Pham his life, but just before Pham dies, he realizes that, although his body is a reconstruction, his memories are real. Vinge expands on Pham's background story in A Deepness in the Sky. 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 easily manipulate electronics and even organic beings. Dirokimes An older race which originally inhabited Sjandra Kei before the arrival of humanity. Humans All humans in the novel (except Pham) are descended from Nyjoran stock. 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 comprising roughly 28 billion individuals. Their main language is 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 plantlike beings with fronds that are used for expression. The riders have no native capacity for short-term memory. Five billion years ago, someone gave the species wheeled mechanical constructs ("skrodes") to move around and to provide short-term memory. It is later revealed that their "benefactor" was the Blight, and it is able to corrupt and remotely operate the Riders via their skrodes. Tines A race of group minds: each person is a "pack" of 4–8 doglike members, which communicate within the pack using very short-range ultrasonic waves from drumlike organs called "tympana". Each "soul" can survive and evolve by adding members to replace those who die, potentially for hundreds of years, as Woodcarver does. Kalir A race of butterfly-like insectoids, authoritarian and warlike, who constitute one of the "majority races" of the Vrinimi organization. Related works Vinge first used the concepts of "Zones of Thought" in a 1988 novella The Blabber, which occurs after Fire. Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky (1999) is a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep set 20,000 years earlier and featuring Pham Nuwen. Vinge's The