News You Can Bruise for 2012 March 13 (entry 0)

(7) Tue Mar 13 2012 08:44 Constellation Games Author Commentary #16: "False Daylight": Here it is, the season finale! We've got the whole contact mission going to shit, plus a game review! Don't worry, everything will turn out fine. Maybe.

Last Friday I went to the Brooklyn Museum to take some pictures for my final Constellation Games commentary. (And if you can somehow turn that into a spoiler, I salute you.) It's a fun museum, like a much less formal version of the Met. While walking through the room of Indian sculpture I passed a curator cleaning one of the sculptures with a Shop Vac and a brush. When I showed a flinch of uncertainty about where the stairwell was, a security guard told me and talked my ear off about what I should see next, then opened up the cabinet containing the emergency fire hose and took out a "What's Happening" brochure, which she used for reference and then gave to me. Also, the neighboring Botanic Garden was free to get in because it's winter and everything's dead.

Friend of the show and beta reader Brendan Adkins has been writing erudite-ass essays about the novel's symbolism, and I'd make fun of him for being pretentious except he's right about most of it. My earlier coyness notwithstanding, I did reuse some of the character of Ariel from The Tempest, the guy with magic powers who gets bossed around all the time. Don't you think The Tempest would be more interesting if it were more about the PEOPLE WITH MAGIC POWERS and less about the Renaissance douchebags? We can only dream. For now, we sup the slender soup of the Twitter archive and this week's commentary:

• Something I forgot to mention last week: Conway's Life is the second real-life game to be mentioned in the novel, after Tennis For Two. There's just one more, I think. I really tried to only use real games when the name was necessary for a joke. E.g. in the second draft, Jenny called a game "alien Candyland", but I took that out because the joke wasn't good enough to justify the real-world reference.
• In this week's episode of Creative License we take on the ice sheet removal. After trial balloons like the kites went over like lead (trial) balloons, I wanted Save the Humans to turn to a plausible, but politically insane, freelance climate stabilization project. I read a number of popular sources on geoengineering, including Eli Kintisch's terrifying Hack the Planet, but they all focused on projects within the capabilities of human technology. So I got introductions to a couple friends-of-friends who are climate scientists, but they never responded to my emails, perhaps fearing that I was a crackpot. So I gave up.

  As such, I do not recommend using Constellation Games as a textbook in the earth sciences. In the end, I went ahead with my initial idea and slathered it with some... Creative License.

• Don't worry, the ice is being replaced with inert material of equivalent albedo. Or maybe that should worry you.
• This chapter has the second and final Bechdel-passing scene in the novel, the overheard conversation between Charlene Siph and Susan the news anchor. The anchor was originally named John, which is the name of my brother-in-law, so I changed it to the name of my sister.

  As you can see here, Charlene Siph's job is to act real folksy for the benefit of people who need to identify the Constellation with a single individual. Maybe a little more on this next week.

• One of the little jokes I put in for myself is that despite everything that happens in the rest of the novel, the ISPs never restore offworld Internet access.
• My original concept was to do the * review in a parody of the discursive style of Tim Rogers (now of Kotaku). You can still see some of that in the throat-clearing at the beginning, but then Ariel's natural despair takes over and produces something very different. Which is good, because this is a big character moment for Ariel, not random real-world people.

  This review is the clearest picture you'll get of the Ip Shkoy outside of Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans. Hopefully it shows why Tetsuo is interested in that society, and why Ariel is sort of clinging to their history as proof that humanity isn't doomed.

• According to Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans there is no "sch" sound in Pey Shkoy, only "ch" and "sh". Tetsuo must have changed the official transliteration sometime before writing PSBH. So "Schvei" is actually "Chvei". (It can't be "Shvei" because then "Ip Shkoy" would have originally been "Ip Schkoy".)

  Unlike "Curic"→"Huric", this was not intentional. I asked Adam about this and he said: "I was afraid you would ask this question, and I am glad that you have already come up with a retcon strategy."

• Af be Hui still doesn't exist as a character, but she's now got a little backstory and a creative arc. In A Tower of Sand she explored what it might feel like to be a Farang with a bicameral mind. In * she applied the same two-players-one-character mechanic to the conflict between the individual and society. This struggle between partners is one of the major themes of CG. Yeah, Brendan, write an essay about that. I know you already did! Uh, write another one.
• The ethics system in * is probably the most inventive game mechanic in the novel. I don't know how fun it would be to play, though. It would depend on your partner, as with board games.

  My vote for most fun game in the novel goes to another of Af be Hui's games, The Long Way Around, which Ariel and Tetsuo played last week and will talk about in the last scene they have together.

• I don't know how * ends.

With that, I'd like to thank you for following me through "Hardware", the first part of Constellation Games. After a short season break of seven days, we'll pick up with Part Two, "Software." It all starts next Tuesday, when Ariel will say, "Probably the most expensive penis in history."

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons user Anynobody, Paul Mutant, U.S. Air Force

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Comments:

Posted by Sean B at Tue Mar 13 2012 09:45

This book is some of the most fun I've had in years: thank you for writing it.

Posted by Leonard at Tue Mar 13 2012 10:37

Glad you're liking it!

Posted by Brendan at Wed Mar 14 2012 13:44

I should note that, as a good critic, I don't actually care if you think I'm right.

Posted by Leonard at Wed Mar 14 2012 15:20

That's a really pretentious thing to say.

Posted by Jeanne at Wed Mar 14 2012 16:37

I've dug this book 100% throughout, but this chapter is STONE COLD BRILLIANT. "That was the shopkeeper" is only the smallest gem in this diadem (is that a legit image? Do diadems typically have like, a lot of gems? Maybe the smallest gem in your Tower of London.) Hell of looking forward to rereading this thing all at once when the physical book is in.

Posted by Zack at Thu Mar 15 2012 17:44

I get that the Constellation isn't terribly good at handling humans' batshit insane politics, but I don't actually find the ice-sheet-removal technique all that plausible: how is less ice in Antarctica (replaced by some other surface of equivalent albedo) going to do a damn thing to the climate? It _might_ mitigate ocean-level rise, but ocean-level rise is only one of a host of problems caused by elevated CO2... Also, it seems to me that Save The Humans could've just parked a bunch of those kites over the oceans, away from shipping routes, and there's a decent chance nobody would ever notice.

Posted by Leonard at Thu Mar 15 2012 20:41

Jeanne, I don't have anything specific to say in response to you, but it really makes my day when people tell me they liked the book!

Zach, hopefully your concerns will be addressed later on. Basically, the two major overlays have achieved consensus about dealing with the sea level rise (because that screws up both their plans), but there's no consensus about the other problems. I will admit it's not the strongest link in the plot.

If there were kites parked over the oceans, satellites would see them easily. But keep worrying about this.