News You Can Bruise for 2012 February 21

Tue Feb 21 2012 09:10 Constellation Games Author Commentary #13: "Your Day Job": The lucky chapter thirteen introduces the novel's last major character, Mission Specialist Dr. Tammy Miram. She gets right to work, kicking off a subplot that won't be wrapped up til the very last chapter. Let's look at a bunch of commentary, most of which is about her. But first, Twitter archive from last week! Okay, here we go:

• Tammy Miram is the only character in the novel who was given a name with an eye towards its symbolism, i.e. I didn't have a name handy so I thought "what would Charles Dickens do?". "Miram" is the Arabic name of the star η Persei. "Tammy" doesn't mean anything in particular, but it was a popular girls' name in the early 1970s. This is the Social Security Administration technique for character naming, and I strongly recommend it.

  Oh, but I just looked up the name Tammy and it means "twin". Can't escape the symbolism!

• I'm calling her "Tammy" because I mentioned her name last week in the tribute to Janice Voss, but Ariel calls her Miss Ion Specialist throughout this chapter and you don't find out her real name until next week. In the second draft, Ariel called her "Ion" for the entire book. You didn't find out her real name until chapter 30.

  Why did I change it? Mainly because of the continuous shift away from the blog format. It didn't make sense for Ariel to be using a blog pseudonym for Tammy in narration. And it would have been too confusing for Ariel to constantly switch back and forth between "Ion" and "Tammy". Especially because I've already got another character for whom Ariel uses different names in narration vs. blog.

  In the third draft, Ariel held on to "Ion" until Part Two. Now he drops the pseudonym almost immediately, when Jenny calls him on it.

• In the second draft the weightless Ariel/Tammy conversation was too dialogue-heavy and it was unclear where they were physically in relation to each other. So I introduced Ariel's frantic attempts to use the kicker and rotating in ways he doesn't want to rotate, contrasted with Tammy's mastery of the environment. This lessens the jokey handwaviness of how Ariel's able to negotiate weightlessness at all.
• Tammy's being from Akron is a reference to my favorite Steven Colbert joke, a question from his interview with Congresswoman Stephanie "Tubbs" Jones: "Twenty-two astronauts are from Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Also a Devo reference.
• Tammy is the star of the unfinished bonus story "A Princess Of Mars." Not ruling out finishing that story, but it'd need to be some kind of currently unplanned tie-in. Like if we did a Kickstarter project to produce a hardcover edition to squeeze a few more dollars out of all you fine customers.
• The ISS backlog is a bunch of shelved experiments that couldn't be brought up because the shuttle program was cancelled back in the 2000s. They were reassembled in a hurry and most of them don't work anymore.
• During the writing of the third draft, I decided to alt-history the International Space Station (in real life a product of the Cold War) into a post-Glavnaya US/Russian Federation joint, the Space Science Station. This stupid idea lasted so little time I don't have any records of it. Beta readers were confused for absolutely no gain except my own personal satisfaction at having made the world more self-consistent.

  The human space station in this alt-history is still a US/Russian Federation joint, it's just that a) it's called the International Space Station, and b) that fact has absolutely no effect on the story. Problem solved!

• Hey, Brendan, here's your one reference to the Cryptids in this whole novel.
• I really should have pushed the Starfarer release date back a few years. 1987 is a little late for a pure text adventure, and Tammy would have been in high school in 1987, so there was plenty of time to push it back.
• In my opinion the gravity kicker is the single biggest piece of Creative License in the Constellation universe. Not because it's technically impossible, but because it breaks the worldbuilding. All I can do is point it out and/or hope you don't notice.

  In "Vanilla", and in the second draft of CG, the device was a "sonic kicker" and it used reflected sound waves. But in conversation with physicist Nick Murphy I learned that although a sonic kicker is technically possible, you'd need to use sound waves so powerful as to kill on impact. Or something like that. Anyway, I changed the kicker to use gravity waves, but a small handheld gravity wave generator is a very valuable piece of tech, on par with the portable wormholes. And here I had this whole novel where ports were treated as very valuable tech and the sonic grav kicker was treated more like a Hammacher Schlemmer gadget. Instead of rewriting big chunks of the novel to deal with this point, I now invite you to enjoy a heaping spoonful of... Creative License.

• Ariel's conversation with Tammy about Cody Wicklund is kind of obscure, the kind of thing you'd expect to pay off later but it doesn't. Exactly the kind of thing I can write commentary about!

  See, it's supposed to pay off when I rewrite "Vanilla". Cody Wicklund is that story's POV character, and he's a pretty famous person in the Constellation universe, so I felt like it would be fun to mention him in the novel. This was a good place because it's reasonable that Tammy would know him. But I dunno if I'm actually going to rewrite "Vanilla", so this is Constellation Games's equivalent of that teaser caption at the end of Buckaroo Banzai.

  Tammy disliking Cody Wicklund is new. In "Vanilla" he was an unassuming scientist, not someone you'd have a strong enough opinion about to dislike—vanilla, in other words. I decided he'd be more interesting if he were more amoral, the kind of person Ariel might compare to Werner von Braun. Will it pan out? Maybe.

That's all I got. Stay tuned for the huge chapter 14, a chapter full of deepening mysteries and used game trade-ins, the chapter where Ashley finally says, "Ariel was distracted by my beautiful ovipositor."

Image credits: NASA, Mark Phillips, Allen Garvin.

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Tue Feb 21 2012 19:33: Remember when this weblog used to be about fun links? I don't either, but I think it was somewhere in there. Well, check this out: last year when I went to PAX my most enjoyable experience was the panel "Videogames Antiques Roadshow." It worked just like you think: people would bring old game stuff up on stage, and distinguished collectors would estimate the value of the old stuff. Here are some pictures from that panel. In fact, you can see me in the second photo, fourth row center.

Kind of got distracted there--the point of this post is not to look at a crowd scene that includes me. I meant to say that they brought the panel back at PAX Prime, and this time there's video. And it's now called "Retrogaming Roadshow", possibly due to trademark issues. In addition to bringing to light cool bits of history like the PCjr edition of M.U.L.E., I love the way these panels illustrate the social construction of value. Highly recommended if you've got an interest in this stuff.