News You Can Bruise for 2012 February 14 (entry 0)

Tue Feb 14 2012 09:00 Constellation Games Author Commentary #12: "Monsters From Space": Welcome to another chapter full of laughter and embarrassing faux pas. This week we learn why Curic scanned Ariel's house, and get our first glimpses of the ancient, not-particularly-wise Ip Shkoy.

Before the commentary begins, I want to bring up something serious that I could save for next week but I don't want to. Dr. Janice Voss died on February 6 at 55. She was a scientist, a NASA astronaut who flew on five shuttle missions, and later the science director for the Kepler Space Telescope. She was a big science fiction fan. I met her once in 2007, in what was certainly the highest-wattage dinner I've ever attended (photos), and she made a huge impression on me.

The only major character in Constellation Games you haven't met yet is an astronaut, Tammy Miram. She's introduced next week. If I hadn't met Janice Voss, Tammy Miram would not exist, and I have no idea what the novel would look like from next week on.

I don't mean that Tammy Miram is "based on" Janice Voss, or that the character is a way to tell Janice's story in a fictional setting. I only met Janice Voss once and I have no idea what her story would look like. (Spoiler) Also, Janice was a very well-adjusted person, and Tammy is not. But a dinner-length conversation with Janice was enough to move the societal role of "NASA astronaut" out of my mental category "archetypes useful in science fiction stories" and into "interesting jobs I can give to my characters."

R.I.P., Janice Voss. Ad astra per aspera.

Here's last week's Twitter feed, as it was meant to be seen (i.e. without a weird UTF-8 encoding issue). And now, this week's commentary:

• I've never been happy with this chapter title. Any other suggestions? It's too late to change it, but I'd like to hear what you think.
• When I first discused cover art with Kate, I was apprehensive that she would insist on a Big Dumb Object In Space cover. A shot of Ring City, or the hole in the moon. The sort of cover that presumably moves books, since every single science fiction paperback has it, but one that I think would be entirely out of place in a novel about middle-class people from Austin. Fortunately, Kate, like me, wanted a cover that implied "video games", and we settled on the handheld computer (about which more in a couple weeks). But I had an ace up my sleeve—a Big Dumb Object cover that I would have liked.

  This hypothetical cover is the interior of Alien Ring, huge and breathtaking, the cma forest curling up in the distance along with the curvature of the ring, and Ariel in the foreground taking a picture of it on his cameraphone. It didn't happen, but I could have lived with it.

  Actually, "Big Dumb Object In Space" would have been a better chapter title.

• The Alien Ring stuff got seriously moved around. In the second draft, Tetsuo and Ashley met Ariel in the docking bay, took him to Alien Ring, they met Curic there, and everyone went to the moon together. All of this happened in chapter 11, after Ariel's initial spaceflight. It was way too much for one chapter, so Alien Ring got pushed to chapters 12 and 13, and expanded greatly.
• My Earth-life analogues for the Aliens were always bonobo chimps, notorious among humans for their use of sex to maintain social cohesion. But in "Vanilla" it was more in the background. The primary Alien character, George, was pretty buttoned-down and never had a scene with another Alien. For Constellation Games I went all-out and made the Aliens huge sluts. Good decision!
• In case you're curious, the Earth-life analogue for the Farang is the deadly Snowth.
• Curic's name change (which never comes up again) is a fun detail, the kind of thing I wish more science fiction stories would mention, but it's also SYMBOLISM. By the end of the book, all the major characters except Ariel have had two different names or identities. So far we've seen Tetsuo and Ashley taking human names, Bai going by his surname, and Curic being Curic.

  What does it mean? Nothing—it's free-floating symbolism. Just kidding, I do have an opinion on what it means, but it'll need to wait for the end of the book.

• This week's "Finux" moment: the Bit Boy series in this novel is a transparent stand-in for the real-world Mega Man series.
• Finally, Creative License returns with an in-depth discussion of ports, first seen in this chapter connecting the lunar excavation to the Ring City habitats above.

  A port is the two ends of an exotic-matter wormhole with negative mass. Each end of the wormhole is mounted in a positive-mass case, and you can (let's say) carry one end down to the moon to shorten the spacetime distance between the space station and the moon. Ports can be collapsed from either end by destabilizing the wormhole.

  I invented ports in 2006 for "Vanilla" and in that story I did a lot of work showing what you could do with them. I felt writers had generally treated wormholes as magic gateways and neglected their mayhemic possibilities. I mean, just imagine if the two ends of a wormhole could be moved independently! You could set up all sorts of wacky gravity and pressure differentials.

  Then in 2007 Portal came out. So, I give up. Ports in the Constellation universe work just like in Portal, with two differences. First, you can't shoot wormholes out of guns, because a) it takes an enormous amount of energy to make one, and b) a wormhole has two sides. In Portal terms, the "blue" portal has no existence without the "orange" portal. Second, in Portal, gravity always points down. In the Constellation universe, gravity travels through ports. By proper placement of ports you can create localized weightlessness or antigravity effects.

  Anyway, the whole thing is moot, because stable wormholes of this sort almost certainly can't exist—they'd violate causality and allow for time travel. The whole thing is merely... Creative License.

Tune in next week, when Curic will say, "Infiltration? Cold reading? Propaganda? Torture? Extracting false confessions?"

Image credits: NASA, NASA again, Kabir Bakie, Alain r.

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