News You Can Bruise for 2012 March 6 (entry 0)

Tue Mar 06 2012 10:09 Constellation Games Author Commentary #15: "777": A few weeks ago I described the moment when I realized I'd written a novel that didn't pass the Bechdel test. I went back trying to "fix" the "problem". Should be easy, right? Five of the eight main characters are women. Well, I'm counting Curic as a woman because that's how Ariel thinks of her.

Actually, that's the problem: the whole novel is tight third-person limited from Ariel's POV. The women definitely have conversations that don't involve Ariel, but it's all off-camera. To dramatize such a conversation from Ariel's POV, he'd have to be spying on them or something.

Fortunately, there's a cheap fix: pull a Starbuck on male stock characters. I did this twice. In this chapter, I gender-swapped the Senator who gives Kinki Kwi the runaround. A similar thing will happen next week. In neither case is Ariel a direct party to the Bechdel-passing conversation. In this chapter, Curic recounts the conversation to him; in chapter 16 it's something he overhears on television.

So annoyed was I at the difficulty of a non-cheap fix, I decided to write all the bonus stories from the POV of the women. This made passing Bechdel trivial. Jenny talks to Bizarro Kate, Jenny talks to Curic. Done. You just have to be interested in what women might talk about.

(Attn. Bechdel nitpickers: if you're calling shenanigans because Curic never names the Senator, wait for chapter 16, geez.)

I hope you're hanging off a cliff. Here's last week's Twitter archive, and now the miscellaneous commentary:

• This is the one of the longest chapters in the book, because I'm out of time. Anything that needs to happen in Ring City needs to go into this chapter. But the chapters have been getting longer and longer over the course of Part One, so that they're now routinely over 4000 words. The first chapter of Part Two will reset to a shorter length, and then they'll start getting longer again. I didn't plan this, exactly, but I did shuffle scenes from one chapter to another so that they wouldn't get too long or too short.
• Before we leave Ring City, I want to mention that the awful motel atmosphere of Human Ring, especially the apartment layout, comes from "Vanilla". But in "Vanilla", what we saw of the other habitats wasn't much different. The ennui Cody Wicklund felt towards his living environment was just part of his general ennui. Ariel's anger is a lot more immediate because we've seen how much nicer Alien Ring and Farang Ring are for their inhabitants.

  However, I agree with BEA Agent Krakowski that it's kind of bitchy to spend a week in space and then complain about the accommodations.

• Curic's response to Ariel's general hopelessness, where she just walks into her hot tub and submerges for two minutes, always cracks me up. Sumana thought the bubbles were from Curic screaming where Ariel wouldn't hear. Could be, but I don't think screaming is Curic's style.
• The chapter title is one of those double-meaning titles they love to use on TV shows. "777" is a reference to Gliese 777Ad, but it's also what a slot machine shows when you hit the jackpot.
• Gliese 777A is a real star, part of a binary system for which two exoplanets are already known. It's 52 light years away, in the direction of Cygnus, which as we'll find out in chapter 24 is the general direction the Constellation is spreading from. The fictional Gliese 777Ad showed up in "Vanilla" (George was an expert on it), but this is the first real explanation as to what happened there.

  

  In "The Time Somn Died" it's revealed that the Constellation name for Gliese 777Ad is "Nobody's Home".

• I don't know what species Kinki Kwi is; she's probably Gweilo. In this commentary I originally called her "Kinki Bwi", because that was her name in the second draft. I changed it at some point and I have NO IDEA WHY and I FORGOT I'D EVEN MADE THE CHANGE. Why the heck did I do that? Not enough 'k' sounds in her name?
• In the second draft, Curic swore almost as much as Ariel does, at least when talking to him. I toned it down a lot in an effort to make Curic seem more cunning. In particular, I remember "Stick it in the overhead compartment" used to be "Stick it in the fucking overhead compartment." You see how the first one is more cunning? Of course, sometimes you want to go the other way. This writer stuff can be tricky.
• I'm kind of embarrassed by the cheapness of the tricks I used to make BEA Agent Fowler a super repulsive character. The guy practically kicks puppies. On the other hand, I do like this chapter's treatment of Krakowski. You can see what I said a few weeks ago behind spoiler blocks: he and Ariel are basically the same character in different situations.
• This chapter introduces the rivalry between the two big overlays, Plan C (end the contact mission) and Save The Humans (keep going). I feel like I didn't do a enough job explaining this rivalry. You may not think that now, because Curic spells it out pretty clearly, but in two months you'll have forgotten all about this chapter and Curic won't be any help.
• I'll talk a little about the Antarctica incident in next week's episode of Creative License. In this week's episode, I'd like to mention that many details of space program procedure in this book are made up or downright counterfactual.

  I could not find a solid number for a Space Shuttle astronaut's personal allowance. The best I could do was that it was more than the weight of 18 Montreal-style bagels. I don't know if there's someone currently doing a three-day stint in an Orion CM simulator so they can eliminate UI errors, but it fits with what I know about the way space programs test things. I could have done months more research, and it would still be good to know this stuff, but I wouldn't necessarily use it if I did find out. I do know how people on the ISS call home, but in Chapter 17 I'll be going with something I made up, because it's too complicated to explain all the failure modes in 20 words of dialogue. It's a situation that calls for... Creative License.

• Insofar as I had specific source texts for the space stuff, they were Mary Roach's Packing for Mars, my 2007 conversation with Janice Voss, my hazy memories of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and a 2010 HOPE talk called T 40: The Three Greatest Hacks of Apollo. I also highly recommend Michael Collins' Carrying The Fire, which has some cool Apollo tech details and backs up a lot of my thinking, but which can't count as a source text because I read it after selling the book.

  That's a reading list heavily weighted towards the Apollo era, but what Tammy says in this chapter is still true: you can be all the way at the end of that bell curve of competence and just lose your opportunity, or die, through no fault of your own.

And on that cheery note we end this week's commentary. Tune in next week for "False Daylight," the HEART-BEATING CONCLUSION to Part One, in which special guest star Charlene Siph will say, "Pardon my French."

Image credits: U.S. Congress (x2), Tropenmuseum of the Royal Tropical Institute, Wikimedia Commons user Silver_Spoon_Sockpop, NASA.

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