News You Can Bruise for 2012 February 7 (entry 0)

(4) Tue Feb 07 2012 08:48 Constellation Games Author Commentary #11: "Launch Title": Love those title puns! This blockbuster episode sends Ariel TO THE MOON and introduces two major new characters, Tetsuo Milk and Ashley Somn. Also a minor but important character: Linda Blum, Ariel's mom.

Here's last week's Twitter archive, which ran two weeks ago due to my own errors. Twitter service has now resumed, but because this plot arc is so compressed (the rest of Part One crams two weeks of frantic activity into five weeks of real time), most of it is going to come out on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Don't be afraid, I'll be here the whole time with long-winded commentary:

• It's such a relief to be able to talk about Tetsuo! So much happens in this chapter, he doesn't get a lot of time with Ariel, but that changes starting next week. Tetsuo is great, I love him a lot, but... he's a scene stealer. Anything I wrote, he would grab and run off in some weird direction. When the Aliens were choosing human names, Tetsuo is the guy who picked a name because it means "iron man."

  Tetsuo reminds me of Londo Mollari from Babylon 5, in that he starts out a comic relief character (insofar as a comedy can have designated comic relief) and over time reveals more serious facets of his personality. But unlike Londo, Tetsuo never stops saying goofy shit. Tetsuo is the infrafictional author of the subscriber bonus tome "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans", which is set about six months after the end of the novel, and he's still at it.

• Ashley Somn is not a scene-stealer, so her husband kind of overshadows her for most of the book. But she's an awesome character on a slow burn. She's got a high-drama character arc that revs up in the last third, and which I fill in with the bonus story "The Time Somn Died." (Title is not a spoiler.)
• I keep forgetting that Tetsuo is orange and Ashley is green; I always imagine it the other way around. They're bright neon colors with darker spots, like tropical frogs. Why? Are Aliens poisonous? I dunno. Lick one and see!
• The short scene with BEA Agent Krakowski in back of the strip club is the very last thing I wrote for Constellation Games. Its main purpose is to dramatize the sub rosa assignment Krakowski gives Ariel, an assignment which becomes very important in Part Two. But I also threw in the talking rat, to introduce you to something else that's very important in Part Two: the idea that Ariel might not be the most reliable narrator.

  I don't know why Krakowski and Fowler were at a strip club in the middle of the day, but I'm sure it was work-related.

• The part of this chapter that's an excerpt from Ariel's Twitter feed will not be shown on his actual Twitter feed, because that would be annoying. But that section was the main inspiration for the in-character feeds in the first place.
• Original title for this chapter: "MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON."
• One of the big problems with the second draft was that for most of it, the tone was emotionally distant. It took me a while to understand the characters. The blog format didn't help, and I moved further away from it in every draft. Ariel is a guy who shows vulnerability in huge dramatic bursts and won't open up otherwise. Etc. etc. Anyway, I worked on this a lot in the third draft, and one of the big changes is that at Andrew Willett's suggestion I modeled Ariel's lunar excursion on this Narbonic strip.

  Ariel's reaction to being launched into space is taken directly from what I imagine would happen to me. Also possibly taken from my reaction as a kid to the Disneyland exhibit "Mission to Mars", which had a similar setup where you saw the ground drop out from underneath you while feeling absolutely no acceleration.

• The sculptures of the figures from the Pioneer plaque (not "Carl Sagan's gold record", as Ariel mistakenly believes—that's the Voyager record) are another moment of not-quite-understanding taken from "Vanilla". Ariel's initial description of the docking bay is the opening parenthesis of a pretty huge piece of bookending, so watch for that.

  One of the imaginary book covers I had in my head while writing was a design based on the Pioneer plaque, except with (clothed) Ariel and Jenny.

• Ariel mentions some Eritrean refugees living on Ring City, but they're only the biggest and most famous group of refugees—the ones Ariel knows about. Human Ring is also home to smaller groups of refugees from around the world, and to miscellaneous individuals living under the radar. The actual population of Human Ring at this point is closer to 700 than to 500.

  The refugees come up a few times later on, but they don't play a big part in the novel because I don't currently feel I've got the literary chops to tell their stories. But I knew that not mentioning refugees would be unrealistic. It would imply that humanity's governments were able to coordinate to completely lock down the planet, or that the Constellation was sending away asylum seekers. What we have is a compromise, not one I'm happy with, but I think the best I could do.

• I know this is already super long, but I want to introduce a new segment here on CG Author Commentary, a little recurring bit I like to call Creative License. Sure, I write silly stories about space aliens visiting Earth seemingly in violation of the Fermi Paradox, but that doesn't mean I can just make stuff up. At the same time, I want Constellation technology to appear very close to the "indistinguishable from magic" line. Creative License explores that tension by pointing out things that probably can't exist in real life, and the made-up reasons I use to justify their existence in the story.

  First we have the shuttles the Constellation uses for short hops to Earth and Luna. I have no idea how they go as fast as they do, but I have a vague idea how they achieve a smooth ride: they use ports to maintain an acceleration differential between the inside of the shuttle and the outside, so the inside accelerates at a gravity-like rate while the outside powers up towards some horrendous speed. Ports are very important bits of Constellation tech and need their own segment on Creative License. I'll probably do them next week, after we see one in action.

  But this week we also have the Constellation spacesuits. Inflatable spacesuits are nothing new, but Ariel's suit folds up when not inflated and doesn't seem to have any space for hard parts like air tanks, a fluid recycler, the comm system he plugs his phone into, or a way of dissipating heat. Creative License Solution: as you'll see later, the Constellation does pretty amazing things with origami. I imagine all that fine machinery is packed flat and inflates to the correct shape with the rest of the suit.

What a huge commentary, and this plot arc's just getting started. Be sure to tune in next week, when Ariel will say, "I do not use sex to maintain social cohesion."

Image credits: Andy Bernay, Joe Mabel, Linda Salzman Sagan, unknown.

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Comments:

Posted by kirk at Tue Feb 07 2012 12:08

You know, i was thinking about that whole confusion w/ "Ip Shkoy as a culture, not a race" thing and I realize the confusion is somewhat worse because the most prominent example of it (Ip Shkoy) is paired with the most-english word for extra-terrestrial (Alien) so it's easy to read it as "Ip Shkoy aliens" instead of "Ip Shkoy Aliens". (In a way that "Ip Shkoy Gaijin" wouldn't be)

Posted by danima at Tue Feb 07 2012 14:58

because that would be annoying.

I'm pretty sure you misspelled "just too awesome" here. (why follow a character if not to see their tweets?)

Posted by Zack at Wed Feb 08 2012 11:54

Am I right in thinking that Aliens have two sexes, but Tetsuo and Ashley's native language doesn't encode the difference in its pronouns?

Posted by Leonard at Wed Feb 08 2012 13:26

Pretty close. Gendered pronouns in Purchtrin are coded as dirty talk. Like, why would you mention that if you weren't interested? When he was learning English, Tetsuo decided to approximate politeness by always using the gender he's not interested in. Now he's paying the price.