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:
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.
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.
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 "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:
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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:
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...
- 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.