This collection, structured around a reprint of Vernor Vinge's enormously influential novella "True Names," includes several essays as well as other short fiction inspired by Vinge's revolutionary tale. Comment by the transcriber: This is as complete and accurate an etext of the 1984 edition of True Names as I can make. I agree with Project Gutenberg, regarding the superiority of hard formatted plain ASCII over other formats. Except that this work requires some italics, so I've used a bastard mix of plain text and HTML. If you want to read it as plain text, the HTML codes for italics are not too annoying; yet in HTML it will still preserve the original work's line formatting (minus right justification). Also included is the Afterword by Marvin Minsky, and .GIFs of all illustrations from the book. These are linked in at the correct places in the etext. One zip file contains the whole lot, for portability. Enjoy! The Rectifier, Feb 1998