the future novels will be like this. I could not have read James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake without another book explaining all the odd references. FW would work very well as a heavily annotated Kindle edition, as would Lewis Carol’s Alice.

If I ever write a novel, I will include notes and eventually make a version that allows the reader to branch to alternate ideas and even different plot lines.