News You Can Bruise for 2012 June 5 (entry 0)

(1) Tue Jun 05 2012 09:40 Constellation Games Author Commentary #28, "Someone Is Wrong On The Outernet": I found this little sketch I did for Sumana during the second draft, when I first completed the chapter with Ariel and Tetsuo playing Temple Sphere. It shows the Tool of Justice guardian-caste strapped into his cockpit, upset about Tetsuo having landed on top of his ship. It also invites Sumana to enjoy peanut butter cookies.

I invite you to enjoy peanut butter cookies as well, but I don't have any prepared. Instead I made you a Twitter archive, and this commentary. The spoiler thread from last week is still open, but no one's posted to it, so perhaps the time for spoiler threads has now passed. Anyway, commentary:

• This is where Ashley (I'm gonna call her Somn from this point, as Ariel does) comes into her own as a character. A little late, you say? Yes, but it was at least partially intentional. Constellation Games is a soap opera, and soap operas have character arcs. Characters come and go, their influence on the plot waxes and wanes.

  Curic was the most important non-Ariel character in part one, and although her character never stops gaining complexity, she'll never be that central again. Dana and Jenny were built up in part one to become central to part two. Tetsuo had two peaks: one at the end of part one, and one here at the end of part two. To a first approximation, part three is a story about Ariel and Somn.

  So yeah, I could have taken care of this a little earlier, but it's better to build up characters as they become important, than to introduce them all at the start and keep some of them under the heat lamp for most of the book.

• Somn's scene replaced the deleted scene I showed you back in chapter 25. I gave Ariel's "we're the most adaptable" attitude to Somn. You're used to seeing it from a human in an SF story, but it's pretty interesting to see it from an ET who's having a nervous breakdown because she can't live up to it. And now you see why I couldn't have Tetsuo tell Ariel his Purchtrin name--he won't even tell his wife.
• The Somn scene was added in the third draft; in the second, she didn't have any decent characterization until chapter 31, which is way too late.

  In the third draft, Somn's Purchtrin name was Pruv. I didn't like this name, in particular because it sounds more like a Farang name. But everything else I could think of was one of those SF women's names that ends in a vowel because that sounds female to American ears. Then I noticed that I'd already come up with a much better name for this character, a name she'd incorporated into her human name as a way of holding on to it.

  I don't beat you over the head with it, but in "The Time Somn Died" you can see where "Ashley" came from, too.

  

• More callbacks! When Ariel had that gut-wrenching conversation about having to lie about everything, he was carrying the stolen Scotch decanter in his bag. And now he's lying to mom about the decanter. Damn! Originally you didn't find out what happened to the decanter until chapter 31, but that was just dumb. It's way more effective revealed here.
• Texas Hold-'Em is the third and final real-life game mentioned in the novel. As with the other two (Tennis for Two, Conway's Life), I couldn't fictionalize it because I needed to make a joke about the name.
• In general I came up with game names before designing the games, and What-The-Fuck Creek was one of the very first names I came up with, way back at the start of the first draft. I knew it had to be a Gaijin game as soon as I had the name.
• "Saved your ass in the temple of Nahadoth" is a reference to N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy. Nora founded my current writing group, and I repaid her by misspelling her name in the acknowledgements. (Update: I did it again, in this paragraph, even though I was writing about misspelling her name!)
• Speaking of name mistakes. In a repeat of chapter 15's "Kinki Bwi" incident, You'll Only See Kis Echo! was originally named You'll Only See Kis Shadow!. I totally forgot that I'd changed the name, and when I added the new Tetsuo scene to chapter 33, I called kim You'll Only See Kis Shadow!, a mistake that made it into the printed book.
• There was significant pushback to the format of the email exchange between Jenny and Bai, even though it was identical in format to email messages you get every day. I did change it a little to ensure that you see the entire email thread one message at a time, rather than with replies interspersed.

  The email exchange was originally between Jenny and Bruce, and due to the difficulty of denoting who was talking in email with no "Jenny said" type cues, I came up with the possibly genius idea of having Bruce write in Twitter-speak. So "ayn rand" was originally "@aynrand", etc. This tied into other jokes like Bruce saying "Lol" at one point instead of laughing.

