News You Can Bruise for 2012 May 22

(2) Tue May 22 2012 09:02 Constellation Games Author Commentary #26, "Everyone With Cartoon Violence": This week Ariel faces his greatest self-imposed challenge yet: getting along with his parents. Let's listen in, shall we?

Actually, before we shall, I have some good non-novel news. I've sold my story "Four Kinds of Cargo" to Strange Horizons! Look for it late this year. It's not a Constellation story, but I think fans of the book will like it.

Here's last week's extensive Twitter feeds. I retconned one of Tetsuo's posts because he mentioned his cocktail experiments, which don't happen until this week. And now, a bulleted list:

• As far as I know, Tetsuo's observation about the air freshener in this chapter is the only explicit acknowledgement that Constellation Games takes place in the future. You'll notice there's no year on the dates in the blog posts. Even within the commentary I was going to play coy about the exact year, but I'll just tell you that it's 2015. That's the only year that's consistent with Ariel's age, the dates of holidays, the American election cycle, phases of the moon, and so on. I typed cal 2015 more times than you'd believe while writing this book.

  I didn't give the year in-story because of something I noticed with "Mallory". That story officially takes place in 2007, but because the year isn't in your face, it could be as late as 2010. The only jarring 2007 detail is the clunky pre-iPhone cells. Not naming a year gives a near-future story a few years of "this could be now" and a few years of "this could be the recent past". Things don't generally change that fast. My hope is that this phenomenon buys Constellation Games enough time to make it to the actual 2015 without becoming dated.

  

• The original title for this chapter was "Second Chances". That fits pretty well but it's a reference to the fictional sitcom from chapter 16, which no one remembers by this point. "Everyone With Cartoon Violence" doesn't fit terribly well (it would be a better title for chapter 28, and I actually thought I'd changed it), but as a string of words it can't be beat. I'm gonna say the "Cartoon Violence" is a reference to Ariel's Ninja Turtles story.
• I've noticed it's common for someone not to get along with their parents even though their parents are perfectly nice people. I don't really understand it, but I suspect I would if my father had lived into my adulthood. Anyway, I tried to depict that phenomenon here, without taking sides.
• Tetsuo's a little light on the "worse than Beatlemania" details, but hopefully you're starting to see why there's no port back to Constellation space right now.
• Lots of the Slow People stuff mentioned here (especially the making of backups) is dramatized in "The Time Somn Died". The next few chapters lay a lot of the groundwork for "Somn", and I'm not going to point it out every time.
• Random influences: Ariel's parents' house is closely modelled after the last house my mother lived in. The Ninja Turtles story is made up, but inspired by conversations I've had with Lucian Kahn. The chummy narrative voice of Your Quiescent Achievement was inspired by WWII-era military "Pocket Guides".
• My phone's bootup message is "This is Your Quiescent Achievement."
• Ariel's dad's line about Ariel being an unreliable narrator was originally "The neutrality of this story has been disputed." It's his only line in the novel.
• Very early in my worldbuilding, Ariel had a younger sister named Britomart. She probably would have been in this scene, but given that Ariel's dad has one line and Raphael only shows up in Ariel's stories, more family members are totally unnecessary. But I wanted to mention Britomart as one more example of how terrible Ariel's parents are at naming kids. Let's say they were like "Ariel if it's a boy, Britomart if it's a girl."
• "I don't think it has much in common with the Internet" is, for me, Curic's Crowning Moment of Awesome. An odd choice? Perhaps, but consider the following. Curic's overlay just deployed a secure interplanetary communications network under the guise of shiny toys for humanity, and she's not even interested in the technology. She just needs an open communication channel to do her job. It's "the net interprets censorship as damage" taken to an extreme.

  I wouldn't call it "awesome", but I also love how good Curic is at pushing Ariel's buttons here.

  Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains,
  Let me remember thee what thou hast promised,
  Which is not yet perform'd me.

• I really hate it when people put disclaimers in their apologies. Stop it! If you're still trying to have the argument, you're not apologizing.
• Curic never lies to Ariel. But in retrospect, it's good I had to change it so we heard the truth about ambivalence from Tetsuo (see last week's commentary). There'd really be no reason to trust that information coming from Curic.

  And I say Curic never lies to Ariel, but the third draft went through a phase where she did, and it's possible I never took that out. So I dunno!

Before I go, a little bonus deleted snippet from the Ariel/Curic conversation, which might be of interest:

"The mature thing to do is to send for help before you end up like the Inostrantsi."

"The Inostrantsi are still around," I pointed out.

"The Inostrantsi reproduce by budding," said Curic. "They didn't have much genetic diversity to lose. They're also immortal, so the surviving individuals had good memories of pre-collapse society. Let's not push our luck, Ariel."

Okay! Good commentary, everybody. Tune in next week for Tetsuo's first college lecture, during the course of which he will say, "I'm sorry, I just assumed there was space travel."

Image credits: Azmeen Afandi, Brian Sterling, yours truly.

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