Comment by headcanon

I am interested in how authors actually work, and the annotated version gives some insight into how he works. You can get an idea of how he works by reading this interview with him [1]. I also got some of this from another interview I cannot find at the moment, but basically he writes in Emacs, just a plain text file, but with some markup conventions that let him distinguish between the text itself and various comments to himself about the text.

The interview I linked to includes a screenshot of Children in the Sky whilst he was writing it. The character of the draft you see there is much like I remember this annotated edition of A Fire Upon the Deep was - in other words, it was really the text of the book itself but including all of the notes to himself that he put in to help himself correlate bits of the story that should be correlated, help him make sure that the first time various things are introduced he actually introduces them properly, includes feedback from his early readers, etc.

I would not actually read the annotated version when I wanted to read the book, but would read it to see his thought process at various points, how he decided to do things, etc.

[1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...

I am also very curious! A Fire Upon the Deep, in my opinion, is one of the best books ever written. The idea of the "zones" really fascinates me, I wish Vinge did more with it.