  Anyway, I got rid of all that crap when I got rid of Bruce. Bai is already ditzy enough without also having Bruce's weird netspeak. So now you must must distinguish between the two characters solely by the fact that Jenny uses capital letters and Bai doesn't. (This is also the difference between Curic and Ariel in chat.)

Now that you've seen Your Quiescent Achievement and met You'll Only See Kis ShadowEcho!, I wanna talk a little about the Gaijin. I designed this species to force me to write outside my comfort zone. I don't get pushed that far outside my comfort zone in Constellation Games, but I'll be able to in any future Constellation stuff I write. Here's how it works:

"Vanilla" introduced the ur-Gaijin, a male named This Guy Loves Salt!, a cheerful bloke who was effectively the manservant to a foppish Inostranets named Geshmu. I was never sure what their relationship was, why This Guy Loves Salt!, a member of a post-scarcity civilization of anarchists, was willing to spend his days literally carrying around his "boss" in a briefcase. I figured it was a case of two eccentrics who'd found each other.

The tipping point away from that idea was the 2009 Star Trek reboot, which saw Montgomery Scott exiled to Hoth along with an alien Starfleet officer who Memory Alpha says is named Keenser. I wrote: "Scotty's always yelling at [Keenser], shoving him around, generally treating him like Igor... this seemed cruel and even kind of racist of Scotty." Jake Berendes responded:

anything dealing with alien races invites a weird "possibly true" style of racism. which is to say, you can just declare "these people are not intelligent" or "these people are money-grubbing schemers" or in the case of the batfaced lackey race, "they respond well to being bossed around". perhaps this is just their way, so let's not be culturally insensitive!

You can declare that, but that kind of SF racism is Star Trek bullshit, because it assumes not just that (e.g.) all Ferengi are greedy, but that something about Ferengi biology makes significant cultural or individual variation impossible. For an entire species to be that one-dimensional they'd have to be... eusocial insects... or something...

So! Some species (Aliens, Inostransi, humans) join the Constellation by dumb luck: they happened to get contacted before wiping themselves out or turning into Slow People. But most surviving species tend towards conservative, low-impact cultures (like the Dhihe Coastal Coalition of the ancient Farang) that can just hold on for tens of millions of years.

The Gaijin have the most conservative culture of all. Their basic culture and behavior are hard-coded into their genes and fine-tuned by evolution to maintain the complex kin selection that propagates their three-gendered caste system. When the Gaijin civilization that produced smart paper collapsed (probably due to an asteroid impact--I like using those), everyone was sad about all the people who died, but the collapse of civilization itself was not a big deal. The Gaijin just moved to the caves and started farming, because that's what you do to survive when there's no electricity.

Gaijin don't form a hive mind, like Them; they're pure individuals. But the individuals only come in three flavors, one for each caste. They're like the Cylons in the Battlestar remake. And it's not clear to outsiders which of their behavior is voluntary and which is instinctual. (Not that it's super clear for humans.)

So, in chapter 31 you'll meet a Gaijin male who's shouty and cheerful and loves doing grunt work. That's just how they are. This Guy Loves Salt! was the same way, and so is He Sees The Map And He Throws The Dart!, the guy who organized the Mars mission, and so is the person What-The-Fuck Creek wanted Ariel to be. There are three character classes, and that's it. This idea makes me super uncomfortable, but it's not very different from a lot of other science fiction I enjoy.

Whew! After all that, I have just one question for you: are you ready? Ready for chapter 29, the GAME-CHANGING, CHANGE-GAMING cliffhanger that ends Part Two? Ready for Ariel to say, "That fucking hippie was right."? Ready, dare I say, for some football?

If not, you have a week to prepare. Unless you're going through this commentary simultaneously with reading the complete book, in which case you should take a break and have some herbal tea or something.

Image credits: Yours truly, Luca Masarco, NASA, Eric Fischer (hi!), Pop Culture Geek.

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Comments:

Posted by Adam P. at Sat Jun 09 2012 13:45

I just wanted to say that I think "You'll Only See Kis Echo!" is the most brilliant name ever. So much world-building jammed into one little act of onomastics.