Editing A Fire Upon the Deep (section)

==Intelligent species==

===Aprahanti===
A race of humanoids with colorful butterfly-like wings who attempt to use the chaos wrought by the Blight to reestablish their waning hegemony. Despite their attractive, delicate appearance, the Aprahanti are an extremely fearsome and vicious species.

===Blight===
An ancient, malevolent super-intelligent entity which strives to constantly expand and can manipulate electronics and sentient beings.

===Dirokimes===
An older race which originally inhabited Sjandra Kei before the arrival of humanity. They work with the humans.

===Humans===
All humans in the novel (except Pham) are descended from Nyjoran stock.<ref>{{cite book|last=Vinge|first=Vernor|title=A Fire Upon the Deep|year=1992|publisher=Tom Doherty Associates|location=New York|isbn=0812515285|lccn=91-39020|page=[https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving/page/62 62]|edition=1st mass market|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving/page/62}}</ref> Their ancestors were "Tuvo-Norsk" asteroid miners from Old Earth's solar system, which is noted as being on the other side of the galaxy in the Slow Zone. (''Nyjora'' sounds similar to [[New Norwegian]] "New Earth".) One of the major human habitations is Sjandra Kei, three systems<ref>p. 436</ref> comprising roughly 28&nbsp;billion<ref>p. 322</ref> individuals. Their main language is [[Norwegian language|Samnorsk]], the Norwegian term for a hypothetical unification of the [[Bokmål]] and [[Nynorsk]] forms of the language. (Vinge indicates in the book's dedication that several key ideas in it came to him while at a conference in Tromsø, Norway.)

===Skroders/Riders/Skroderiders===
A race of plant beings with fronds that serve as arms, the Riders have little native capacity for short-term memory. They are one of the longest-existing species; five billion years ago, someone gave them six-wheeled mechanical constructs ("skrodes") to move around and to provide short-term memory that made it easier for them to retain information well enough to become long-term memory in the "rider". It is later revealed that their "benefactor" is the Blight, which is able to easily corrupt and remotely operate the Riders via their skrodes.

{{Anchor|tines}}

===Tines===
A race of group minds, each Tine is a "pack" of doglike members, which communicate within the pack using very short-range ultrasonic waves from drumlike organs called "tympana". A pack of four to eight members possesses roughly human-level intelligence; a pack with fewer or more is less smart. Each "soul" can survive and evolve by adding members to replace those who die, potentially for hundreds of years, as Woodcarver does.