Now that I've buttered you up, I want
to once again ask you to do what you can to get other people interested in Constellation Games. "What's in it for me?" you ask, because buttering you up only goes so far; I get it. Well, maybe you want a sequel. I have an idea for a sequel. But I can't justify spending the time to write a sequel to a book that wasn't a big hit. I'd be better off writing a totally new novel, as I'm doing now.
Hopefully getting people interested will a lot easier now that
serialization is done. Ebooks will soon be available for $5, which should take the book into the realm of instant-gratification impulse buys. You'll
be able to get a PDF direct from the publisher, or to get Nook
and Kindle versions from B&N and Amazon.
It would also help a lot if you left reviews of the book on the
bookstore sites, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and so on. Or just post a review on your blog. And remember that someone who's on the fence can read the first two chapters for free as PDF or HTML.
I'm still trying to line up podcast appearances and so on. But I've learned that it's really difficult for an author
to effectively promote their own book, because everything I say sounds
like an ad. Well, it is an ad. That's why books have quotes on the
back covers from people who didn't write the book. Fan-driven
publicity is a million times more effective than anything I can do. (n.b. I haven't actually
measured this, but a million times seems about right.)
You can read the end of the book as an unimitigated "yay, Ariel",
and I deliberately didn't spend much story time on what I'm about to
say, but... Ariel's redesign of Human Ring is an incoherent mess. His
appreciation of art does not extend much past "art is good and we
should have more." He's not a curator, an architect, or a designer of
ecosystems. He didn't even get to finish his metafractal before
instantiating it.
But this huge mess pushes a habitable Human Ring into the realm of
the imaginable. Ariel gets in your face with a really cheesy version
of whatever you're good at, and gets you thinking about how amazing it
would be if you could redo it properly. (Most of what Ariel does between December 26 and April 22 is working with people with real domain knowledge.)
I used The Dinner Party to dramatize this. Judy Chicago's piece is a
monument to dead and mythological heroes, realized in media
traditionally associated with women: ceramics, sewing, weaving,
embroidery, lace, and (implied) food. It serves as a counterweight to
all of history's monuments honoring men.
Like all monuments, The Dinner Party works by overwhelming
you. In the Brooklyn Museum the piece has three parts: you walk down a
hallway hung with very 1970s tapestries, then you turn a corner and
enter a dark triangular room containing nothing but the installation,
and you're overwhelmed. Finally you leave the installation room to a
big Mathematica-like timeline explaining who all the women
mentioned in the piece were. (I get why the timeline is necessary, but
it leaves me with the feeling that I've just visited a state park.)
Ariel does not really understand The Dinner Party. Even
Somn, who understands it less, can see this. Ariel's reproduction
omits the timeline, the hallway with tapestries, and the dark
triangular room. He just reconstructed the table in the uniformly-lit
docking bay along with everything else. This ruins the overwhelming
effect.
It's highly questionable whether Jenny would want to put
Protector of Earth in that room. Setting up The Dinner
Party next to Trajan's Column doesn't do either piece any
favors. But it does put them on the same rhetorical level, and putting
hundreds of those pieces in a room a mile square creates its own
overwhelming effect. In the docking bay, the monuments humanity has
built to its accomplishments are themselves recognized as
accomplishments.
Even before the contact event, Ariel knew what this tasted like. He
had an archive of all of humanity's Games of a Certain Complexity,
acquired through software piracy and playable whenever he wanted to
play them. Now he's demonstrated that kind of abundance in a way that
people who don't care about video games can appreciate.
Of course, all the artworks on Human Ring are replicas. Even the
"fucking Banksy mural" got destroyed by the matter shifters and had to
be restored from backup. But as Tetsuo says in chapter 12, there are
no un-replicas. Even the original artwork is an imperfect replica of
the pure idea in the artist's mind.
Constellation Games is full of replicas. Ariel's house,
Dieue's apartment, the shipping containers, Ariel's notebooks, the CDBOEGOACC games and hardware, the
golden cellular-automata machine, the periodically resurfaced lunar
field, the Disneyland environments of Ring City, Jenny's cosplay, Tammy's missions in the Orion simulator, Ariel's recreation of Tammy's go bag, Dana Light in all her forms, the game companies making the same game
over and over, Recapture That Remarkable Taste and Sayable Spice: Earth Remix, the imperfect copy of Tetsuo that Somn has in her head,
and the imperfect immortal electronic copy that could have existed
instead.
