I'm not sure who put a bunch of tags on CG's LibraryThing page, but they're pretty great. (and full of spoilers) Apparently CG is a bildungsroman about cosplay, douchebags, mecha-godzilla, real replicas, and vastening. I don't disagree!
Come for the Twitter archive, stay for the commentary. CDBOEGOACC contest winners will be announced as soon as I finish the post.
You can see that Ariel isn't trying very hard to conceal the
truth. He left unchanged details like the way "Svetlana" dresses, and
he added over-the-top winks like Svetlana boasting about supplanting
Dana. Bits like "Svetlana held her smart paper against the
TV screen" are minimal glosses on what happened in the second draft ("I taped the
smart paper to the television").
This one at least has some truth to it. Human cultures are all over the map, but almost by definition they involve a bunch of humans forming a community. I wouldn't go as far as B5's suggestion that humans form inclusive communities (TV Tropes: "Humans Are Diplomats"). But it is a real tendency which distinguishes humans from, say, octopus.
Farang are more like octopus. There's nothing wrong with this, it's not time for them to learn a valuable lesson about what it means to be human, but it means their cultures have little in common with human cultures. A normal human put into a Farang body would be a misfit, the kind of person who produces offensive artwork like Sayable Spice. A human might be able to identify with such artwork, but probably not with its pugnaciousness.
(nb. humans are not special in the Constellation universe; Aliens are very similar and they got there first. This is the subject of chapter 25's deleted scene, which I'll put up when the time comes.)
In Twilight Struggle, the player who starts a nuclear war
automatically loses. I sometimes find myself making decisions not to
help me win, but to help the game go on a normal amount of time given
how long it took to set up. I don't think this kind of decision-making
is even particularly unrealistic in a nuclear context, but it's only
half the story.
Because really, who cares who started the war? You're both dead. In
TNE the only thing that matters is who has more survivors. And
although 90% of the time the name of the game is a lie and a
"tactical" exchange will escalate until everyone dies, there's
some mechanism in TNE constantly working to convince you that
this time you can win but you gotta go for it now!
I saw The Middleman while finishing the second draft of
Constellation Games, and I was a little upset to see Natalie
Morales playing Wendy Watson very close to how I imagine Jenny:
kind of ticked off all the time at how not everyone is as smart as
she is. But I got over being upset.
In the second draft this scene was also the introduction of
the star-draw, and it was just too much for one little scene. So I
had Curic introduce the star-draw back in chapter 8, and now this
scene just has to remind you of it.
Part Two's plot kicks into high gear next week, with the terrifying chapter 21, "Her". The chapter in which Tetsuo will say (but not demonstrate) "Sexual pair bonding!" Also next week: you can get a paper copy of the book and read the whole rest of the story! Then complain about how I'm not putting up this commentary fast enough.
Photo credits: US
Army, US Department of Defense, Flickr
user my_eye.
Tue Apr 10 2012 09:18 Constellation Games Author Commentary #20, "Feature Creep":
This week: Dana earns her paycheck, we learn the shocking (if you're a
Farang) secret of Sayable Spice, and Ariel stresses out and
gets a little stalkery.