Negative space is Ariel's theme, and replicas are Tetsuo's. Throughout the book, Tetsuo concerns himself with the
negative space that separates real replicas from fake ones. The way someone from a
culture with less history might care a lot about originals
vs. replicas. He cares because the original was
trying to tell you something. Probably unintentionally, probably not
what the original creator was trying to convey, probably
something about that person and their society. A real replica
will let that message come through. A fake replica will preserve the
text of the article but lose the revealing advertisements. And how you use a replica will, in turn, reveal something about you.
Maybe miscellaneous notes are an anticlimax after that, but here
they are anyway:
As far as I'm concerned, Ariel yielded control of the narrative at
the end of chapter 35. But everyone was so adamant, I caved and wrote
that last email of Ariel's. And no one has complained about the ending
since, so I guess I did the right thing. But I don't think it's
necessary.
And that's Constellation Games. This commentary series will
continue for two more weeks, with commentaries for the bonus material
posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you ordered the bonus material, you should be getting it soon along with the complete ebook. If you ordered the USB key, the bonus material's on there. If you're not sure what to read first, here's the commentary schedule, and my recommended reading order:
Update: I originally put the stories in this list in the order I wrote them. But when I suggested a reading order to Kate, I suggested chronological order, which is the exact opposite order. I've changed the commentary schedule to reflect the order recommended in the email that contains the bonus material.
If all you're getting is "The Time Somn Died", then your task is easy. Pictures from the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanical garden are ones I took on March 9, 2012. Other image credits: NASA, Jerry Paffendorf, and Kevin Stefanovitch.
← Last week | "The Time Somn Died" →
![[Comments]](/nb//themes/Default/comments.png "3 comments")
(3) Tue Jul 31 2012 09:17 Constellation Games Author Commentary #36: "Protector of Earth":
Here it is, the denouement. I hope you've enjoyed the story, the
commentary, and whatever bonus materials are coming your way. As I start closing out this commentary series I want to give a big thanks to you, the fans. I've done projects before that have garnered fans, but Constellation Games is the first time I feel like I have a traditional fan base, and it's greatly appreciated on my end.
Hopefully after that you're ready for some commentary:
And every replica is imperfect. Duchamp's famous "readymades" are,
less famously, not
ready-made. They've been altered, or they're nonfunctional
replicas, or (later on) they're laboriously reconstructed (and further
altered) replicas of the
original replicas. When BEA Agent Krakowski smashes
Fountain in chapter 34 he's destroying a replica of a replica
of a possible replica.
The first email in this chapter, the automated reminder, is
also not strictly necessary, but it's funny and it sets up the
"Vanilla" rewrite that probably won't happen. To the extent "Vanilla"
still contains an exploitable idea, it's that after the events of
Constellation Games, America (and Earth in general) is on the
wrong side of a gravitational Berlin Wall. That's what I've been
getting at with stuff like Ariel's need for an exit visa, and the
"request the presence of a Constellation observer" in this email.
Otherwise, tune in next Tuesday, when Dana will say, "Americans cost extra." Tune in next Tuesday, when Somn will say, "Ha ha ha... stop it!"
Throughout Month of Kickstarter I've gotten a lot of recommendations from friends. Some I've backed, some I haven't, some I'd already backed when the friend told me about it. But from strangers? Not too often. Earlier this month someone asked me to back their video project about (I think) how to do video projects. It wasn't really my thing so I ignored it. And yesterday Daniel Davis asked me to check out Urban-Jazz Violinist Daniel D.'s New Album Project! I actually saw this project when it launched, and decided it too was not really my thing, but what the hell. It's a fine project, today is the final day of MoK 2012, so let's go out with the abandon that marked last year's observance. I've backed Daniel's project and two others:
Thus ends Month of Kickstarter, coincidentally on the same day as the serialization of Constellation Games. But just like last year, the fun doesn't stop when I stop backing all these projects. Once the projects complete (or fail) I'll be updating the graphs I made last year, when I said things that sound ridiculous now, like "realistically you're not going to get more than 350 backers." What's the realistic number of backers now? We'll find out.
This year there are other people crunching numbers on Kickstarter projects, notably Kicktraq. But this year I've gathered a lot more data than I did last year, and I've got my own ideas for how to slice it up. See you then! Tue Jul 31 2012 13:02 Month of Kickstarter #31: Jazz Python Planet:
As I write this I have backed 269 Kickstarter projects. I've also been posting the word "Kickstarter" to my Twitter feed every day for the past month. (In my defense, it was always in a sentence along with other words.) So you might imagine that people who are hustling especially hard on their Kickstarter projects might discover me and pitch me to back their project.
